A personal CRM for freelancers
Your relationships are the business
A freelancer rarely loses work because of a missing feature in their CRM. They lose it more quietly: a returning client has to explain their situation again, an introduction from six months ago is forgotten, the detail that would have made a proposal feel personal is gone.
Sales CRMs are built for teams managing a pipeline of deals. Most freelancers have a handful of active clients, a longer list of past ones, and a network where the next project usually comes from. What they need is not stages and forecasts. It is memory.
What is worth keeping
- What the client actually cares about. The goal behind the brief, the stakeholder they have to convince, the thing that went wrong with the last agency.
- Who introduced you. Referrals are how most freelance work arrives, and the person who referred you deserves to hear how it went.
- Personal context. The holiday they were about to take, the new baby, the move to another city. Small things, remembered, make a working relationship feel like a relationship.
- What was agreed, in their words. Useful when a project's scope starts to drift.
The hard part is the minute after the call
Everyone knows they should write things down. The problem is timing. The call ends, the next one starts, or you are simply tired of typing. By the next day the details are fuzzy; by next month they are gone.
That is the gap Rucksack is built for. When a call ends, open it and speak for half a minute: what you learned, who was mentioned, what matters. Or type, if you are somewhere you cannot talk. Rucksack transcribes it, works out which people, places and organisations you meant, and files the facts under each of them. If a name could be two different people — two clients called Anna — it asks rather than guessing.
Before the next call, open the client's page and read what you know, with a link from every fact back to the recording it came from.
What Rucksack will not do for you
Rucksack is not a business tool. There are no invoices, no deals or pipeline stages, no reminders to follow up, no import from your email or LinkedIn, and no sharing. If you need those, a freelancer CRM or a business CRM is the right choice, and the two can sit side by side.
It is also early: a closed beta whose only user so far is its founder, with the first invited testers next. The interface is in English; you can speak German or English.
A note on client confidentiality
Whatever tool you use for notes about clients, check what your contracts allow before you record details of client matters in it.