Norm CRM — a normal CRM

Hi, my name is Egor Kamelev. I am a UX designer, system and business analyst. I have been working independently for many years, attracting clients through articles and videos. I wrote the Book of a Normal Freelancer and became one of the most read authors on Habr in the Freelance section.

Over time, I’ve built a fairly typical client base for a solo specialist. Some are one-off clients. Some come back from time to time. And some work with me more or less continuously on the same projects.

My services are complex and stretched over time. Finding clients is not easy — every one of them matters. And quite quickly it becomes clear that the main problem is not professional skills, but the organization of daily work.

There were periods when I had no work at all. During those times, I would urgently message former clients asking whether they had any tasks for me. The problem was that I didn’t have a proper client database. Contacts were scattered across old chats, messengers, and email threads.

At other times, I was overloaded with work. Tasks ended up written wherever possible — notes, lists, documents. Making sure nothing got lost across projects became a task in itself.

During such periods, I had many meetings and negotiations. Some were postponed, some canceled, participants changed. Everyone used different calendars, and by the end of the month it was difficult to understand how much time was spent talking about each project or client.

Completed projects were stored in folders on my computer. The documents remained, but the context was lost: who was involved, what had been agreed on, how many meetings there were, what tasks had been done. If I didn’t add a project to my portfolio right away, a couple of months later it was already hard to recall the details.

Overall, all of this is familiar to almost any freelancer who provides complex services and works alone.

At some point, I realized that I simply wanted a normal CRM. Without corporate processes, managers, or reporting for the sake of reporting. A tool that helps you organize yourself and move faster.

I decided to build it myself. Decided — and did it. That’s how NormCRM was born.

This is how I use NormCRM in my daily work.

• All contacts in one place. I make sure each contact has a role, a phone number (for quick communication), and an email (for reliable communication). I no longer need to search across messengers — everyone is right there.
• Communication tracking. For each contact, the system shows how long ago we last interacted and reminds me when it’s time to reach out. I set the reminder frequency myself, individually for each client.
• My day. I see all meetings scheduled for today and create a separate task list for the day — I can pick tasks from existing ones or create new tasks on the fly. Here I also see clients who are unhappy with the service level and those I haven’t contacted in a while.
• Meeting and negotiation tracking. I record dates, participants, postponements, cancellations, actual duration, and outcomes. Meeting reminders are sent to my email. This allows me, for example, to see how many hours of negotiations a project took over the past month.
• Project tracking. I add participants, tasks, meetings, and related companies to projects. For me, a project is not just a task list, but the full context of working with a client.
• Counterparty database. I maintain a separate database of companies and link them to projects and contacts. This helps me avoid confusion with legal entities and clearly see which projects and people belong to the same company.
• Task tracking for everything. Each task has a deadline, planned time, and links to a client and a project. I use tasks for everything — from work to shopping, content planning, and a list of future NormCRM features. If I move a deadline, the system remembers the reschedule, so I can later see where my planning went wrong.
• A full-featured time tracker. I can start and stop the tracker directly in tasks and meetings, and add time manually when needed. As a result, I see a realistic picture of where my working time actually goes, by project and by client.

NormCRM has other features as well, but the ones described above form its core.

I designed and developed NormCRM myself and continue to evolve it to fit my freelance life. The project roadmap is public and constantly updated . Any user can contact me personally and suggest a feature — it usually takes no more than a week to build.

Access to NormCRM is paid.

• 299 ₽ per month.
• 2990 ₽ per year — two months free.

There is a free trial — 14 days.