Most CRMs are built for sales teams with 50+ reps, pipeline quotas, and marketing automation. If you're a solo founder, freelancer, or indie consultant, you don't need Salesforce. You don't even need HubSpot. You need a way to track the people you talk to, the deals you're working on, and what was said in each meeting — all connected, all searchable, all yours.

Synap isn't a CRM product. It's data infrastructure that happens to be perfect for building one, because contacts, companies, deals, and notes are all first-class entity types in the same graph. Here's how to set it up.

Traditional CRMs separate contacts, deals, tasks, and notes into different modules. Your meeting notes live in one place, your contact list lives in another, your task list in a third. They're "linked" through the CRM's proprietary data model, but the links are shallow — you can't query across them freely, you can't view them in arbitrary layouts, and you certainly can't export the relationship graph.

In Synap, everything is an entity in the same graph. A contact, a deal, a meeting note, and a follow-up task are all nodes with typed properties and bidirectional relationships. The same data powers your deal pipeline view, your contact list, and your meeting notes feed. No duplication, no sync issues, no module boundaries.

Synap ships with system profiles that map directly to CRM concepts:

Person → Contact. The contact profile inherits from person and adds a role property. Properties include email, phone, company, and any custom fields you add. Each contact is a structured entity, not a row in a spreadsheet.

Company. The company profile includes website, industry, employee count, and location. Link contacts to companies — the relationship is bidirectional, so viewing a company shows all associated contacts.

Deal. The deal profile has a stage property (lead → qualified → proposal → negotiation → closed-won / closed-lost), value, and expected close date. Link deals to contacts and companies.

Note. Meeting notes, call summaries, email threads. The note profile stores content as rich text with tags. Link notes to the contact, deal, or company they're about.

Task. Follow-ups, action items, reminders. The task profile has status (todo / in-progress / done / cancelled), priority, and due date. Link tasks to contacts and deals.

Once your entities exist, create views to see them the way you work:

Deal pipeline (kanban). Create a kanban view filtered to deal entities, grouped by the stage property. Drag deals between columns as they progress. This is your pipeline at a glance — the same view HubSpot charges $50/month for.

Contact list (table). Create a table view filtered to contact entities with columns for name, email, company, last interaction date, and any custom properties. Sort, filter, and search across all your contacts.

Meeting notes (masonry feed). Create a masonry view filtered to note entities tagged as meeting notes. The feed shows your recent conversations in a visual layout — scan the cards to remember what was discussed.

Follow-up tasks (table or kanban). Filter task entities by due date or linked deal. See what you owe to whom and when.

Here's where Synap's CRM advantage becomes clear. You don't have to manually create and link most of this data.

Capture a meeting note. Paste or dictate your meeting notes into Synap. AI reads the content and automatically: creates task entities for any action items mentioned, links the note to the relevant contact (by detecting names and matching existing entities), and updates the deal stage if the note mentions a decision or next step.

Forward an email. Send an email to your Synap capture address. AI extracts the sender as a contact (or matches to an existing one), identifies any commitments or deadlines, and creates linked tasks.

Quick capture. In the desktop app, hit the quick capture shortcut and type "Call with Sarah from Acme - they want a proposal by Friday." AI creates a note, links it to Sarah (contact) and Acme (company), creates a task "Send proposal" with a Friday due date, and links it to the relevant deal.

All of this goes through the proposal system. You review what AI wants to create and approve or adjust before it takes effect. No silent mutations.

In a traditional CRM, your contact database, deal pipeline, task manager, note archive, and calendar are separate systems stitched together with integrations. When an integration breaks, data drifts. When you want a view that crosses module boundaries — "show me all tasks linked to deals over $10K that are due this week" — you hit the CRM's query limitations.

In Synap, that query is trivial because contacts, deals, tasks, and notes are all entities in the same PostgreSQL database with typed relationships. Create a table view, filter by entity type and properties, and you have your answer. No integration layer, no sync delays, no module boundaries.

Because your CRM data lives in standard PostgreSQL, you can export it with pg_dump or query it directly with SQL. Need a pipeline report for investors? Write a SQL query that joins deals with companies and contacts, export as CSV, and drop it into a spreadsheet. Or connect a BI tool like Metabase directly to your pod's database.

Try doing that with HubSpot's free tier.

The entity profiles for contacts, companies, and deals are built into every Synap workspace. You don't need to install anything or configure a schema — the profiles exist by default. Start by creating a kanban view for deals and a table view for contacts. Then capture your first meeting note and watch AI connect the dots.

For more on entity types and how they relate, see the entity guide. For founder-specific workflows, see the founders use case.