Why HubSpot is Fantastic for Your Solo Business (But Why I Would Never Recommend It for Marketing)
The moment you made your first sale, you're in business! Suddenly, you find yourself acting as the CEO, the IT helpdesk, marketing, the finance department, and the admin assistant , all with zero training.
If you are currently managing your practice out of a paper diary, a chaotic inbox, or a digital shoebox of random documents and folders, your back-office infrastructure cannot support your front-facing brilliance. You need a structured system to hold your business together and protect your mental bandwidth.
Client's always ask me, 'what is the best CRM for a small business?'. My answer is always the same – it depends on what you want to do with it and where your business is going!
I do have a few that I love, but today I want to talk about the 'Kingpin' and all round 'OG' of marketing, HubSpot.
You’ve probably heard it mentioned once or twice, but let's take a look under the bonnet and see if it's the 'ride' you need. Now, there's a specific setup where HubSpot is an absolute game-changer for a solo founder, but there is also a distinct boundary line where you should walk away.
The Good Stuff: Why HubSpot's Free CRM is a Solo Founder's Dream
If your client data is currently scattered across post-it notes, personal notebooks, and random spreadsheets, you are leaking massive amounts of time and energy. For a solo practitioner, a simple Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system empowers you to take charge of the daily chaos.
HubSpot’s Free CRM is an incredible entry point for organising your day-to-day operations:
One Source of Truth: It integrates with your email so you can see exactly when you last spoke to someone, automatically storing every thread against the relevant contact record. No more frantically digging through your sent folders.
Memory jogger: Just met someone at networking or for coffee – want to keep track or where when and what you talked about. Just make a note against the person and set an auto reminder to follow up!
Pipeline Visibility: It lets you track new leads and business connections through clear stages, showing you exactly where an inquiry stands so nothing falls through the cracks.
Operational Templates: You can create email templates for repetitive tasks, removing the fatigue of drafting the same responses over and over.
Free Asset Creation: The free tier actually lets you build a basic, free website and operational landing pages to capture warm leads.
And there's actually a lot more I haven't mentioned! For zero financial outlay, honestly ZERO, it helps you understand the digital possibilities of an organised back office. It handles the basic repetitive stuff, giving you back the headspace to focus entirely on your clients. There is a little caveat – if you are not tech savvy you might need a bit of help setting it up, although it's so much simpler than some very popular CRM's I could mention.
The Sweet Spot: The Small Business Tier and the Power of a VA
Now, let's fix a mistake I see a lot of solo business owners make. They think they have to stay on the free tier forever because they run with a scarcity mindset, viewing software as a pure cost rather than an investment.
HubSpot has a Small Business/Starter tier that costs less than £20 a month. If you are exchanging time for money and feeling the squeeze, this tier is a magnificent operational asset, particularly when you are ready to build your small business ecosystem with an outsourcing partner, like a Virtual Assistant (VA).
Stop doing it alone and bring in help:
Automated Appointment Booking: Instead of playing 'email tennis' backwards and forwards to schedule a session, add your VA and let them send a templated email that sounds just like you inviting your connections and clients to book, through HubSpot. (also available on Free)
Instant Stripe Integration & Product Ordering: Many business owners waste hours manually drafting invoices in Word, checking bank records, and awkwardly chasing payments. By connecting Stripe, you can set up predefined products and services. Clients can place an order and pay you instantly via a secure payment link. The transaction fee is a tiny price to pay to protect yourself against last-minute cancellations and erase the awkwardness of manual debt collection.
Future-Proofing Delegation: It is incredibly frustrating to hand over a back office that is a total mess. If your processes only live in your head, it feels faster to just do it yourself. But by using this tier to digitalise your product ordering, payment links, and booking workflows, you create a clean, standardised digital backbone. Your VA can log straight in, track the pipeline, and manage the administrative engine on your behalf.
Why I Would Never Recommend HubSpot for Your Marketing
So, if the CRM is great, the free website/landing pages are handy, and the Small Business tier is brilliant for automation, why am I telling you to keep your core marketing away from it?
Because HubSpot is a corporate software giant disguised as a small business helper. While their small business operational tier is reasonably priced, their full marketing modules are an absolute trap for solo practitioners.
1. The Pricing Becomes Prohibitive
The moment you want to graduate past basic contact tracking and leverage HubSpot’s full email marketing suite, complex automated drip campaigns, and high-level lead tracking, you leave the low-cost tier behind. The corporate pricing structure kicks in, and the cost becomes completely prohibitive for a solo business owner – unless you are already raking it in! You are suddenly paying a massive monthly premium for features you will never fully use.
2. Over-Engineering and 'Shiny Object Syndrome'
HubSpot’s advanced marketing suite is packed with complex configurations, properties, and endless bells and whistles designed for corporate marketing departments with dedicated data analysts.
3. You Lose Your Creative Focus
When you spend your peak energy zones trying to untangle a massive software system that isn't intuitive to your business model, you are trading away your creative genius for unpaid IT troubleshooting.
Best in Class Tools to Play a Supporting Role to your Core CRM.
To build a highly profitable business engine that works for you when you aren't working, you need to match your tools to your unique style and budget. If you want to build clean landing pages, send out beautiful newsletters, or set up automated email trust-building sequences without breaking the bank, look at these standard Software as a Service (SaaS) alternatives to run alongside your HubSpot CRM engine:
Systeme.io: An exceptional marketing platform. It is surprisingly powerful for the price, features an excellent free tier, and keeps your marketing campaigns, newsletters, and web pages cleanly under one roof.
MailerLite: Perfect if you just want to focus purely on elegant email marketing and newsletters without system clutter.
For Efficient Client Work Jane App or Practice Better: If you are a healer, therapist, coach, or nutritionist, these platforms are tailored specifically to your profession. They seamlessly handle secure, GDPR-compliant data vaults, intake forms, and scheduling protocols without corporate bloat. But they don't do marketing.
Summary: Drive the Engine, Don't Let It Drive You
My core philosophy is simple: implement tools work for your business then use the time you save to do more of what you love!
Use HubSpot’s Free or Small Business tier to secure your digital headquarters, map out your client conversations, integrate your Stripe payment links, and automate your appointment bookings. It creates a clean environment that your virtual assistant can easily manage and improve. But keep your core lead-generation marketing agile, affordable, and simple by using tools built for solo operators, not global corporations.
Don't wait until you are completely drowning in client work to fix the plumbing behind the scenes!
Want some insight into what you could do better in your business? Take the Business Bliss Or Burnout Scorecardand get an instant look at what's holding you back.
