Use case
Software For Lead Management
Lead management is a speed problem before it is a software problem. Most of the value is in answering quickly, and no amount of pipeline configuration compensates for a two-day response.
Lead management covers what happens between somebody expressing interest and somebody deciding whether to pursue them: capture, routing, qualification, and follow-up. It is the front of a CRM rather than the whole of one, and buying a full CRM to solve it is common and often more than the job needs.
We sell source code you clone and run yourself, so there is nothing hosted here. For most businesses the answer is the free tier of a CRM, and this page is about what to set up in it.
Lead, contact, and opportunity are different records
The vocabulary confusion causes real problems, so it is worth being precise.
The three stages and why they are separate
Someone who showed interest and has not been qualified. May be a real prospect, a competitor, a student, or a bot. Keeping these separate from your contact database is what stops that database filling with noise.
A real person at a real organisation, once qualification has happened. Converting a lead creates these, and the conversion is the moment the record joins your permanent data.
A specific thing you might sell, with a value and a close date. One contact can have several over time, which is why it cannot be a field on the person.
Systems that skip the lead stage put every enquiry into the contact database, and the database becomes untrustworthy within a year.
Response time dominates everything else
The single largest determinant of conversion in inbound lead handling is how quickly somebody responds. This is well-established in sales practice and it changes what you should optimise.
The practical consequences are unglamorous. Route the lead to a person automatically rather than to a shared inbox somebody checks. Notify them somewhere they actually look, which is usually not email. Make the first response possible from a phone. And measure time-to-first-contact rather than only conversion, because it is the input you can actually change.
Sophisticated scoring and nurture sequences are worth far less than this and get implemented first because they are more interesting.
What to set up, in order
A lead process that works, roughly in this order
- One capture point per sourceWeb form, phone, email, and events each need a defined path into the same place. Leads arriving in three systems is the most common cause of leads going nowhere.
- An owner assigned immediatelyA lead with no named owner is a lead nobody follows up. Round robin is fine to start; territory or product routing can come later.
- A definition of qualified that people agree onWrite down what makes a lead worth pursuing, in terms somebody can apply in thirty seconds. Without this, qualification means whatever each person feels, and the pipeline numbers mean nothing.
- A follow-up cadence with an endHow many attempts, over how long, before a lead is closed as unresponsive. The end matters: leads that stay open forever make every report about the pipeline wrong.
- Source recorded, honestlyWhere the lead came from is what tells you which marketing to repeat. This is only useful if capture sets it automatically, because a manually selected source field is guesswork.
Four of these five cost nothing and are configuration rather than software.
Where the free tiers land
Several CRMs give away lead and contact management with generous limits, funded by charging for automation, sequences, and reporting. For a small team handling inbound enquiries, that is usually the whole requirement.
The point where paying starts is normally automation volume or the need for reporting that survives scrutiny. Worth noting that lead routing and notification, the two things that matter most, are usually available on free tiers.
When lead management gets built
Not as a standalone tool. It gets built when leads are part of a product rather than part of your own sales: a marketplace routing enquiries to its suppliers, a franchise system distributing enquiries to territories, a lead generation business delivering to clients who each need their own view.
That last case is common and specific. The product is not managing your leads, it is delivering somebody else's, and the requirements are per-client isolation, delivery confirmation, and often billing per lead. No general CRM does that well.
What you would start from here
There is no lead or CRM capability in this stack. No leads, no contacts, no companies, no opportunities, no scoring, no routing, and no sequences.
What the Better Studio template provides for the delivery case is the application: organizations as the boundary each client's leads live in, roles and invitations, a Hono backend with Prisma and Kysely on Postgres, an admin app, and Stripe billing. The notifications pack covers in-app and email delivery, which is the mechanism the immediate routing notification described above would use.
You would write the lead record with its source and owner, the routing rules, the qualification states, and the delivery or acceptance flow if clients are receiving leads. If you charge per lead, the acceptance and dispute path is worth designing early, because it decides what you can invoice.
If you are managing your own inbound enquiries, use a free CRM tier and spend the effort on response time. The packs below are for the delivery case.
What is Hype Stack?
Every product starts with the same month of work nobody pays you for: sign-up and login, teams and permissions, taking payments, notifications, an admin panel to run the business. Hype Stack is that month, already built and tested. Start from the free open-source app, add the pieces you need with one command, and keep going on the part that is actually your idea.
Everything lands as real code in your own repository, so there is nothing to rent and nothing anyone can switch off. For the engineers: React 19, Hono, Postgres, and a desktop build, typed end to end.
See it running
Templates are curated project starters built on this stack: a layout, feature packs, a custom theme, and bonus pages. The previews below are recordings of the real apps.
Packs in this stack
Every pack ships real source code: frontend, backend, and admin surfaces where the feature needs them. The ones this stack installs come first; the rest can be composed in later.
Two ways to install features
Same features underneath, different starting point. Either command resolves what the packs depend on, copies the source into your repository, and merges the Prisma schema.
Take a template
A landing page, a design system, a themed layout, and the features already wired into it. Rebrand it, put your product in the middle, ship.
npx @hype-stack/cli template$ hype-stack compose
Compose your own design
Your design and your choices, without rebuilding auth, billing, or notifications. Tick the packs you want and the CLI wires them into the open-source starter.
npx @hype-stack/cli composeQuestions, answered
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Turn your ideas into
Real applications.
Start free and own every line you ship. When you want more, one All-Access license unlocks every premium pack and template for a year.