Building an Open-Source CRM as a Solo Developer: Insights from Five Months of Development
Over the past five months, I embarked on creating an open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to better understand the development process, tools, and challenges involved. Here’s a reflection on what I’ve learned along the way, specifically leveraging Laravel and Livewire for a streamlined solo development experience.
Effective Tools and Technologies
One of the standout tools during this project has been Filament. Its capabilities significantly accelerated development; what might traditionally take weeks was achievable in mere days. For solo developers, Laravel combined with Livewire proved to be an ideal stack—eliminating the need for separate API and frontend layers and enabling rapid, integrated development.
Modern PHP also proved to be unexpectedly enjoyable to work with, especially when utilizing high levels of type safety (around 99.6%) and static analysis tools like PHPStan set to level 7. These practices contributed to a more reliable and maintainable codebase.
Challenges Encountered
Handling custom fields was initially straightforward but became increasingly complex as the number of fields per record grew beyond 50. This caused page load times to spike from under 250 milliseconds to over two seconds. Implementing eager loading techniques and caching strategies helped mitigate these performance issues.
Designing software for a broad audience often leads to the trap of catering to everyone and ultimately pleasing no one. I learned to narrow the target audience to small teams, allowing for more focused and effective feature development.
It’s important to recognize that maintaining an open-source project requires ongoing effort; it’s not just about writing code but also about community support and updates.
Strategic Decisions That Worked
Consistently adhering to Laravel’s conventions kept development straightforward and sped up the process. Early integration of static analysis with PHPStan helped catch bugs early, reducing technical debt. Additionally, choosing Filament for the admin interface saved countless hours compared to building an admin panel from scratch.
Reflections on Development Timeline
While five months may seem both swift and slow—fast in terms of delivering a production-ready MVP, yet slow considering the extensive effort involved—it’s a realistic timeframe for building a robust, feature-complete solution with diligence and care.
If you’re interested in the technical details or the live implementation, you can explore the project at relaticle.com.
Your Experiences
Have you developed SaaS products on your own? How long did it take you to reach an MVP? Share your insights and lessons learned
