Over Five Months, a Single Developer, and One CRM: Lessons from Developing with Laravel and Livewire

Building an Open-Source CRM from Scratch: Lessons Learned Over Five Months with a Solo Developer

In February, I embarked on an ambitious journey to develop an open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system entirely on my own. After five months of dedicated effort, I want to share the key insights and lessons I gained throughout this process.

Highlights of My Experience

Stellar Tools and Frameworks

Filament: An absolute game-changer. Tasks that would have traditionally taken weeks were accomplished in days thanks to its powerful and streamlined features.
Laravel + Livewire: A perfect duo for solo development. They eliminate the need to juggle separate API and frontend layers, simplifying the development process.
Modern PHP: Surprisingly enjoyable to work with. With 99.6% typed code and static analysis at PHPStan level 7, coding became more reliable and satisfying.

Challenges Encountered

Scaling Custom Fields: What seemed straightforward at first became complex when dealing with over 50 custom fields per record. Performance issues arose, with page load times jumping from 250ms to approximately 2 seconds. Optimization through eager loading techniques and caching resolved these bottlenecks.
Target Audience Focus: Building a “general-purpose” platform made it difficult to serve everyone effectively. Narrowing the focus to small teams allowed for more tailored, effective features.
Open Source Commitment: Releasing code openly is just the beginning. Ongoing maintenance and support require significant time and dedication beyond initial development.

Critical Tech Decisions

Adhering to Laravel Conventions: While it might seem less exciting, sticking to established standards accelerated development and ensured maintainability.
Early Adoption of PHPStan: Integrating static analysis from day one helped identify and resolve numerous bugs early, saving time later.
Choosing Filament for Admin Panels: Instead of building administrative interfaces from scratch, utilizing Filament greatly sped up development and improved usability.

Realistic Expectations

Completing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in five months is both an achievement and an indicator of realistic timelines. It’s fast in terms of reaching a production-ready state, yet every feature required three times the effort to ensure quality and robustness.

For those interested in the technical journey, I’ve documented the implementation details at relaticle.com.

Your Experiences?

I’m curious—how long did it take