One of Moscow’s largest lighting showrooms came to us.
Nearly 30 years of work left them with a huge base of interior designers — some active partners, others worth bringing back.
The problem: that base lived everywhere except one place — half in email, half on paper in the director’s cabinet.
We shipped a CRM where you could:
- store and filter the designer base;
- run SMS for promos and birthday greetings;
- track who comes back after events and brunches;
- log offline sales with a client source — so you see what actually makes money.
Finally you could see the full chain: Instagram → Telegram → offline store. Or Yandex Maps → offline store.
In our heads it looked perfect.
A month later we asked:
— So, did you get what you wanted?
The answer was unexpected:
— Nothing changed at all.
We opened the CRM and saw why immediately.
Over 90% of deals were either empty or so thin that the client source couldn’t be recovered.
Turns out shipping the system isn’t enough.
You still have to make the team understand why it exists.
We rewrote the playbook, walked real first-month cases, closed every edge scenario and explained why a few extra clicks today become clear management decisions tomorrow.
What happened after that — and whether it actually changed — is the next post.
Curious who’s lived this: tool shipped, and the problem wasn’t the tool at all?
Product write-up — Lighting studio CRM (FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis, SigmaSMS). Original on vc.ru.