Own product · SaaS
A lightweight lead board that keeps contacts, stages and history together
Cognize is a lightweight CRM and lead board, live at cognize.live. It helps small teams organise contacts, track lifecycle stages, enrich professional data and keep all activity history in one place, with auto summaries. It is my own product: I designed and built it.
01The problem
Small teams outgrow spreadsheets for leads but find full CRMs heavy, slow to set up and full of fields they never use. Notes and activity end up scattered, so nobody has the full story of a contact. Cognize had to give structure without the weight.
Who it’s for
Founders
See every lead and its next step without setting up a full CRM.
Freelancers and consultants
Track conversations with prospects and clients in a simple way.
Small sales teams
Share history so anyone can pick up a lead.
02The main flow
01
Add a contact
02
Enrich their profile
03
Tag lifecycle stage
04
Log activity
05
Read the summary
03Structure
Board
Contacts
Activity
Settings
04Key decisions
Decision 01
Contact lists show who you know but not where each relationship stands.
Considered
A table of contacts with a stage column.
Chosen
The home view is a board with a column for each lifecycle stage, and moving a card moves the lead on.
Why it works
Stage is the question people ask most. A board answers it before they read anything.
Decision 02
A long activity history is complete but slow to read before a call.
Considered
Show only the raw timeline, newest first.
Chosen
Each contact opens with an auto summary of its history, with the full timeline below for detail.
Why it works
The summary gets someone up to speed fast. The timeline keeps the source visible, so the summary can always be checked.
Decision 03
Auto-enriched data can be wrong or out of date, and silent changes break trust in a CRM.
Considered
Overwrite contact fields automatically whenever new data is found.
Chosen
Enriched fields are labelled as enriched and stay editable like any other field.
Why it works
People stay in charge of their own data. The label shows where each value came from.
05What’s inside
Every lead on one board, grouped by lifecycle stage.
Adds professional data to contacts so profiles fill out faster.
A short summary of each contact’s history, above the full timeline.
Notes and activity in one timeline for each contact.
Tags that mark where each contact stands, from lead to client.
06How it was built
I designed it and wrote the code, so the design survived contact with reality.
Interface
Services
AI
Data
07Outcome
Delivered
What I learned
A CRM gets lighter when you decide which questions it must answer and drop the rest.
AI summaries are trusted when the source is one scroll away.
Next step
Pick a time that suits you. You'll leave the call with a clear next step, whether we work together or not.
