Your network is not a spreadsheet

I have worked for myself for a long time. For most of it, my network lived in a spreadsheet. Name, company, email, a column called "notes" that said things like "met at conference, nice, follow up". Some rows had a date. Most did not.

It held up for years. It always does, right up to the day it matters.

The day it matters

The day it matters is not the day you add a contact. It is the day, eighteen months later, when a recruiter you got on with moves to a new firm and you find out from a LinkedIn notification. Or the client whose invoice you chased three times in March goes quiet, and you cannot remember whether you replied to their last message or they replied to yours. Or you are about to walk into a call with someone you have not spoken to since 2024, and the only thing your spreadsheet knows about them is "nice".

A spreadsheet is flat. Relationships are not. A row cannot tell you:

• when you last actually spoke to someone, as opposed to when you last remembered to type it in
• whether that relationship is warming up or quietly going cold
• what you talked about last time, in enough detail to pick the thread up
• that they changed jobs, raised money, or published something you should have seen

It cannot tell you any of that because you are the only sensor it has. The moment you stop feeding it, it stops being true. And you stop feeding it the week you get busy, which is the week the information would have been worth something.

What I actually wanted

I did not want a sales pipeline. I have used the big CRMs on contracts and they are built for a team of people whose job is to close things. Stages, forecasts, quotas, a manager's dashboard. None of that is my problem. I have one job and about two hundred people who matter to it.

What I wanted was smaller and, it turned out, harder to buy:

Every interaction in one place, filled in without me. My email already knows when I last spoke to someone. So does my calendar. The tool should read those, on my machine, and stop asking me to type what it could see for itself.

A number for how warm a relationship is. Not a score to optimise. A nudge. Something that decays on its own when I go quiet, so the list of "people I have accidentally dropped" is a thing I can look at instead of a thing I find out about later.

A morning list, not a notification storm. Who is due a message today. Who has gone quiet. Which of my emails is still waiting on an answer. Then let me get on with the day.

My data on my Mac, encrypted, and nowhere else. This is my professional life. Every client, every rate I have ever quoted, every note about who is difficult and who is not. I was not going to put that in a startup's database and hope their privacy policy held.

Nothing I tried did all four. The private ones were flat. The clever ones were in the cloud. The clever, private ones did not exist.

So I built it

NexxusCRM is a Mac app. It runs on your machine, keeps everything in an encrypted database, and never phones home. It reads your email and your calendar locally and turns them into a timeline per person. Each contact carries a warmth score that fades on its own. Every morning there is one list.

The AI, where there is AI, runs on your Mac through Ollama. It writes the meeting prep the night before and scores your feeds against the people you know. Nothing about your network is sent anywhere unless you set that up yourself, and even then your email is kept away from it by default.

I built it because I needed it. I run my own outreach in it now, which is the most honest test I know of.

If this sounds like your spreadsheet

The first fifty people get it in October. They shape what gets built next, and whatever it costs at launch, they never pay more than that.

If you work for yourself and your network is sitting in a spreadsheet, or in your head, ask for a seat. There are fifty, and then a queue.