Orbit Template: A Four Stage CRM You Edit by Chat

Orbit Template: A Four Stage CRM You Edit by Chat

Orbit is the CRM in Zugo's template gallery: a landing page for a deliberately small sales tool, plus a working pipeline board with four stages, contacts, and totals that recalculate as you move cards. Cloning it into your own project is free, and each change afterward is a chat request costing 3 credits.

The interesting question with a CRM template is never how it looks. It is which parts hold real data, so that is where this walkthrough starts.

What is inside the Orbit template?

Three surfaces, and the third one is the reason to pick this template over a generic dashboard: an actual board you can put deals on.

The landing page argues one idea from top to bottom: most CRMs die because nobody updates them, so the tool should be small enough to keep current in seconds. Whether or not you keep that positioning, the structure is a good example of a page built around a single claim instead of a feature list.

The board is the working part. Four columns, a card per deal with company and value, one click to advance a deal, and column totals that move the instant a card does. Contacts sit next to the deals rather than in a separate module.

Does the pipeline board actually work?

Yes, and further than most template dashboards. The board opens with nine sample deals and a matching contact list, and those are stored in your browser rather than painted on. Add a deal, move it to proposal, and the column count, the stage total and the pipeline value all update. Reload the page and your changes are still there.

The limit is where that data lives. It is your browser's storage, tied to the browser you used. A colleague opening the published link gets the seeded sample deals, not yours, and your phone shows a different board than your laptop. There is no shared state and no per user separation.

The sign in screen matches that: it is the picture of an account, not an account. It does not verify a password, and there is nothing behind it that belongs to a specific person.

For a solo founder tracking a handful of deals on one machine, that is genuinely enough, and it costs nothing to run. For two people who need to see the same pipeline, the missing pieces are a real database and real sign in, added with the Supabase connector. What that upgrade involves is described in can AI build a database app.

Test the boundary before you trust it with anything. Add a deal, open the published address in another browser, and see that it is not there. Two minutes now beats a bad surprise in week three.

Who is a four stage pipeline enough for?

Orbit is opinionated on purpose: lead, contacted, proposal, won, and nothing else. That suits founders selling their own product, small agencies with a handful of live conversations, freelancers who lose deals by forgetting to follow up, and anyone whose current CRM is a spreadsheet nobody has opened since spring.

It suits you badly if your sales process has real complexity. Territories, quotas, multiple owners per account, forecast categories, approval steps on discounts: none of that is here, and asking for all of it turns a simple template into a half finished enterprise tool. Buying a mature CRM is often the honest answer at that point, and pretending otherwise would not help you.

There is a third group that fits well and rarely realizes it. The board is not really about sales. Four stages with cards, counts and totals also describes a hiring pipeline, a grant application tracker, a client onboarding queue, or a content calendar. Changing the vocabulary is one edit, and the mechanics come along unchanged.

If you want the broader version of this decision, including when to start from an empty prompt instead, see how to build a CRM with AI.

What must you change before your team touches it?

The demo content, all of it, and there is more than first appears. Nine seeded deals with invented company names sit on the board. The contact list is invented. The landing page carries three testimonials with names, job titles and companies, a count of teams supposedly using the product, and a before and after comparison whose numbers describe nobody.

Those numbers are the risky ones because they read as research. Minutes saved per week, fields removed, days to onboard a new rep: all demo copy. Publishing them as your own claims is the kind of thing a prospect checks.

Clearing the board is one instruction: remove every seeded deal and contact so the app opens empty for a new user. Rewriting the landing page is a separate edit, and it goes faster if you bring your own numbers or agree to have no numbers at all. An honest page with three sentences beats an impressive page with invented statistics.

Two small ones people miss: the browser tab title and the footer line still carry the demo product name until you ask for them by name.

How do you turn Orbit into your own CRM?

Change the meaning first and the appearance last, because restyling a column you later rename is money spent twice.

1. Rename the product and rewrite the promise. One edit covers the name across the site, the tab title and the footer.
2. Rename the stages. "Rename the four columns to inquiry, qualified, quoted and booked, and update every label that mentions them."
3. Adjust the card. Add the field you actually need, such as a close date, a source, or an owner, and remove the one you never fill.
4. Clear the demo data. Empty the board and contacts so the first real deal is the first thing on it.
5. Rewrite the landing page or delete it entirely if this is an internal tool nobody will visit from outside.
6. Publish and check on a phone. The project gets an address like yourname.zugo.run, and a custom domain connects on paid plans.

Sharpen every request into something checkable. "Improve the board" and "show the deal value on the card in bold and put the company name underneath it" cost the same 3 credits, but only the second one has a verifiable outcome. The same discipline applies to the notes app covered in the Nimbus template walkthrough.

What does it cost, and when is a build from scratch better?

Cloning is free, so the first charge is your first edit. Renaming stages, clearing data and rewriting the page is typically four to six edits.

Free gives you 5 credits, Pro is $25 a month for 200 credits, and Business is $99 a month for 800 credits. Two hundred credits is roughly 66 edits, so a full reshaping of Orbit uses a small slice of one month.

The choice against a fresh build is simple arithmetic. A build from a description costs 6 credits and gives you exactly the structure you asked for. The clone is free but comes with decisions already made. If your process is a pipeline with stages, Orbit is cheaper because you only pay for the differences. If your process is nothing like a pipeline, the shell will fight you, and describing your own tool from scratch wins.

Every build opens in a sandbox before it reaches you, so a version that fails to load is never delivered. That catches breakage, not misunderstanding.

Where does Orbit stop?

One browser, one person. Shared pipelines with per user permissions require accounts and a database. That is a supported path through Supabase, and it is a project rather than a prompt.

No email, no calendar, no automation. There is nothing here that sends a follow up, logs a call, or syncs with your inbox. Those integrations are real engineering work, and describing them in one sentence will not produce them.

Zugo does not replace a development team on a complex product. A personal deal tracker or a small internal tool is well within reach. A CRM you intend to sell to other companies outgrows a chat window eventually, and the GitHub export exists so the source can move with you.

The fastest way to judge the fit is to try it against your real week. Open the gallery at zugo.dev, clone Orbit, rename the four stages to the words you actually use, and put your three live deals on the board.