And that's how CuatrIA was born, from a fit of anger for which we are now GRATEFUL

This is one of those stories that you don't tell with pride, but it's worth telling, if only so that others don't repeat it.

A few years ago, we hired the "Ferrari of CRMs," and, while we were at it, also the integrator they themselves recommended. So far, so by the book. A growing company, a CRM that's too small, a top manufacturer, a "trusted" integrator. Who would go wrong hiring a large company that advertises in F1... What any consultant would advise you to do.

But what happened next, nobody talks about. A year and a half. A thousand meetings. Scope realignments, reviews, urgent calls, "we'll have it in the next sprint," "this time for sure." And the CRM, still not running. Not even at a brisk pace, not even trotting, literally not moving. The amount of money we lost along the way I prefer not to count, and it's not modesty, it's pure shame. When there was no elegant way out, it ended as these things usually do. With lawyers.

From that, we got two things. A very long list of learnings (and of the other kind of bills). And enough frustration to make the decision that you only make when you're fed up (or they tell you the famous phrase "you don't have the guts"...), to stop looking for solutions externally.

First, stop the bleeding. We deployed Microsoft Lists as a provisional CRM (yes, a glorified Excel, I know) and built a handful of small tools around it within the Microsoft ecosystem that allowed us to continue operating with some dignity. It was a patch, but a patch that worked. And in the meantime, in parallel, we evaluated more serious alternatives.

Spoiler, none of them really appealed to us. Some too expensive, others too rigid, all designed for companies that weren't like ours. Every demo was the same script: friendly spokesperson, beautiful slides, impeccable success stories... and inside, the same fifteen-year-old architecture with a layer of AI painted over it to make noise on LinkedIn.

We wanted the exact opposite. AI integrated from the design, not as a varnish layer. And if no one was going to sell it to us, we were going to have to build it. A year and a half ago, we rolled up our sleeves. And that's how CuatrIA was born.

The name comes from "cuatro" (four), for the four axes it integrates: administration and finance, business development, service delivery (what happens day-to-day in operations), and human resources. The "IA" at the end needs no explanation. Four areas that in almost any company, and certainly in ours, live like four parallel worlds: each with its own system, the same data repeated in three different places, and someone who spends Fridays manually cross-referencing everything in a spreadsheet. The idea of CuatrIA, in short, was to kill that Friday Excel.

There's a lot to tell about how it's built, what specific problems it solves for us every day, and what comes next, but that will be the subject of future posts. This one was simply to tell you the story of why we ended up building our own CRM, which, as some clients and allies who have seen it have already said, is something new, standing out for its ability to have everything integrated and speaking the same language, and, especially, for how much it facilitates the team's day-to-day work.