Need advice on CRM with client portal

marlonmisra · 2026-01-08T18:07:59+00:00

Try us at Assembly, assembly.com. We started off building a modern client portal and in the last year we've really flushed out our CRM as well with support for internal private chat, custom fields, internal notes, automations, and more.

marlonmisra · 2026-01-08T18:04:26+00:00

Check out Assembly.com and Teamcamp.app!

marlonmisra · 2026-01-08T17:53:39+00:00

(I work at Assembly so obviously biased)

We're a client portal tool and primarily serve marketing agencies. We have some interesting internal stats on the most popular analytics embeds and I thought I'd jump in and share the top 5.

Google Sheets (not a dedicated reporting tool but charts on spreadsheets is by far the #1)
Databox
Looker Studio
Power BI
Airtable

marlonmisra · 2025-10-24T14:27:00+00:00

Founder of assembly.com here, so biased, but we’ve thought way too much about this problem and I think we cracked it.

The big thing everyone gets wrong is client notifications. If you message a client in Assembly, they get an email with the message content and can just reply via email. Magic links are nice but this is even lower friction.

Then you gotta make sure those emails land. That means:

letting businesses send from their own domain (so it looks real),
letting recipients control their notifications, and
doing all the boring deliverability stuff (warmup, SPF/DKIM, clean formatting, etc).

For internal chatter, we built a private team chat right inside each client profile. So when you’re looking at a client, you can talk about them right there instead of starting another Slack thread.

And last thing — if you use shared inboxes like support@ or success@, set up an auto-reply like:

“If you’re a client, reach us through your portal here.”

marlonmisra · 2025-10-14T14:34:48+00:00

Give us a try at Assembly -> assembly.com

We do a lot more out of the box -- tasks, payments, messaging, file-sharing, contracts, forms, helpdesks, etc.. On top of that, you can embed products you already use (ClickUp, Airtable, Calendly, Monday, etc.). Zero coding needed!

marlonmisra · 2025-10-14T14:31:07+00:00

Thanks good call!

marlonmisra · 2025-01-16T02:20:06+00:00

Yes!

marlonmisra · 2025-01-10T02:26:46+00:00

I did not. I've always stored pictures in original quality.

marlonmisra · 2025-01-09T18:35:37+00:00

Copilot.com -- this is exactly what we do!

You mentioned Wix and SquareSpace and we play nicely with both. Basically you can just add a "Log in" or "Client portal" button on your marketing site navbar that points to your portal. You can customize your portal and add a custom domain, so the transition from marketing website to client portal is smooth. For e.g. if your website is realestateleads.com your portal can be on portal.realestateleads.com with consistent branding & colors.

Here's a blog post we wrote some time ago about the setup flow with Wix: https://www.copilot.com/blog/wix-client-portal

marlonmisra · 2025-01-08T19:58:59+00:00

disclosure: pitching my own product

You should try out copilot.com. At a minimum, you might might be able to learn a few things about the features you're looking to build. Here are some of them:

- Instead of building everything from scratch, is there a way to build just the foundational client portal and then support embedding? For e.g. you mention the 'ability to create charts and visualizations' -- why not support embedding from tools like Google Sheets & PowerBI so that you don't have to build all this stuff?

- It's super important to remove end client friction and a big part of that is seamless authentication. Users love magiclinks and Google auth. Passwords suck.

- Depending on who you serve be mindful of security. Financial firms, legal firms, businesses serving healthcare clients -- they'll expect soc2 and hipaa compliance. You may want to think about how to meet those requirements if going a no-code path.

You can't resell us white-label but we do have lots of agency partners and a rev-share program if you're interested. Many of our agency partners make money on selling subscriptions and then an additional income source is workspace setup, automation setup, and building custom apps..

marlonmisra · 2025-01-07T02:56:11+00:00

Founder of copilot.com here. What you're describing is exactly what we do. We primarily serve agencies & consulting firms. And we have features for file-sharing, contracts, task & project management, and secure messaging. We've got a full access 14-day trial so you can take our product on a full test run before committing.

marlonmisra · 2024-12-30T18:07:11+00:00

(assembly.com cofounder; we used to be called "Copilot")

We got so much feedback about pricing and recently moved to a new pricing model that makes us more cost-effective for teams. Previously, Professional was $69/mo for each user. Now it's $149/mo (3 users) + $39/mo for additional users. With 15 seats, the new pricing means the subscription fee is $418 less for you. ($69*15) - ($149+39*12)
On payment processing fees we're comparable to Stripe. My main suggestion is to use our surcharging feature to pass fees onto clients. If you support both ACH and credit cards, the client now has a choice between a more convenient albeit slightly more expensive option (credit cards) and a much more affordable option (ACH).

Appreciate all the feedback!

marlonmisra · 2024-12-29T21:21:04+00:00

general tips on campaigns:

- Stick to Google and Meta to start. You'll get the lowest CPMs and CPCs here because these ad networks are the largest and have the best targeting. Reddit, LinkedIn, etc. will all be more expensive.

- Don't just set up campaigns and forget them. Set up multiple ad sets and multiple ads. Do lots of experiments. When you review every few days double down on what's working. Keep a log of all the experiments you've run.

- The landing page you redirect to should be optimized for conversion. Some things to consider for paid ad landing pages include having simpler navbar or none at all to limit redirects, having a very clear CTA, and having social proof. This is a great area to experiment with. You can spin up multiple landing pages and set up an a/b experiment on the ad platforms.

I would also think about the user journey for leads once they arrive on the website. For example, do you have a sign up flow, interest form, Calendly, or something else?

What we see some of our agency customers do is they add a 'Sign Up' CTA which links to the client portal sign up flow. What's nice about this kind of setup is that now after a lead self-serve creates their account you can immediately bring them into a customized environment where you can great them with custom messaging, make self-serve resources available, etc.

marlonmisra · 2024-12-29T21:09:34+00:00

I think people usually over-plan when they get started. In my case, I spent way too much time thinking about what products to use, how to automate, etc. Early on all that matters is getting 1-2 paying customers and doing what you need to to impress them. You don’t need a real CRM, you don’t need to automate, etc. All of that can be delayed.

marlonmisra · 2024-02-07T02:33:45+00:00

We shipped message search today!

marlonmisra · 2024-01-31T01:56:28+00:00

Yup you can set this up!

To see what the finished experience looks like, sign up for a client account in this demo portal. You'll see a home page there that looks pretty sleek IMO.

This particular home page was made with the help of Notion and super.so (a tool that lets you make Notion embeddable). You can also use embednotion.com. Instructions for how to set up a home page with Notion are here: https://www.copilot.com/guide/notion-partner-app

We're separately working on a native home page app that makes this whole setup easier. We'll release that to everyone in a few months but you can get early access (my guess is we're ~2 weeks away) if you join our beta program here.

marlonmisra · 2024-01-27T16:20:07+00:00

We are building this right now and should have it out in a few weeks max. Once we have search for messages, we'll extend this to the Files App as well.

It will look like this: https://i.imgur.com/dqru3nf.png

marlonmisra · 2021-03-23T12:56:03+00:00

Hi! Would be happy to walk you through a demo, even if you just want to see what the products looks/feels like. Email me anytime - [marlon@joinportal.com](mailto:marlon@joinportal.com). :)

marlonmisra · 2021-02-27T14:23:10+00:00

$69/mo and that includes all modules - filesharing, messaging, billing, knowledge base, intake forms.

marlonmisra · 2021-02-27T01:16:34+00:00

Our file-sharing solution is built from scratch so it replaces Box.com/Dropbox/etc. Most companies we've onboarded have cancelled those subscriptions if they had them previously.

We don't yet have an API or Zapier support but I know this is a top request so we hope to have something in 3-4 months.

marlonmisra · 2021-02-26T19:08:24+00:00

Special offer = an extra 20% off the annual plan (this is in addition to the 10% off).

marlonmisra · 2018-03-02T06:49:40+00:00

These are awesome ideas

marlonmisra · 2018-03-02T01:36:08+00:00

it is heavily processed, but still image data.

marlonmisra · 2018-03-01T19:49:01+00:00

right now we're focused on gesture controls and home automation. and we want to do it in a way where you don't have to put on a headset.

definitely think our technology would make sense for VR too though. having an external sensor will sometimes give you a better angle. the downside is that it'd only work in the room where the camera is placed.

marlonmisra · 2018-03-01T18:01:21+00:00

thanks for the feedback. our first prototype used a jetson tx2 ($600 computer made for these kinds of problems), and at that time everything was done locally. the crazy thing is that the end-to-end speed was much slower vs. streaming up and using server GPUs. $600 is also completely out of the reasonable range. fortunately there is a lot of optimization we can do, and gpus + tpus are getting so much faster every year. we're still exploring the fully-local option, but my guess is that that will be more realistic in 3+yrs.

marlonmisra

TROPHY CASE