Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

news.ycombinator.com

71–80 of 147 posts

Re: Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

#71

I really, really need something like this in my life. In a previous life, I ran for political office and raising money would have been so much easier if I had kept those contacts warm over time. Big problem here is that it requires Google Contacts. Do people actually use that? Phone/FB contacts would be much more useful in my book. I actually was just thinking about this type of product just yesterday while walking a…

Google Contacts are useful for email data (since folks often add to Google Contacts, which does create issues with noise...)

I'll add you can add your iCloud contacts into Dex if you're an iPhone user!

Re: Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

#72
I was very excited to try this. Particularly as a hypersocial super-connector, I've dreamed about my ideal personal CRM.

What I want is:

* The ability to do something like a spaced repetition with my contacts. If it proposes I connect with someone, and I'm like "great", they stay high priority. Or I can snooze that contact for a little while or a long while. (There might be an orthogonal feature to track who is important but I only need infrequent contact with.)

* The ability to accurately search my contacts. e.g. Friends who are into crypto and art.

So I went all in on Dex for ten minutes and granted read permissions for my calendar + contacts and added the extension access to read and change data on all websites.

The results were pretty underwhelming. It showed me a handful of contacts scraped from Google, many of which I didn't even recognize. I understand that this is perhaps I'm not much of an email guy, so I do know that a scrape of my Google contacts (or even my emails) will poorly reflect my social graph.

Here's what I want:

* Scrape and import my contacts across all platforms. If you need to use a Chrome extension to read my Facebook activity (not the messages, but just the people involved), fine. If you want me to spend 20 minutes downloading Facebook exports that don't include message text, or maybe screenshotting my message feed subjects for Facebook and Instagram and emailing them to you to OCR, to avoid you being liable for TOS breaking, fine.

* Auto-tag contacts, and allow me to update my tags.

* Auto-prioritize my contacts, and allow me to update the priorities.

Dex isn't really what I need, but thank you. I appreciate you trying to solve this problem.

[edit: Give me a Chrome extension to take screenshots of pages with key information about my social graph, whenever I browse onto them, that will then find sensitive info like message text and black them over and then allow me to easily email them to you?]

Re: Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

#73
post #64
post #5

> Add "Dex for Chrome"? >> It can: >> Read and change all your data on the websites you visit No thanks

With chrome extensions, unfortunately that's the only option for developers; read all urls/data or no access to urls/data

Are you sure that's current? I made an extension (just for myself) a few months back and I could restrict the domains via the permissions array in the manifest.json

https://developer.chrome.com/apps/declare_permissions (see reference to "match pattern")

This then in turn populates the list of sites in the extension settings where you can choose to deny access to the aforementioned websites listed in the manifest

Re: Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

#74
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With chrome extensions, unfortunately that's the only option for developers; read all urls/data or no access to urls/data

Are you sure that's current? I made an extension (just for myself) a few months back and I could restrict the domains via the permissions array in the manifest.json https://developer.chrome.com/apps/declare_permissions (see reference to "match pattern") This then in turn populates the list of sites in the extension settings where you can choose to deny access to the aforementioned websites listed in the manifest

Oh sorry, yes I am mistaken (been a while for me). I guess a lot of developers just use permissions "host": " * " because it's easier...

What extension did you make? I made [1] an extension a while ago, and spent more time than I'd care to admit. Now that I think about it, I used "host": " * " too! (even though it's necessary for that particular extension)...

[1] https://newsit.benwinding.com/

Re: Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

#76

Do you have a demo or some more insightful screenshots of what the app is? Even if I wanted to sign up to the site, I'd have to fill in a bunch of stuff to actually have a meaningful overview of the UI. I appreciate you have two-way contact syncing with Google Contacts which is a big thing that's lacking in monica. I also appreciate the Chrome Extension you mentioned. Is there deeper integration there, eg. do you all…

Re: demo / screenshots, I totally get this. Honestly the landing page hasn't been a huge concern, but I'll take your feedback that you actually want to see the feedback first; we'll make changes.

The Chrome Extension unfortunately doesn't do a deeper integration -- we're looking into how to make this happen! You're absolutely right that a personal CRM needs to be a single source of truth -- the hard part is getting data in the actual product!

Re: Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

#77
I think a personal CRM should include knowledge of Dunbar's number.[0][1]

Like,

"You are spending too much time with C people. Is C person Andrew now a B? B people like Joe and Jane need more attention."

"You could use another A relationship. The following B people might be good candidates based on your contact frequency."

This is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it is often true that people don't attend to relationships with apprppriate priority. And, knowing your situation with regard to various relationship levels provides insight for growth.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-med...

[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2004...

Re: Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

#78
post #72

I was very excited to try this. Particularly as a hypersocial super-connector, I've dreamed about my ideal personal CRM. What I want is: * The ability to do something like a spaced repetition with my contacts. If it proposes I connect with someone, and I'm like "great", they stay high priority. Or I can snooze that contact for a little while or a long while. (There might be an orthogonal feature to track who is impor…

Appreciate this feedback -- I recognize Dex is underwhelming for you and we''re working to fix that. We actually do have an experimental feature for Facebook import (it does take a few steps), but I don't think we come close to the automation you're looking for unfortunately (we're trying to get closer!)

I think the end goal of a product we're looking to build might not be too far off from what you're looking for, and I appreciate your comments on what you want. (it's always nice when someone directly lists features they are looking for). I'll make a note to follow-up when Dex is a better solution for you!

Re: Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

#79
post #76

Do you have a demo or some more insightful screenshots of what the app is? Even if I wanted to sign up to the site, I'd have to fill in a bunch of stuff to actually have a meaningful overview of the UI. I appreciate you have two-way contact syncing with Google Contacts which is a big thing that's lacking in monica. I also appreciate the Chrome Extension you mentioned. Is there deeper integration there, eg. do you all…

Re: demo / screenshots, I totally get this. Honestly the landing page hasn't been a huge concern, but I'll take your feedback that you actually want to see the feedback first; we'll make changes. The Chrome Extension unfortunately doesn't do a deeper integration -- we're looking into how to make this happen! You're absolutely right that a personal CRM needs to be a single source of truth -- the hard part is getting d…

Do you consider messaging history as mentioned to be in scope? I'd love to be able to quickly refer to emails, convos etc. And the best CRMs do let you keep track of people based on conversations.

I get you that getting the data in is difficult though. A lot of API work. This is one thing where if you were open source and had a plugin / provider API people could contribute. I certainly would.

Re: Launch HN: Dex (YC S19) – personal CRM that reminds you to keep in touch

#80
post #66
post #58

Give me an option to pay and be more clear in your data policy and maybe I'll give it a shot. I've been wanting something like this for a while but the privacy policy is pretty vague and far too broad for me to trust a service like this: https://getdex.com/privacypolicy

I'm happy to take your money and also clarify the privacy policy -- will follow-up with you when that's done!

The data security / privacy policy is super important. I've also wanted a personal CRM for some time so this definitely hits my pain point. However, I anticipate this would become most useful when I start adding personal, honest notes for all my contacts. That's obviously a problem if this database were ever to be leaked, or (worse) subpoenaed.

I'd be much more excited about this product if it used zero-knowledge encryption for my data. Yes you can't data-mine it (and if I lose my password I'm hosed), but I'd prefer having the only copy of the decryption key.

Post reply on HN