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Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

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Re: Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

#161

Post by drikerf »

paggle wrote: post #148
johnwheeler wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah because you know, NOW really is the best time to prepare themselves for being the next Salesforce or Office 365. Don't you think it's a just little premature for that scale of thinking? I mean, they just got the thing posted on HN.

It’s not that - it’s that as a 6-person team who is a target customer, I don’t want to get a bunch of my data locked in to a system that’s not priced to sustain the company.

Hey!

The company is just me and I'm not trying to land huge customers. Therefore I need no marketing or customer support team. I'm building it for myself and other small businesses. I think I can make that sustainable. I also have no interest in being acquired so you won't have to worry about that either :).

Re: Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

#162

Post by drikerf »

JaggerFoo wrote: post #155

No API information. This is what I look for first when evaluating CRM software, which gives me an idea of the underlying schema and how to extend or integrate the software. Most smaller CRM's do not support multiple price books, for example, that can be critical to businesses that have price differences between sales channels and regions. A typical use case, customer story, for your solution would be helpful. Cheers

Thanks! I also check API docs :)! I'll be working on documenting the API in September.

Re: Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

#163

Post by aantix »

rrggrr wrote: post #92
dotancohen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You evaluate CRMs for a living? If I may, an off-topic question. I am completely unsatisfied with any addressbook software and have been looking at a ton of CRMs for personal use. I would prefer something open source, but anything self-hosted would do. The one feature that most CRMs are missing is CardDav and CalDav syncing. I need my contacts on my phone. Do you know of any opens source or otherwise self-hosted CRM…

Streak or Copper would be my go-to for this, but they sit atop Gmail and Google Calendar which doesn't give you the open open source solution you want. I'm sorry to say that I don't have a FOSS recommendation.

Personally, I'd actually like a CRM that sits atop LinkedIn. That's where the leads and data truly exist.

Any recommendations?

Re: Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

#165

Post by onetype »

aantix wrote: post #163
rrggrr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streak or Copper would be my go-to for this, but they sit atop Gmail and Google Calendar which doesn't give you the open open source solution you want. I'm sorry to say that I don't have a FOSS recommendation.

Personally, I'd actually like a CRM that sits atop LinkedIn. That's where the leads and data truly exist. Any recommendations?

LinkedIn already has that -- it's sales navigator.

Re: Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

#166

Post by mistrial9 »

rrggrr wrote: post #49

As someone who evaluates CRMs pretty much for a living I'm sad to report there's nothing new here. Great UI - Kudos. But, this is way more expensive than Pipedrive whose UI is arguably as user friendly. I think you've got potential here... but you're priced same as close.io with far fewer features and a similar UI.

recommendations an ubuntu-based CRM for a researcher with ~300 PDFs; requires basic metadata, some kind of tagging support, not a year's worth of setup, please!.. coder here!

Re: Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

#167

Post by lukevdp »

perfunctory wrote: post #136
tryitnow wrote: post #118

I would still go with a major CRM. It's not so much about having a great product as it is about having software that a lot of people already know how to use. Even if people don't like the major players at least they're familiar with them, so recruiting and training is a lot easier even if the product is not a good as it should be.

This reasoning has certain merit, but I still get sad every time I hear it. With this kind of attitude we would have never gotten out of the caves.

Not everyone is an early adopter

Re: Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

#168

Post by drikerf »

jayyeh wrote: post #140

The title of the Show HN grabbed me and the design on your homepage had me leaning in. I think it's hard to differentiate on design fully as a basic CRM. One idea you could look into as both a feature set and a focus of your marketing is leaning into the idea that you're the ideal first CRM and you make migrating to Salesforce dead simple. You can snag ppl like our company who have been told you'll eventually need to…

Thank you!

That's interesting. I'll always help you export your data whenever you want manually until I've built a good export tool :).

Re: Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

#169

Post by drikerf »

jstsch wrote: post #146

Looks nice! What about self hosting? I’d copy the Gitlab model. Open source community edition, and a quite pricy Enterprise edition that is full of features that only larger companies need (compliance stuff, audit trails, fine grained permissions, etc).

Hi!

I'm making this for myself and other small businesses. So not really interested in enterprise :).

Open source model is interesting though and I've thought about it before. We'll see :)!

Re: Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

#170

Post by zaroth »

drikerf wrote: post #63
rrggrr wrote: post #49

As someone who evaluates CRMs pretty much for a living I'm sad to report there's nothing new here. Great UI - Kudos. But, this is way more expensive than Pipedrive whose UI is arguably as user friendly. I think you've got potential here... but you're priced same as close.io with far fewer features and a similar UI.

Hey! Thanks for your feedback! I just want to mention that Wobaka is $49 for all of your team, not per user. So if you're more than 3 users it's not more expensive :).

Despite the advice to add enterprise pricing — advice which I’ve given in the past too — I think you’ve done exactly the right thing with your pricing.

Pricing is a form a bike shedding. You can spend an infinite amount of time worrying about it, and there is no one right answer.

But one thing that a fixed price of $49/mo regardless of team size will do for you is put a hard cap on how much you will work on closing a single account.

Even assuming a very sticky product, by fixing the price your guaranteeing a whale isn’t going to show up in your inbox, promise the world if only features X, Y, Z existed, get you running in circles chasing that ghost, and then disappear without paying a dime, leaving with a pile of code that adds no value to your true customer base.

This pattern is extremely common for small companies that dream of being the next Enterprise SaaS, and the big companies with high probability will never buy from you, but will have no problem dangling carrots that waste your extremely valuable cycles.

Fixing the price is a very overt way to maintain focus and declare that you are going to own your own feature set and build the product you want to build, take it or leave it.

As a sole proprietor this is the safest way for you to grow your company at this stage.

Ignore all pricing discussions and just focus like hell on features that increase your SAM (the number of customers who could actually use your product), your reach (the percentage of your SAM that know you exist) and your conversion (the percentage of people who know you exist that ever actually pay you money).

Also remember that when you start out, the customers you have are not always the customers you want. The low monthly price is a great way to say, tell me what you like and don’t like, but don’t expect me to move mountains to build something special for you.

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