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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

#181

Post by chipotle_coyote »

mbesto wrote: post #127
tyre wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still useful to have. The most basic version would be something like: 1. up to 10 users: $49/mo 2. 11–25 users: $99/mo 3. 26–100 users: $199/mo 4. 101+ users: call me EDIT: As anyone who has tried to buy a CRM will know, these prices are crazy low. Which is a good thing!

> As anyone who has tried to buy a CRM will know, these prices are crazy low. Which is a good thing! No, no it's not. CRM is incredibly valuable to any business and if your software provider can't sustain it's own businesses because they charge too little, the last thing you want to deal with is switching costs (direct costs and hassle) when they go under.

You're right about the switching costs if an SaaS provider goes under. But assuming $50/month is unsustainable for the feature set and service guarantees this company provides seems, well, to assume a lot. If they were trying to provide features competitive with Salesforce, maybe, but are they? (And can we really be sure that Salesforce would collapse if they weren't charging $150/user/mo for their "most popular" plan?)

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

#182

Post by andyfowler »

wickedwiesel wrote: post #152
bbmario wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you recommend for a mom and pop ecommerce? Trying to find something for a couple of friends, but everything is bloated and complex.

In our SMB we went with Nutshell CRM [0]. The starter version has all the features minus sales automation. The UI is fine, they have well written docs [1] and their security docs is actually insightful [2]. Things like an well written API and an actual, live and up-to-date status page etc. make it look like a decent run SaaS business imho. [0] - https://www.nutshell.com/pricing/ [1] - https://www.nutshell.com/securit…

Hey thanks! I'm a cofounder at Nutshell. Always great to hear from other hackers getting value from what we're building.

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

#183

Post by chipotle_coyote »

koonsolo wrote: post #157
hobofan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because then we have the money to automate it I think you are missing the point that in this case you _don't_ have the money.

If a big company with 50,000 employees is your customer, you must be pretty blind or stubborn to not get the money you want.

The problem is what zaroth outlined at the start of this thread: the big company doesn't start as your customer. They start out as "Hi, we're a Fortune 500 company and we'll become your Number One Customer if you jump through these hoops...before we sign a contract!" And you start jumping. And there are more hoops. And you jump. And they have a strategy change and blow you off for six months, then come back with a different set of hoops. And you jump. And you jump. And you've spent hundreds of thousand of dollars for the promise of getting that big customer, on the belief that they'll surely sign and that other customers of their size will follow.

And they don't sign.

And it turns out what you worked on for them isn't something other customers of their size really quite want. But if you jump through these hoops...

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

#184

Post by taphangum »

drikerf wrote: post #76
taphangum wrote: post #57

Is there a guide or a book you'd recommend on designing software like this (in terms of the UI)? You've done very well.

Design of everyday things is the only book I've read on design and it's great :)! I also learn from others and save design inspiration all the time and share it on Klart.io/pixels.

Thanks a lot for sharing. I have it, but have never gotten around to reading. Will do now.

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

#185

Post by writepub »

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.

Pricing does not work this way [1]. Smaller companies tend to offer a lot more accessible support, which is not as loudly advertised. In any case, if pricing did work this way, Saas would be a race to the bottom, which the market has shown to not be the case.

[1]: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...

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

#187

Post by lima »

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.

I tried Pipedrive but if you want to sync contacts with Google Contacts, they insist on accessing your mails as well. No way to reduce OAuth scope. To make matters worse, they use a third party API to do this, so you trust not just one, but two random companies with access to your email. This is an issue since email is not just used for marketing (think password reset tokens and so on).

Their support has been useless when I asked about this, insisting that their approach was perfectly secure and that their other customers don't care:

> We have now more than 85,000 companies from all over the World who have accepted and agreed with our Terms and Conditions and I am happy to say that we have never had any issues with these matters.

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

#188

Post by sangerSCB »

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?

insidesales.com. I was the product manager when we launched Playbooks. Its core value prop is this.

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

#190

Post by mbesto »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #181
mbesto wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As anyone who has tried to buy a CRM will know, these prices are crazy low. Which is a good thing! No, no it's not. CRM is incredibly valuable to any business and if your software provider can't sustain it's own businesses because they charge too little, the last thing you want to deal with is switching costs (direct costs and hassle) when they go under.

You're right about the switching costs if an SaaS provider goes under. But assuming $50/month is unsustainable for the feature set and service guarantees this company provides seems, well, to assume a lot. If they were trying to provide features competitive with Salesforce, maybe, but are they? (And can we really be sure that Salesforce would collapse if they weren't charging $150/user/mo for their "most popular" pla…

Even if you are able to get 1,000 customers at $50/month, that's only $50k/month or $600k/year. That's barely enough to provide enough support personnel and hosting costs alone to support 1k clients.
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