Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

We definitely need to work on integrations soon!

My two cents: I work in marketing and CRM for eCommerce lifestyle companies. When I evaluate a CRM I try to understand if it's for sales or eCommerce or both. I see in your docs that you mention that specific point of sales being dominant in CRM so that's a plus.

Then I look at if it natively or easily connects to the tools that the company uses. If I'm pointed to using Zapier for connections that's usually too costly because you're collecting a lot of emails and you can quickly get into millions of calls for low quality leads.

Another big miss I notice is not integrating with POS systems and only eCommerce so that quickly creates an issue with companies opening stores.

On the sales side there's usually less of a sales pipeline and more of a clienteling side where you've got sales people at store locations reaching out to customers to announce products or services or events. It's a lot less of stages because products are usually not all that high value.

I like this approach. So much software feels completely half-assed and frustrating to use. Quality can be a real differentiator (it just has to be empathized enough).

Not all "migration costs" are the same: to quote General Turgidson, "It is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed."

In the case of software migration costs, the cost of migrating away from a proprietary application-platform with zero-to-little code and data portability, will be orders of magnitude higher than the cost of migrating away from a proprietary infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

This isn't anything new: while Cloud-y platforms like SalesForce present even higher barriers to exercising our rights to data-sovereignty than what we had previously with SAP (because at least with SAP you can defenestrate the machines), it's all too similar to the 4GL vs. SQL wars of the 1990s. I honestly can't think of any orgs from then that regrets betting on a SQL-based RDBMS, while there are still companies out there depending on FoxPro, Progress, or worse...

This is also why I flat-out refuse to use Firebase.

Another hidden-cost of 4GL-like systems is that eventually they run-out-of-steam: hype fades and the vendor becomes stagnant and/or can't attract the best minds in the industry to design and build the platforms they expect others to use, so they lose whatever advantages they might have had which justified their proprietary nature - or an even more insidious version, whereby too many slow-moving companies become dependent on a particular platform that the platform's vendors have to intentionally hold-back the platform to avoid imposing too many fast-moving potentially breaking-changes (Java comes to mind...).