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

I'm interested to know how much time you've actually spent using CRMs or ERPs yourself. Not clicking around and exploring features, but actually using for something.

While I know this is a very early release, my biggest concern is naivety about real world usage requirements, and if you'll be able to manage the feature creep that will be coming with it without just turning into another Salesforce or NetSuite.

As soon as you get users it's going to get harder to add in those things you're putting off thinking about until later, and managing it will become a legacy suckfest. This manifests itself in a slow, slow, slow experience and necessary UX decisions that make the user scratch their head.

I'd say the biggest example of this is custom fields. It's not just another problem to solve at some point, it's probably one of the biggest ruins of CRMs.

However, there are three reasons that pushed us to go through a different way:

1) We want to build a cloud version which is multitenant (I personally think that provisionning single tenant instance at scale is not a good vision in a world with restricted resources ; there is a significant resource saving when we mutualize resources). This means that different users can have different data schemas. This is not possible with Hasura that serves one unique schema for all users.

2) We want to offer a good developer experience and Hasura comes as a standalone service. This means that installing the project gets much more complex than a "yarn && yarn start", and creates a harder onboarding curve which we want to avoid as much as possible. If you face a Hasura issue during installation, you would need to understand Hasura workflows, and probably docker too.

3) Very similar to 2, we want Twenty to be easily self-hostable with 1-click to deploy. This would had pushed us to create bigger joint images including Twenty + Hasura, making it harder to maintain and to debug.

There is a great article on how Salesforce is built here: https://architect.salesforce.com/fundamentals/platform-multi.... They basically have 1 metadata table and 1 data table (uuid, objectid, orgid, field1, ..., field500) where each column is a VARCHAR and they have built their own engine on top of it. I think we will likely need to do something similar and we cannot build it on top of Hasura / we lose the value of Hasura by building on top of it.

I'm an engineering consultant for various sales tech startups which operate within the ecosystem of "build a HubSpot/Salesforce/Freshworks/etc integration for a specific type of sales organization". What I would love to see in an open-source CRM is an easy way to bring these integrations directly into the CRM - imagine a `crm.json` file which configures a CRM web app and imports custom code modules from a central repository, similar to `package.json` and NPM.

A big issue end users bring up with Salesforce/HubSpot is the high cost, especially for sales organizations which only need the core features you have in your demo today (track leads, deals, companies, etc) but have to buy a seat for each salesperson. A managed service for a hosted CRM without feature/usage/seat limitations would be an easy sell if you can reliably ingest existing CRM data and provide some level of integrations/customization.