131–140 of 317 posts
Just in time for my app (Cancelly.ca) to use a CRM. I was going to code a CRM myself. I hope it stays open source. Like how OpenAI went from being Non-profit to for profit.
We are currently evaluating CRM packages. This is probably a bit too in development for me to recommend but I'll let you know our internal requirements so you have one extra data point in the market. Phone integration is huge for us. We need the CRM to respond to an incoming call by bringing up the contacts details if it recognises the number. We also need a log that the cal began, was answered by, and how long it la…
What type of phone integration would you need? Do you use an external provider like Aircall? If you don't, I know Close.com has a built-in phone functionality so maybe their solution could fit your need? We definitely need to work on integrations soon!
As far as integrations go, for us it's an API that is critical. Our accounting system is Myob Exonet. So old that nothing integrates but it was an API so we can write an ETL process to dump data out of it into a CRM. Our Ecommerce platform is NopCommerce but that's a bit obscure and so heavily customized out of the box integration plugins aren't going to work.
Also $29 per seat per month is an amazing price. But I've noticed something strange with mentioning pricing to upper management.
If I take say Zoho CRM, one we've looked at. The plan we need is $55 AUD per seat per month. Realistically we're going to have 5 - 10 users of the system so that works out to $3,300 - $6,600 per year.
I can get $6,600 per year for CRM operations approved no problem. But, If I say $600 per user per year management freak out. It's the same number but there is something about per user that worries upper management.
Now I always just give them the per year 10 user cost and say if we keep under 10 sale and support staff this is the cost.
I don't know if that is unique to my company but if it's not some pricing packages with yearly figures might help sell. That is true over all SAAS products we use.
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Curious why did you think about building you own? For us the frustration came primarily from the design, the developer experience to extend/customize, and the way data is pulled and fetched. I think that if we nail those 3 points, we would have a solution that is well enough differentiated from what currently exists in the market
Well, first of all, becaused we are all trying to build the new [put_some_big_company_name_here]. But besides my entrepreneurship, I think the space for building such application goes to 3 routes: 1) Build one "traditional" CRM, to handle accounts, contacts, oppportunities, etc, etc. Without or just few customizations being possible. So then you felt in the "commodity" bucket to compete with all other CRMs in the mar…
Congrats on launching! It looks like you started with Hasura GQL and switched to your own implementation ( https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/pull/156 ). Would it be possible to comment on what influenced your decision here? I've built ontop of Hasura in the past and it's permissions model seems like it'd be a good fit for a CRM
Sure! We want to build something flexible where users can define their own custom objects and fields. We were thinking about leveraging Hasura that's already providing a flexible graphql API based on metadata which is exactly what we need / will need to build in the future. 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 person…
But the core skill of the people at Salesforce is that they've had this thing online for 20+ years, most of their customers have extensive customisations, and three times a year Salesforce push new features to the platform while successfully minimising the amount of customer customisations they break.
And thats the key - how can you regularly expand and improve your PAAS without fucking up the extensive and very complicated custom things your customers have built on top of it. Its actually a very hard engineering challenge that no-one really talks about because its a long term challenge and not many people focus on long term engineering.
The biggest mistake a competitor can make is thinking Salesforce is a CRM. They may sell themselves as one, but that is just to get a foothold in a company's sales system. Salesforce actually sells (1) an ecosystem that lets your company connect to any other software out there and (2) a platform on which you can build...basically anything. These two together ensure that every one of their customers is 100% locked in…
Congrats on launch! I completely agree with the wisdom of launching early as soon as some basic functionality works. If I had to suggest the lowest-hanging fruits for your roadmap, it would be email automation and lead enrichment. 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 organ…
I like the "crm.json" image. We definitely want to work on doing something modular like this. I also wanted to price differently than by seat initially. Because CRMs tends to be the source of truth for the whole organizations, and usually teams like customer support are left out because it's not worth paying a license for them to just read the information the sales have put in, while it would be useful. But we didn't…
Consider an organization spending $10k/year on HubSpot. They're also spending at least a million a year on salaries/commissions for their sales staff. Optimizing software costs addresses 1% of the total spend, while making sales people more efficient optimizes the other 99%. In general, if your target customer is sales management, I would pitch support/customization contracts to streamline sales organizations when you're picking up initial customers. This would also likely bring you perspective on the wide range of customizations out there.
Lots of comments about salesforce app exchange, but I will say, as someone (unfortunately) very familiar with Salesforce and also startups ... I think there is a huge opportunity here. The Salesforce schema of opportunities is incredibly out dated for modern software companies — you only need to look at the explosion of "PLG CRMs" in the past few years — I think there is a massive opportunity for a CRM that integrate…
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100% agree. And we are not there yet. But I feel like open source is the best answer to 1 (building an ecosystem of integrations), and that it will also allow us to build a better platform for developers (2): why learn Aura components/Apex when you already know and can use Typescript/React?
An open-source core is only part of it, because different users will need different data models for different business domains. One of the biggest challenges here will be: how can you allow tenants to run arbitrary plugins that (a) execute arbitrary sandboxed server-side code, and (b) can store arbitrary new data models and custom fields within your instance's centralized storage alongside the canonical model types,…
https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/cms/data/serverless-func...
Generally agree with launching early - although this feels very early! We are currently looking for a replacement to our HubSpot account (20 person company for context with c4 people who use HubSpot - so probably a potential customer!), however this appears to be very buggy to start with and misses some basic functions:
* Doesn't seem to be a way to name / describe an opportunity (pretty fundamental)
* Cannot quickly add an opportunity without setting up the company (most other CRM products have a quick-add)
* 'Contact' appears to have a quick-add when adding an opportunity, but it doesn't work.
* All opportunities automatically default to Lost
* Dragging an opportunity into an 'empty' bucket does not always behave as expected (e.g. if you drag it to below the 'new' button)
* No way to add additional pipeline stages
* Users can remove all companies/deals/contacts from the system in two clicks with no limit and no way to reverse (:
* If you invite a user to your workspace, they are immediately admin and can kick you out of your own workspace.
* No way to archive an opportunity - the pipelines will just grow so will be totally unusable after a few months.
* Basic UI issues from a usability perspective - like two icons for people when you go into an opportunity, and not clear that one of them wants you to put an employee count in it, and then other field where you say employees doesn't actually seem to work. If I go to add people to the opportunity, it shows me people I have already deleted and does not show me someone I just recently created and assigned to the company...!
* No way to export data for analysis (e.g. to Excel). Conversely no way to import data (e.g. from Excel) so migration is impossible (companies will have 10's of thousands of contacts)
* Basic audit issues... If someone creates a note I can either delete it, or I can rewrite it and it looks like they said it (it doesn't say it was modified by another user and just lets me edit others notes!).
This is after like 10 minutes of testing so I assume there are lots of other issues too...
Broadly at the moment I don't think it passes the 'Being a better CRM than Trello' test, and definitely does not pass the 'better than a spreadsheet' test, but hopefully with time it will. At the moment though it feels very under-baked, but wish you luck in building this out into a product which is usable.