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

Looks exactly like what I have built with two notion tables :man shrugging:

Today I learned that salesforce is like SAP

Haha, I was waiting for a comment on programming language choice.

It was my first time with JS on the backend and I really enjoy the dev experience with Nest. Sadly, we can't please everyone

As someone who recently built an open source crm (iceburg.ca - Laravel / Vue) I think your choice of license is very limiting. Limiting how the crm can be used will limit the number of users and handicap yourself. Focus on a great crm first and don't worry about others copying you and providing a saas solution better than yours. The more people using your crm is more important than preventing others from making money.

I debated whether to use your license because other crms like SuiteCRM are. I quickly discovered getting others interested enough to host their own saas platforms using my crm framework means more user interest in your crm. The hardest part is getting users to try your crm. That's what you want, not to try to capture imagined lost profit on saas hosting. Then with scale you can create a marketplace of addons and widgets that can capture the real profit center

If I was running a company of any meaningful size, I would hesitate to allow any 3rd party to become the OS of my company.

The OS of my company should be at the very core of my company - highly customized to give me an edge rather than to level the playing field with my competitors.

And that means becoming very good at creating and maintaining the internal IT vision and expertise to make that possible.

And that in turn means that I better have amazing IT capability in my leadership.

The corollary of that is: Without amazing IT leadership, my company is living on borrowed time, eventually to be crushed by dependencies on one or more 3rd parties like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and their ilk.

So the only way I’d accept strategic 3rd party software into my company, would be, if I have the ability to fully fork it and take it in-house at any time of my choosing, with at most a very manageable and finite remaining financial obligation after the fork.

If Twenty.com has a business model, that can accommodate that, it might be onto something special.