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

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

#181

Post by charlesTwenty »

kgeist wrote: post #179

My team develops our company's own homegrown internal CRM. It manages basically everything about the company, and contacts themselves is a very tiny part: there're marketing campaigns, followups, accounting, incoming/outcoming calls management, our products' entire licensing/subscription system (neatly integrated into everything else), tech support, inbox/outbox, activities, contacts, leads/lead events, analytics, th…

Thank you for the feedback. What you said resonates with me a lot.

Standardized APIs:

While we are designing Twenty, we have in mind to provide three APIs: a GraphQL API (headless), a Front-end React API and a NodeJS API that engineers could use to build their own plugins. We imagine that you could build your plugins in your own repository using SDKs maintained by Twenty. Then on your twenty instance you would be able to install a plugin from your custom repository or a shared marketplace (this would maybe imply a vetting process) There are many challenges around that, especially in resources monitoring and security given we are going into the multitenant architecture

API that don't assume custom business logic: Here, we might have a slightly different opinion: we think that Twenty should come by default with a quite opinionated behavior. We will likely introduce a rich library of standards objects and fields that would have pre-defined behaviors. However, we would also enable the users to create custom objects and custom fields if they need that can be customized in whatever makes sense for their business. So: Standard objects/fields + Custom object/fields. We don't know yet if they share the exact same API

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

#182

Post by e12e »

iFelix wrote: post #125
LrnByTeach wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good to know what these "Company OS" stands for > Salesforce comes in at the sales side of things, > SAP invades as a finance app, and > ServiceNow begins their encroachment as an IT ticketing system, but they all wanna be THE only cloud platform your company needs.

Good summary! And Microsoft through the Productivity apps? (Word, Excel...)

Microsoft also has Dynamics 365 (née Navision).

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

#183

Post by e12e »

vxNsr wrote: post #152
iFelix wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good summary! And Microsoft through the Productivity apps? (Word, Excel...)

Sure but Microsoft isn’t really offering a coherent solution for general company data and processes. They have the power platform, but because there’s no happy path, best practices, laid out it requires a lot more buy in from actual engineers who don’t have a lot of love for nocode platforms. It’s totally feasible to build a IT ticketing system in power platform. And then to build a sales/CRM solution and then also b…

> Sure but Microsoft isn’t really offering a coherent solution for general company data and processes.

Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior Dynamics 365?

> Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a product line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) intelligent business applications

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Dynamics_365

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

#184

Post by xyst »

I love these open source alternatives to big tech and centralized solutions. So far I have seen:

- authentication and authorization with oauth: Ory (ory.sh)

- payments and billing (alternative to stripe): Lago (getlago.com)

and now

- CRM: Twenty

I'll look into this and see if I can contribute back. I hate SF

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

#185

Post by noizejoy »

charlesTwenty wrote: post #166
noizejoy wrote: post #149

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 tu…

Thanks for the feedback! We have been discussing this a lot. Here is one of the option we have in mind for the upcoming months and we would love to know if this could work in your opinion. Data ownership: a) Twenty makes the distinction between Twenty owned data models (People, Company, Pipeline) and your own data models. b) Let's say you use the cloud version: you can plug your own external database as a datasource.…

Good to see that you're spending quality thought on differentiating by reducing the lock-in problem generally associated with the software/service space you're aiming to compete in.

My initial reaction is that the ideas you listed around data ownership and and extensibility hold considerable promise and allow a company to grow not only with you and your other customers, but also to create and grow competitive distinction.

And if you refrain from being sneaky about locking your customers in, it would probably limit the enthusiasm of most potential investors, but it would also be a chance to have much less antagonistic customer relationships and a much more likable public sentiment over the long haul.

And that gives me pause to wonder, if it might make sense to strengthen the messaging around the fact that you're not taking your customers hostage like most(all?) of the big incumbents. Is you current messaging possibly burying the lede?

You're most certainly picking an interesting time to start such an ambitious project. But then again, maybe -- exactly while so much is in upheaval -- now is a great time to do so! My warmest wishes not just for success, but even more for a fun and rewarding journey!

p.s. I noticed, what I assume to be a small typo section on your github page:

> For the developer community:

> A CRM that ban self-hosted for free, on your own network and close to your data sources

Was the intent to have something like this?

A CRM that can be self-hosted for free, on your own network and close to your data sources

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

#186

Post by kgeist »

charlesTwenty wrote: post #181
kgeist wrote: post #179

My team develops our company's own homegrown internal CRM. It manages basically everything about the company, and contacts themselves is a very tiny part: there're marketing campaigns, followups, accounting, incoming/outcoming calls management, our products' entire licensing/subscription system (neatly integrated into everything else), tech support, inbox/outbox, activities, contacts, leads/lead events, analytics, th…

Thank you for the feedback. What you said resonates with me a lot. Standardized APIs: While we are designing Twenty, we have in mind to provide three APIs: a GraphQL API (headless), a Front-end React API and a NodeJS API that engineers could use to build their own plugins. We imagine that you could build your plugins in your own repository using SDKs maintained by Twenty. Then on your twenty instance you would be abl…

>Here, we might have a slightly different opinion: we think that Twenty should come by default with a quite opinionated behavior

It's perfectly fine to have opinionated behavior as long as there's a way to override it. Companies which don't have 15 years of tech debt have to start from somewhere, and it's nice to have good defaults.

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

#187

Post by nlh »

mattfrommars wrote: post #156
andy_ppp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of Salesforce like an octopus that puts immovable tentacles into the organisation that are almost never removed. It provides as much opportunity to be misused as possible!

The question is why are they so successful in doing this. Why do organizations by default use Salesforce. I have never used nor worked at an organization that is built on top of Salesforce. Just a regular web dev.

The basic answer is that when an certain type of organization gets to a certain size, they hire professional full-time sales people, and those sales people have been trained their whole career on Salesforce, so that's what they're familiar with and that's what they're going to want to use.

I've tried twice to buck this trend at small startups. I was successful in getting the companies to use a lightweight, elegant, user-friendly, not-Salesforce CRM system when they were small (This is a VERY hard pattern to break, unfortunately.

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

#188

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

e12e wrote: post #183
vxNsr wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but Microsoft isn’t really offering a coherent solution for general company data and processes. They have the power platform, but because there’s no happy path, best practices, laid out it requires a lot more buy in from actual engineers who don’t have a lot of love for nocode platforms. It’s totally feasible to build a IT ticketing system in power platform. And then to build a sales/CRM solution and then also b…

> Sure but Microsoft isn’t really offering a coherent solution for general company data and processes. Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior Dynamics 365? > Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a product line of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) intelligent business applications https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Dynamics_365

On a related note, what happened to BizTalk?

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

#189

Post by charlesTwenty »

xyst wrote: post #184

I love these open source alternatives to big tech and centralized solutions. So far I have seen: - authentication and authorization with oauth: Ory (ory.sh) - payments and billing (alternative to stripe): Lago (getlago.com) and now - CRM: Twenty I'll look into this and see if I can contribute back. I hate SF

Thank you, happy to see you on the codebase!

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

#190

Post by tootie »

paxys wrote: post #16

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…

It's more than that. If you look around the market at any sort of data, BI marketing automation, payments or a dozen other verticals and every single one of them will have a first-class integration with Salesforce extolled on their homepage. A business running Salesforce is like a business that speaks English.
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