Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–317 of 317 posts

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

#311

Post by carstenhag »

epolanski wrote: post #300
arethuza wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of ERP stuff is like that - pays well but few people regard it as fun - not least of which is that end up with knowledge of very niche technologies that don't really progress very rapidly. Edit: Mind you for job security and cash generating potential they are can be pretty good - years ago I knew of people on £3000 a day in the UK working on very niche financial systems - but you basically had to have a…

Honestly, I do mostly web development and unless you're really interested in the product (which is far from a given) why do you care if it's an ERP or ecommerce or some travel application?

My guess: If you are implementing any type of software, you usually see an UI, input and output. For SAP and ERP you can also have this.

But it's really ugly, messy, and you might have to implement 5 corner cases of what the german government has thought of to complicate the lives' of everyone in regards to capital gains taxes in combination with church taxes, in a year in which you got married but one of the two left the church the same year. Oh, and what if you also got a kid that year and moved cities? And during implementation there is another law passed to change stuff?

In other words: So out of the world that noone finds it interesting anymore :D

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

#312

Post by new2this »

iFelix wrote: post #72
frabjoused wrote: post #62

Looks neat iFelix! 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…

Your question is right on spot. We are three founders with a passion for design (1 designer + 2 ex-Airbnb were design was key to the culture), building this product 2 decades after Salesforce when the tech is different, so we will approach problems with different priorities and ways of thinking than Salesforce did. But there is definitely some naivety and some challenge ahead of us, as none us is an expert ERP/CRM us…

You should spend some time with sales leaders to better understand what's needed from a CRM.

I took a look at your CRM product and understand that your long term goal is a great ecosystem...however, your UI is missing the point of a modern CRM.

A CRM used to be account/contact/opportunity tracking. Now, sales teams use CRM as the de facto customer-focused data warehouse (because no one in sales actually knows how to query a data warehouse). These days I rarely use salesforce for anything besides looking up data that was written there by another sales tool via the API. The product focus should be on developing a great analytics solution for salespeople, not an online Rolodex.

I used to work at Salesforce and have deployed it at multiple startups as the founding head of sales. Shoot me an email if you want to talk more; I'm looking forward to the day that Salesforce is replaced by something that better fits the modern sales process.

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

#313

Post by calvinmorrison »

iFelix wrote: post #154
calvinmorrison wrote: post #141

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

Haha, if we were able to replicate the notion experience in 2 months that's a great compliment! The difference will come from the fact that we hold structured data. Notion doesn't know that a person is a person and a company is a company. That makes it impossible for them to build robust integrations CRM have. You can build rules to replicate some behavior, but once you have more business logic, it becomes too limite…

> Notion doesn't know that a person is a person and a company is a company. That makes it impossible for them to build robust integrations CRM have. You can build rules to replicate some behavior, but once you have more business logic, it becomes too limited.

I literally have a 'person' database and a 'company' database.

But yeah fo sho, it will get limiting if i make this much more complex lol

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

#314

Post by b0ner_t0ner »

arethuza wrote: post #246
e12e wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft also has Dynamics 365 (née Navision).

D365 has elements descended from Dynamics CRM, Dynamics AX, Dynamics NAV and probably lots of other stuff!

> and probably lots of other stuff!

Yeah, lots of botched React integrations, misuse of Serviced Workers, nightmare security roles, just to name a few daily problems you will run into when choosing Dynamics 365!

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

#315

Post by slotrans »

Just as food for thought, the two big problems I see with every single Salesforce deployment are:

1. Excessive customization. Ever seen a Lead record with fewer than 300 custom fields? I haven't! I have no idea what you do about this from a tool design standpoint but... think about it. It's a huge problem.

2. Synchronization. If you have Your System, and then you adopt a CRM, now you have state in two places. And commonly that state is allowed to mutate in both places, and now you inhabit a permanent nightmare hellscape. Figure out how to discourage this. Think about ways of modeling relationships to outside systems (ala NetSuite's externalId) and enforcing unique connections. Make it easy to request supplementary data "live" so that there's less reason to copy it in.

Good luck!

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

#316

Post by Closi »

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…

What? Microsoft is one of the biggest players in the market in this space with Dynamics 365!

I don’t have any data to back it up officially, but working in the space it seems like dynamics is taking customers from their competitors (eg SAP) fast too…

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

#317

Post by rodolphoarruda »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #257

I worked as an implementation consultant during the 1st or 2nd generation of CRM apps back in the fist decade of this century. Then, since 2010 I became a CRM end-user, mainly of Salesforce. After all those years listening to sales people complain about workflows and broken UI/UX, I realized the perfect system for this type of user is a message driven minimal UI app. System would send email/IM to users all day long a…

Update: Kommo.com seems to be aligned with the idea to be message driven having integrations with WhatsApp and Telegram (among others).
Post reply on HN