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

Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 105 posts

Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX

#11

Post by ucarion »

mushufasa wrote: post #7

> We think the way you win in CRM in 2024 is by keeping the flexibility of SObjects, and then tacking on modern UX. That first part takes engineering discipline, but the second part is much easier than Salesforce had it 25 years ago. Just about every part of a modern SaaS product has dozens of vendors that do most of the work for you. It sounds like your business strategy is 'remove legacy code.' I don't hear anythin…

The plan for winning is: slowly at first, then suddenly. We'll start with smaller businesses transitioning between CRMs, and grow with them. Number one goal is to never give customers a reason to churn.

Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX

#12

Post by ucarion »

SignalM wrote: post #8

You could make an outlook/excel add in. Sales people live in those two apps. Without that you are battling to be that “second screen” as you mentioned and sales folks aren’t generally tech savvy enough to “go it alone” on your solution vs the status quo. Looks nice though good luck!

An Outlook/Excel add-in is a great idea. Something that lets you peek at CRM data related to a person/company, you mean?

We support syncing Outlook email/contacts into Okapi. Definitely agree that outside of tech, Microsoft's stack is predominant.

Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX

#13

Post by ucarion »

lighttower wrote: post #9
lighttower wrote: post #4

we use PipeDrive to track deals (customers and investors) and keep team aligned. most important features for us are getting the team to BCC PipeDrive and automatic attribution of emails to the correct deal.

what I need is a way for any arbitrary team member (not just the sales people that have a PipeDrive account) to be able to BCC PipeDrive/Okapi and get that email linked to the deal. think of some engineering questions being answered directly by hardcore scientists that don't normally have anything to do with sales. I want them to simply BCC and internal address at our domain which forwards to Okapi or PipeDrive. then…

Right now our email sync is maximally simple, so that it's predictable for customers. If anyone on a thread has the sync set up, then any thread with outside parties gets synced. Each outside company/person is associated with the email. Also no BCC stuff, too easy to forget.

We're working on a simple way to do deal->email association. Right now you can only do deal->company->email, so if you have concurrent deals on a company there's not a great way to disentangle them.

You got thoughts on how you'd want that to work?

Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX

#14

Post by ensignavenger »

Cool stuff, I've considered building something similar for my own needs. For me, I would never invest the time to learn and integrate something like this into my business processes if its not open source. But there is a large market of folks who don't care about that (obviously, as Salesforce isn't open source and does well enough), so you have a lot of potential.

I played with the demo for a couple of minutes- one thing I noticed was that to add a field, you have to go up to the drop down menu in the top right and select add field- I would expect to see an "add field" button below the (initially empty) list of fields on an object. Hotkeys would also be really nice at some point as you develop the app. Probably just really early in your development to refine these things.

You mention your path to success being a "modern UX" and I think that is great, if by "modern UX" you mean (at least in part- a major part) "much faster and more responsive than Salesforce". Maintaining the flexibility while also keeping it easy to use and fast is a triple combination of power.

Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX

#15

Post by npace12 »

Congrats on your launch! I have some feedback, but please don't take it negatively, it's just my thoughts.

I love to see anyone taking on salesforce.com, but your product so far is way too barebones. It reminds me of something I'd get from just using some admin UI for a database.

I was a salesforce technical architect and consultant for a number of years (hated it.) and what I've seen is that some of the first things people look for are reports, dashboards, workflows, integration. A lot of people think their sales process is super unique and want to see a path of implementing it in a system and that includes integrating it with a bunch of other systems already in place.

For smaller companies, sourcing leads, creating and tracking email campaigns, is probably the first thing they look for.

Some feedback for your website:

* gifs/videos take a while to load and stay blurred

* The linkedin example is great, show more like this

* Ability to add custom fields/objects is expected, doubt anyone would be impressed by that

* Show some canned dashboards and reports on the data

Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX

#19

Post by ucarion »

npace12 wrote: post #15

Congrats on your launch! I have some feedback, but please don't take it negatively, it's just my thoughts. I love to see anyone taking on salesforce.com, but your product so far is way too barebones. It reminds me of something I'd get from just using some admin UI for a database. I was a salesforce technical architect and consultant for a number of years (hated it.) and what I've seen is that some of the first things…

Totally agree we're way too barebones to say we're an SFDC alternative today. Reports and dashboards/views are the next two things on the roadmap. For workflows we've been using our Zapier app so far, but we're looking to potentially do that built-in. Integrations is going to be a long list of work. Going to feel like working at Segment again. :)

For sourcing and campaigns, our initial plan is a two-way Apollo integration. Not sure if you have thoughts on the necessity of doing everything in-house (the Hubspot approach) or just focusing on integrating with the best tools (the Salesforce approach).

Your feedback on the website is well taken. We've got a lot of work to do there.

Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX

#20

Post by ucarion »

GGO wrote: post #17

account is locked. I wanted to see how email integration works. Do you do any DKIM/SPF checks to avoid spoofs and spam?

Working on the account lock, sorry. Password stuffing alarm is tripped. EDIT: in the meantime, a jank workaround. Just added a few more users:

hn.login.alt1@okapicrm.com

hn.login.alt2@okapicrm.com

hn.login.alt3@okapicrm.com

All have the same password as in the original post: sk9ueEAfhXP9j4cuxLCVmw7. (include the trailing period)

We rely on GMail or Outlook's spam and checks. We only sync emails that made it to your non-spam inbox.

Post reply on HN