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

21–30 of 105 posts

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

#21

Post by monknomo »

I've done some work with salesforce integrations and from my perspective, the pain comes in when trying to keep a bi-directional link between data in the CRM and data in the custom backend systems. At least in my case, there is a desire for a low latency sync so that the two data sources are as similar as possible.

Salesforce, with its batch loads, open api spec, soap/rest api and 'use mulesoft' approach makes this pretty painful, and quite expensive.

The dream, at least among folks I work with, is for a single pane of glass where salesforce provide contact and case management, and the internal systems provide a source of truth and the apis or screens to fix problems or complete tasks

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

#22

Post by robertlagrant »

ucarion wrote: post #19
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 integr…

Reports are a big time sink. Have you thought of integrating a pre-baked tool? A quick google shows up Carbone[0] (I don't know if it's good; I'm not a customer/investor) but that sort of thing might get you going.

[0] https://github.com/carboneio/carbone

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

#23

Post by mushufasa »

ucarion wrote: post #11
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.

Why would a smaller business choose you? Over: hubspot, Zoho, Monday, salesforce, and industry-specific CRMs?

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

#24

Post by npace12 »

ucarion wrote: post #19
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 integr…

Yeah, integration work never ends but having a few popular ones built in + api and docs goes a long way. I've honestly never seen anyone in mid/big companies consider Zapier, but it's been a few years since I was in that space, so could have changed. Getting into those bigger companies, you're basically going to need everything, or hope for a small team within the company to like your CRM.

Those small teams/companies basically want a simple Hubspot, not salesforce, but a lot of times, they don't really know the difference. Something that can take Apollo leads, build some "simple" email campaigns [1], some landing pages [2], track one-off emails and report on all that for cheaper than the $25k/yr or whatever hubspot charges would be a great tool. I know, not exactly a CRM, but people call it that.

I don't think it matters if you integrate other providers or build it in, but having an easy setup where users don't have to go sign up, manage and integrate with a bunch of other services could help you get the small/startup space.

[1] Lots of things to deal with if you're taking on the email sending & tracking part, automated clicks, safari privacy, etc. [2] This is a can of worms, but being able to build simple landing pages for people to click on from an email is pretty important.

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

#25

Post by noleary »

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…

(I'm one of the cofounders of Okapi)

You're 100% right.

We're missing a bunch of stuff simply because we're early :)

Regarding custom objects and fields, I agree this is not very interesting when compared against Salesforce, but these things actually aren't common in the products we can currently compete with! These are typically low-end, self-service products designed for simplicity and don't afford their users much freedom.

In this sense, we've been able to offer some of our early customers the flexibility of a SFDC product without all the other stuff. A decent chunk of people want exactly that.

A few things on the roadmap include:

* Reporting

* Custom views

* Open API

* Built-in automations (right now we piggyback on Zapier)

All this stuff will take a long time to get right

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

#26

Post by noleary »

robertlagrant wrote: post #22
ucarion wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 integr…

Reports are a big time sink. Have you thought of integrating a pre-baked tool? A quick google shows up Carbone[0] (I don't know if it's good; I'm not a customer/investor) but that sort of thing might get you going. [0] https://github.com/carboneio/carbone

Yep! Agree -- we're currently evaluating some vendors. I don't see much reason to build a bunch of stuff here if we can simply buy it.

No decisions yet on who best fits our needs, so thanks for raising Carbone; it wasn't on our list yet.

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

#27

Post by tootie »

monknomo wrote: post #21

I've done some work with salesforce integrations and from my perspective, the pain comes in when trying to keep a bi-directional link between data in the CRM and data in the custom backend systems. At least in my case, there is a desire for a low latency sync so that the two data sources are as similar as possible. Salesforce, with its batch loads, open api spec, soap/rest api and 'use mulesoft' approach makes this p…

Salesforce really really benefits from network effects. If you survey 100 data integration tools for their list of off-the-shelf integrations, 100/100 would have Salesforce on the list.

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

#28

Post by noleary »

ensignavenger wrote: post #14

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 t…

Awesome feedback -- agreed on all counts!

I expect performance and developer experience to evolve as points of competitive differentiation as we mature. We're still too early to make those claims defensibly.

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

#29

Post by noleary »

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!

Oh this is a cool idea.

We've considered working on a chrome extension to help sales people pipe data into our product, but we haven't thought surfacing CRM data to salespeople in other apps.

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

#30

Post by noleary »

ucarion wrote: post #10
Lukas1994 wrote: post #3

Great stuff! I celebrate everyone who gets the world off SFDC. We recently started using https://attio.com/ — how do you guys compare?

Attio is great. I think it's among the best new entrants. So far, the main difference is that Okapi can be even simpler than Attio if you'd like it to be. There are no mandatory built-in objects, and no enrichments/automations/etc that you can't disable. You can KISS your sales process as much as you like. To that end, we've also been eschewing self-service onboarding. We just set up customer's CRMs and import their…

Adding another simple point: we're simply earlier than Attio by several years.

Our long-term differentiation will be more obvious as we mature the product and distribution model.

Post reply on HN