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

I wouldn’t get too distracted by reporting - SF classic had the absolute worst reporting engine for decades and they still sold millions of licenses all for the ability to click-to-configure. Pure sales teams use listviews more as a ‘who do I call today?’ list based on rankings and last interaction dates. Serious CRM enterprises have their own report infrastructure and don’t use the built in.

Congrats on the launch! couldn’t login to the demo on mobile but will try from a desktop. All the best.

"How to Start Google"

It makes salient points about what is needed to venture forth and create a "startup". It seems pertinent here because your comments about this project seems to not really meet the criteria, and calls into question whether the salients points from the essay apply here. Good topic for discussion.

I have some QA feedback for some quirks I noticed and some potential feature ideas/requests:

1) On the companies list, it would be nice if you automatically grabbed the favicon.ico from the domain. It would be nice if you could tether fields together so information can be automatically derived from other fields. This could include an area for custom scripts to do this automatically.

2) While using the demo I was automatically logged out. I'm wondering if someone else logged in and then my session was killed? Also, when I was logged out, I was given a white screen of death when I clicked back on the history, but was given no redirect. E.g. pressing back sent me to https://app.okapicrm.com/objects/companies but I'm just stuck with a page with the title "Title" and an empty div[id="react-root"] node.

3) Because you end the password with a period, if I double click on the password and copy that, it will put the wrong password in my clipboard. I wasn't sure if this period was part of the password or not until I logged in and tried without the period

4) At first, it wasn't obvious the search feature was only available for the current page you were on. E.g. I tried accessing search on the reminders page, https://app.okapicrm.com/reminders, and I wasn't sure what was suppose to happen after I typed something in. There was no visual feedback that a search query was being processed, or had been processed. Once I tried it on another page was it clear that the search feature was searching for records visible on the current page. Also, because it is so quick, I wonder if this is purely a client-side search. If I have a Records page with a paginated number of records, will the search be able to find records which are not visible on the current page? If not, I would find this super frustrating as a user.

5) If I look at the details page for a company record, the fields for the domain and icon url are not links. i.e. on https://app.okapicrm.com/records/e8e09b41-25ab-4889-92bb-987... I cannot click on QAComet.com or the icon url.

6) I'm not sure I understand why fields which point to an archived record must be cleared. Could you keep those fields and just use some kind of visual indicator (such as a red highlight or background) to show the record being pointed at is archived?

7) When I clicked the archive button, there was no visual feedback the website was loading. It would have been nice to at least change the cursor over the modal to a "cursor: wait" while it was making the archive request.

Hopefully you find these points useful!

1. Definitely want to improve favicons. For deriving fields, we do have formula fields. Would love to show that to you, it's not obvious enough how to use to enable for this HN launch.

2/3. Sorry about that. This username/password approach for the HN launch is definitely a hack.

4. Right now, search is just on the current type of record you're looking at. I want to fix this, and I just haven't because I haven't made the UI for filtering what objects to search across. The backend is in place though. Glad it seems suspiciously fast! I can assure it's a real FTS talking to a database.

5. I want to fix this too. A way to make data of type "Link" for better UI treatment.

6. Archiving is meant for data that others shouldn't be looking at -- it's a staging ground for data. That's why you can't point into archived data. It's also a precursor for deleting data, and we want to guarantee no dangling references to deleted data.

7. Will fix this.

I think what happens is people hit this "here's what you need to do to start a company" and like 40% of all founders see opportunity in those basics and build an email, CRM, survey, project management, etc. tool because it feels bad to pay high prices for something you could build themselves.

The engineering equivalent of this is an issue tracker, JS framework or "we simplified kubernetes".