Looks good! TailwindUI? I'm a fan of this.
Thanks! Yeah, we all stand on the shoulders of the giant that is Tailwind UI :)
Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
71–80 of 105 posts
Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
#72My personal objective with CRM is always the sales/cs team productivity at different stages and I don’t see the impact of your product yet on that. Every sales or CS agent needs to know what is their next task: they shouldn’t go through the list of the deals or customers to figure that out. Ideally they get their tasks assigned in some round robin algorithm taking into account their availability and skills. If agents…
Task management, lists/views, and general "journeys" management are all on the roadmap. There's a lot of stuff you need to do to be generally competent in this space, we're definitely launching very early here. When I talked about Apex, I really mean the "scripting language that sees data mid-transaction" aspect of the language. Sounds like you're not really seeing the value there either? I totally agree that good ol…
>I really mean the "scripting language that sees data mid-transaction" aspect of the language. Sounds like you're not really seeing the value there either?
I do see value there as long as it is a general purpose programming language running in your sandbox and not something vendor-specific.
Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
#73Can’t you made do with Airtable? Isn’t CRM just some tables wired up together?
Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Our company, biotech, doesn't want arbitrary extensions grabbing email out of our servers. BCC the CRM is the only way.
Big companies have different departments. You could have a deal with department X at TargetCo and department Y. Generally those are different people (and emails) at each of those departments. So you associate email to the deal based on what email it's copied to.
Just use emails to link to deals. Forget about company.
Company association is useful. But it needs to be a historical association. Example Jonny works at MSFT now. But used to work at FB. Jonny could help you win a deal with FB even if he doesn't work there now.
Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
#75IMO, what makes UX for enterprise software bad is time waiting. Salesforce has multiple redirects and terrible load times with a huge JS bundle size. Datadog isn't as slow, but it's loads 2.7MB of data. It's unusable on a 4G tethered connection (ie my car's hotspot). I pray that you keep load times minimal. I see almost 1MB loaded over the wire for a list of 15 objects. Also, your sidebar icons (Risks/Companies/etc)…
I also feel your pain with datadog, and even GCP’s UI. I used to periodically travel to a relatives house that beamed internet from a cell tower miles away. Not being able to access these in my line of work is pretty critically bad. Unfortunately I don’t think the intersection of low bandwidth internet users and these types of high tech software will ever be large enough to justify an investment in making it work in low bandwidth environments. I bet most companies in the space take a Quick Look at number of users that would benefit and easily decide that it’s not worth the effort. Which is quite unfortunate for people who have to deal with that.
I will say though that the two pieces of software that we are discussing seem necessarily much more bandwidth and data heavy than a CRM. So there isn’t as much justification for large bundle sizes for a CRM in my opinion
Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
#76I was recently working for a customer that was heavily invested in an older version of Microsoft Dynamics, but they were considering alternatives for their CRM platform. Salesforce was one of the options.
They were a sales organization, so CRM was a very central tool for them, and they needed lots of customization and applications build on top of the CRM. So CRM selection was more than selecting a tool, it was selecting a platform, an ecosystem, method of developing apps etc.
The reason they were considering the alternatives at all was that practically all of the MS Dynamics customization was built based on direct database access, and Microsoft no longer supports the versions that allow that. That, and all CRM development was behind one person, which was huge risk for a multi-billion dollar company.
Salesforce was one of the alternatives, not due to it being technically superior, or even having a better UI, but because this customer was not really a software house, so they wanted to avoid in-house software development as much as possible. One part of that was to outsource CRM-related development, to "focus on their core competencies".
When people say "network effects", this is what they talk about. What would have it taken for them to consider a startup like this as the CRM platform? They did not really consider HubSpot nor 100% custom frameworks as alternatives. You had to be in the Gartner magic quandrant to be considered a serious alternative.
I am not saying you should target customers like this, but I believe it may helpful to think if this is the kind of customer you want to win in the long run, and what would it take to win a customer like this.
In that company, sales wanted MS Dynamics, because that was what the sales people were used to. IT wanted Salesforce, because they believed they could just outsource the CRM-related development work to Salesforce consultants, and integration narrative is strong for Salesforce due to Mulesoft.
They ended up choosing MS Dynamics, because in a sales orgazation, sales brings in the money, so everything else supports sales, and sales calls the shots.
Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
#77What this really does is prove the commoditization of the generic SFDC approach to "CRM", where it's horizontal and empty. It's price pressure for force.com, hence their push on "AI" and add-ons, to protect 30bn in revenue.
HubSpot is easier to defend as you get far more OOTB business functionality, rather than a generic, un-opinionated toolbox.
Attacking SFDC via your route is like attacking Excel with a barebones table entry form. Why would a company switch? How do you get your first paying customer and retain them?
/been doing CRM for 20+ years, good luck lads!
Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
#78Going through auth by clicking on Google Sign in to be met with "Please sign up with you work email" is pretty poor CX.
Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
#79> We think the way you win in CRM in 2024 is by keeping the flexibility of SObjects, and then tacking on modern UX.
What is driving that thinking? Is it something the market is asking for?
> Salesforce is slow and clunky. And that doesn’t matter because people don’t buy Salesforce to be delighted.
So if they are buying it despite bad UX, it stands to reason that UX isn't important to them.
Who does your CRM attract, if the differentiator is "good UX"?
Re: Launch HN: Okapi (YC W24) – A new, flexible CRM with good UX
#80Earlier 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…
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…
While the boundaries continues to fade, what you described is generally called a Marketing Automation system. Hubspot is becoming more CRM now, but its roots were and still are Marketing Automation.