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

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

#91

Post by aaronharnly »

I mean this feedback in the kindest way possible: you are taking a developer-out view of what a CRM is, and prioritizing the problems you perceived with Salesforce as a developer.

If you want to get a customer to pay money for your product, you really need to take a customer-in view. What problems do customers (some segment, perhaps a particular industry or country or type) have with buying Salesforce, and what can you do to make your product a better choice for them?

A flexible object data model and a UX that you as a developer find better are not likely to be those things.

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

#92

Post by ed_blackburn »

As an ex-Salesforce engineer, you appear to have a good handle on the engineering implementation side. You had the mechanism to build the workflows and reporting on top. Double down on that because that's your table stakes product. Make sure you include some out-of-the-box workflows that people can tweak.

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

#93

Post by ruslan_talpa »

cjonas wrote: post #87
cjonas wrote: post #86

Congrats on launch. This is a space I've thought about a lot in my 12 years as CTO of a consulting agency that centers around Salesforce. Salesforce's "killer" feature really is the Custom Object. You can create a new data model, customize a UI and have a production API up and running immediately. I've been wondering when someone would attempt a modern take on this, and this seems like a decent start (from what I can…

+ What I'd really like to see in this space is "the supabase for business application development". Basically a framework like this, but with complete focus on developer experience. Would handle all the challenging infrastructure & non-functional areas and just let you focus on writing code for workflow, integration, etc.

I think i’ve built just that, can we get in touch? I would appreciate the feedback

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

#94

Post by bwb »

Login doesn't work :(

I currently created my own CRM in Airtable, and it is basically an automation platform along with CRM. I need that, but not with Airtables row limits and other issues.

I'd love something that has their UX for managing all the customization and expanding it, but also heavy automation options with Zapier and others.

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

#95

Post by MarkinK »

lighttower wrote: post #74
ucarion wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. For…

Interesting idea! Thank you!

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

bwb wrote: post #94

Login doesn't work :( I currently created my own CRM in Airtable, and it is basically an automation platform along with CRM. I need that, but not with Airtables row limits and other issues. I'd love something that has their UX for managing all the customization and expanding it, but also heavy automation options with Zapier and others.

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by ctvo »

ucarion wrote: post #31
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…

You should check out Twenty! https://twenty.com/ (YC S23) -- they're an OSS CRM. I totally agree the object management UI is too clunky right now. I want to redo that set of pages, they were the first ones we shipped. Not gonna lie, idk if anyone except me and Ned are really pining to learn hotkeys for managing object schemas, since in practice we're the only ones doing that on a regular basis -- we do initial setup…

> We're doing some somewhat fancy stuff to reliably replicate every record into a couple of stores, each of which is optimized for different access patterns (search, get latest by ID, etc.). The big central Postgres(TM) is mostly there to be authoritative and to transactionally maintain invariants in the system.

When I, as a perspective customer, read things like this, it makes me question if I can trust you with my data or your platform long term.

What is your technical expertise and what other similar systems have you built? I can’t seem to find it on the site.

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

#98

Post by zkid18 »

It's great to see more builders entering the CRM space. Brace yourself for a long and tough journey, but the rewards will be substantial.

About two years ago, I was testing out the concept of the CRM build on top of Snowflake or any other DWH as a backend [0]. I can implement the core functions using existing drag-and-drop modular components, visualization elements, forecasting, alerting, etc. For basic CRM entities (contacts, deals, companies), tables are created in Snowflake via Unistore. CRM may maintain a separate database of their data containing application state, user permissions, and other metadata. Still, increasingly, the core data used to course through a system of record will be pushed/copied to the DWH.

For a data scientist to make forecasts, there is no need to upload data to the notebook; you can take Streamlit and build the necessary experience within the application. Any alerting logic can be described declaratively. An application or workflow can be created depending on its interaction with the product. The customization limits are almost limitless.

I love you're working in that direction. Reach me if you want to chat more – kidrulit at Twitter

[0] https://nonamevc.substack.com/p/how-snowflake-changes-the-wa...

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

#100

Post by cjonas »

ruslan_talpa wrote: post #93
cjonas wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+ What I'd really like to see in this space is "the supabase for business application development". Basically a framework like this, but with complete focus on developer experience. Would handle all the challenging infrastructure & non-functional areas and just let you focus on writing code for workflow, integration, etc.

I think i’ve built just that, can we get in touch? I would appreciate the feedback

Would love to see it. How do I get in touch (preferably without ending up as a marketing lead in your system)?
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