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

Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 201 posts

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#101

Post by nextaccountic »

tga wrote: post #95
idsout wrote: post #17

I'd love something like this packaged as an offline only desktop app. I can't trust any third party to protect such personal data about myself and the people I care about. I suppose there's the option of self-hosting and allowing only localhost...

So, once your super secure local app will remind you to contact a friend, how will you message them to exchange detailed personal stories? Gmail? Facebook?

I will message them in their preferred communication platform. Which in my country is usually Whatsapp or perhaps Facebook.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#102

Post by wil5for »

I recently developed my own app to solve the same problem, I call the Personal CRM a “PRM” (link here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prim-relationship-manager/id14...)

The privacy comments elsewhere in the thread resonated with me, but I think self hosting is too large a barrier for most users.

I decided to build Prim by leveraging iCloud’s local/cloud CoreData storage. This approach ensures I never have access to user’s data - it stays completely within the Apple ecosystem.

I have also taken a mobile-first approach, I think that focus reduced some of the installation and maintenance barriers for users. With the iOS app there’s no deployment or setup cost for users. Personal interactions (chat) and data (contacts, calendars) are already managed through our phones, so the iOS app also seems to be a natural fit for other reasons.

I hope to see more products/projects where the users data, monetization, and developer incentives align. It’s great to see an open source PRM project that matches those incentives.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#103

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tga wrote: post #95
idsout wrote: post #17

I'd love something like this packaged as an offline only desktop app. I can't trust any third party to protect such personal data about myself and the people I care about. I suppose there's the option of self-hosting and allowing only localhost...

So, once your super secure local app will remind you to contact a friend, how will you message them to exchange detailed personal stories? Gmail? Facebook?

You give them a call to meet up sometime? idk, I feel like you're being argumentative / snide but I'm not sure if you're actually trying to make a point.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#104

Post by tomgs »

brtkdotse wrote: post #91
tomgs wrote: post #79

I have to mention that this is one of the top 3 tools in my personal stack. See some comments below regarding various things I saw in this thread. Stability: Been running it for 2+ years now (or is it 3+ already?), no problems whatsoever. I update when the mood strikes - never had to roll back because something wasn't working. Why: As someone who considers himself terrible at remembering things, this little piece of…

> There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated. I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a similar resistance towards books like “How to win friends...”, like you’re a sleazy car salesman for trying to improve your social skills. It’s like harpin…

> It’s like harping on people going to the gym and watching their diet for not being “naturally” fit.

Exactly. I have this thing that I'm not good at. I have this tool I use to be better at it. Everybody wins.

One might say that computers in general are tools for computational work, since people are not as good at crunching numbers in their head at a consistent, repetitive and deterministic fashion over time.

One might even be right. :)

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#105

Post by tomgs »

wh-uws wrote: post #100
brtkdotse wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated. I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a similar resistance towards books like “How to win friends...”, like you’re a sleazy car salesman for trying to improve your social skills. It’s like harpin…

I figured out how to deal with cognitive dissonance people are feeling about this years ago. I would rather make a calendar invite / use and remember to call and feel bad about having to do that... Then forget to call and feel worse about forgetting.

> Then forget to call and feel bad about forgetting.

This. I feel really, really guilty if I hear something great or awful happened to someone I used to be in touch with, but the relationship faded away into the flow of life.

Why wasn't I there? What? It's been 3 years since we last talked? How did that happen?

So, no to all that jazz. Enter Monica. :)

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#106

Post by tomgs »

bengale wrote: post #99
tomgs wrote: post #79

I have to mention that this is one of the top 3 tools in my personal stack. See some comments below regarding various things I saw in this thread. Stability: Been running it for 2+ years now (or is it 3+ already?), no problems whatsoever. I update when the mood strikes - never had to roll back because something wasn't working. Why: As someone who considers himself terrible at remembering things, this little piece of…

> Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake. I agree with you, I do something like this on a much smaller scale to try and keep up with who I have and haven't spoken to recently. I have a lot going on and time seems to slip past me, I can easily go weeks without talking to people and it feel like no time at all.…

> Making a deliberate effort to maintain those relationships doesn't seem like its fake to me.

I actually think it's more genuine to care enough to write down to call somebody instead of letting it slip by you. Being determined to build the tooling to be good at something doesn't have to stay within the professional realm - it should extend to personal life as well.

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#107

Post by manigandham »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #56

I would love to have a social media platform where I can have multiple tiers of friends. Social Media "friends" and separately a circle of ACTUAL friends. You would get more access to the data shared by actual friends. The best part of it would be that unlike in a CRM I wouldn't have to keep this data up-to-date. My (actual) friends would update their own data, only. Everybody would need to only keep their own data w…

Facebook has this but not many people use it. Google+ also had a good implementation in "circles".

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#108

Post by luckyshot »

pests wrote: post #20

Just like David Rockerfeller's Rolodex! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867741 I've always wanted to create something like this myself. Glad to see someone do it.

I also developed my own version of it and launched it many years ago!

It was extremely simple on purpose, you had two views:

- List of people: sorted based on when you needed to get in touch with them

- The profile: add notes (with a contact more/less often when submitting) and choose social circles (by closeness: Family, Close Friend, Work, Acquaintance... or by situation: Golf Club, Gym, Chess...)

Based on the circles, notes, ratings, etc. the App organized them from top to bottom on a "Who should you contact now". It was cool.

As I grew older I used it less and less and ended up retiring it. It helped me become a better person by internalizing the importance of remembering names, hobbies, FORD method (Family, Occupation, Recreation and Dreams) and improving my small talk or breaking the ice.

If you've never used a personal CRM and you struggle to maintain and nourish relationships I highly recommend you to try something, either Monica or what someone suggested of having text files, a spreadsheet, notes...

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#109

Post by Schiendelman »

wil5for wrote: post #102

I recently developed my own app to solve the same problem, I call the Personal CRM a “PRM” (link here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/prim-relationship-manager/id14... ) The privacy comments elsewhere in the thread resonated with me, but I think self hosting is too large a barrier for most users. I decided to build Prim by leveraging iCloud’s local/cloud CoreData storage. This approach ensures I never have access to u…

Thank you for writing this. I’ve tried a few methods to keep track of important information about friends, and thought about writing exactly this - especially tracking contact frequency. I just installed Prim and I’m going to try it!

Re: Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

#110

Post by ath92 »

brtkdotse wrote: post #91
tomgs wrote: post #79

I have to mention that this is one of the top 3 tools in my personal stack. See some comments below regarding various things I saw in this thread. Stability: Been running it for 2+ years now (or is it 3+ already?), no problems whatsoever. I update when the mood strikes - never had to roll back because something wasn't working. Why: As someone who considers himself terrible at remembering things, this little piece of…

> There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated. I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a similar resistance towards books like “How to win friends...”, like you’re a sleazy car salesman for trying to improve your social skills. It’s like harpin…

I think the resistance towards that particular book is because the full title is "How to win friends and influence people". The last part in particular is what makes it sound sleazy. It would be very different if the book had just been called "How to make friends".
Post reply on HN