Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

It's a tedious process to get off a CRM, and particularly Salesforce, so it's much easier to target companies that are not using any tool at first and grow with them.

Consider Microsoft Power Platform / Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement/Sales for which I'm a developer. Obviously this is a behemot and much more than CRM, but it was born out of CRM! But I want to share things I love about the platform.

The following customization points for power platform goes a VERY LONG WAY to adjust CRM to business needs and I yet have to see a significant roadblock for any customization business has needed:

- Custom tables which are 1st party citizens in all the ways and doesn't have any shortcomings. It supports all the auditing, security model and ability to link to first party tables and other way around.

- Custom attributes for 1st party tables.

- Robust Plugin-Architecure - everything is a message (API calls, CRUD, special operations, etc) - I can "plug-in" into the pipeline either for my messages or 1st party messages and have pre-operations and post operations. I can do sync/async plugin. For sync plugin I can live within same database transaction and make it so that all the transaction succeeds or rollbacks if I choose it so.

- 1st party JS library API that enables limited interaction with the form (show/hide fields, set required, get/set values)

- An option to create own Custom APIs, add a plugin to API and you have a nice extensibility.

- Powerful, consisten WebApi for integration that also supports my custom tables and stuff - CRUD operations and API calls. Can build a completely custom client for the CRM if the platform is lacking somehow.

- Custom components framework - whenever builtin controls/JS is lacking, I can build full-blown control in my choice of JS framework that has particular integration points when hosted within CRM.

As I see it, consistency makes things like that possible.

There should be a template library and a way to do a really high-level business model NODE style work flow and it pulls the templates needed to make that

A NODE TREE builder for a crm would be valuable, if it doesnt already exist - start with "departments" and then have children recommendations for each, such that Inventory is a Child of Receiving and all the requisite models/modules in such....

1) Building a full-featured CRM is a long-journey. Our strategy is to start working with companies in our YC batch which have simple needs, and then deliver improvements fast enough so that these companies never outgrow us and have to switch.

2) We're focused on a simple B2B Sales use-case for now (log tasks, kanban, etc.). Next we will focus on data integration, connectors and extensibility. The goal is to become the best system of records for the company. That should allow connecting external tools to bring the best of breed app for each category (e.g. customer engagement, support tool, phone). Later on we will eventually invest in building our own Marketing/Support apps like Salesforce did but we're still very far from there.

3) Prior to this launch we only had a handful of people we were talking to so a simple Kanban in Twenty, no automation. And after that, we will remain focused on product development in the coming months so our team is probably not the best example in terms of Sales playbook. But once we want to scale the team and have built integrations, we will likely take the "best of breed" approach I was mentioning above, using Twenty as the central piece to connect Aircall, Braze, Docusign, etc.

(Great questions by the way, thanks)