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

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

#291

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

bingemaker wrote: post #230
nlh wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The basic answer is that when an certain type of organization gets to a certain size, they hire professional full-time sales people, and those sales people have been trained their whole career on Salesforce, so that's what they're familiar with and that's what they're going to want to use. I've tried twice to buck this trend at small startups. I was successful in getting the companies to use a lightweight, elegant, u…

| I was successful in getting the companies to use a lightweight, elegant, user-friendly, not-Salesforce CRM Can you please name these softwares?

Nutshell CRM (https://www.nutshell.com/) is my fav for sales teams. Some of our younger sales staff have also pointed us towards Less Annoying CRM (https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/) and Zendesk Sell (https://www.zendesk.com/sell/)

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

#292

Post by iFelix »

jve wrote: post #283

Make it extensibe. Usually businesses require this little customization here and there and given you provide the customization points, excellent. OOTB hasn't worked well for me... probably I can use excel then more easily. 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 s…

I aspire to achieve all of this someday!

The key challenges I foresee are:

- Backend: offer extensibility that is powerful while secure in our multi-tenant cloud service.

- Frontend: ensure that custom plugins don't feel limiting while not disrupting the unified design, as the overall software appearance, not just the core, shapes the end-users' brand perception/experience

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

#293

Post by iFelix »

iFire wrote: post #290
iFelix wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a specific use-case in mind that this license is blocking?

Connect my CRM to an internal system. Let's for example say it's an AI power assistant for the sake of memeing Iron Man. I want to be able tell openai to generate a function calling method that takes a json schema and inserts the code into "Twenty.com" for data retrieval. You can construct an alternative scenario with a bank's financial data retrieval. It's too hard to think through the recursive cases through a netw…

I'm not a licensing expert but I know AGPL has a concept of derivative work that is somewhat blurry for me. We could argue this isn't core to the CRM (if specific to your company) and therefore not derivative work but I agree it's subjective and therefore not ideal.

I'm not entirely convinced we made the right choice. Considering your feedback and we will see in a few months what people want to build and if we should revisit.

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

#295

Post by alanaan »

this looks super cool and great ux (love the keyboard shortcuts, dark mode, notion-like experience). congrats on launching it!

do you have any plans to automate data entry? i currently use airtable and have tried folk, attio, etc. but my biggest frustration is it takes so much time and energy to manually add information about people and companies. would immediately pay $20/mo or more for a product that can automatically enrich any person/company data for me and sync with my calendar, email, twitter, linkedin, etc. to add people/companies.

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

#296

Post by pclark »

iFelix wrote: post #138
pclark wrote: post #105

Lots of comments about salesforce app exchange, but I will say, as someone (unfortunately) very familiar with Salesforce and also startups ... I think there is a huge opportunity here. The Salesforce schema of opportunities is incredibly out dated for modern software companies — you only need to look at the explosion of "PLG CRMs" in the past few years — I think there is a massive opportunity for a CRM that integrate…

We initially though pitching "Segment-native" or "Warehouse-native" as one of our key differentiating feature (we haven't build any of that yet). I agree nailing this would make a big difference

I'd focus less on specific integrations and more on having a modern CRM schema that suits bottoms up SaaS products. Exciting!

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

#297

Post by tgtweak »

N-Krause wrote: post #278
tgtweak wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need a js engine to run the entire thing which entails shipping that with the product to make it "locally installable". Then you get into complex version dependencies and require support for upgrading and upgrade paths... yarn is pretty straightforward and so are docker containers.

Haven't looked into the technical details of it, but it seems like this should be as simple as slapping it inside of electron to have a fully local and cross platform install.

Yes, that would solve the javascript interpreter aspect, but then you need to provide update services and updaters to customers, logic to update, an installer, support for said installer, testing for breaking changes to updates... It's more complicated than just bundling the code in a static wrapper.

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

#298

Post by tgtweak »

cccybernetic wrote: post #280
tgtweak wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be brutally honest, Airtable is a dog to get data out of... the sync is delayed, the API calls to pull data are atrocious and the cost/complexity to exfiltrate data from Airtable is hugely prohibitive. I wouldn't use that as a source of inspiration, at least not on the "connectivity" end.

I'm the founder of a startup (www.getsubsystem.com) that builds solutions on top of Airtable, so I'm familiar with their systems. While it's true that their REST API has some sharp-edges, particularly around linked fields (columns), rate-limiting, and filtering records, I think it’s mostly solid and user-friendly. Getting records from a table is as straightforward as making an API call to: `/{baseId}/{tableId}`. For…

As a user of airtable and not a developer of an airtable app/plugin, the api calls are burdensome (dereferencing lookup fields, data types) and if you want to do any serious work on large bases, you hit rate limits/call limits very quickly.

They make it trivial to import/push data in but accessing it or pulling it out looks like an intentionally hindered dark design pattern (like egress on aws). I have resorted to writing extension scripts in their godforsaken nonstandard javascript framework to access and aggregate data before pushing it out. Accessing google sheets programmatically is a walk in the park, comparatively.

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

#299

Post by tgtweak »

CPLX wrote: post #274
tgtweak wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be brutally honest, Airtable is a dog to get data out of... the sync is delayed, the API calls to pull data are atrocious and the cost/complexity to exfiltrate data from Airtable is hugely prohibitive. I wouldn't use that as a source of inspiration, at least not on the "connectivity" end.

Maybe so but it’s incredible as a rapid prototyping tool to solve actual business problems at reasonable scale and it’s one of the few platforms that is constantly improving in intuitive ways. Emulating AirTable usability with a CRM focus would be a category killer if successful.

Nothing pisses me off more than non-devs saying how AirTable is for devs when all the devs I know hate interfacing with it or having to work with it.

If you want pretty spreadsheets, cool. If you want to use this as a CMS or CRM, and it has to interface with an external tool, god rest your soul.

edit: a candid example, we were using it to track some payables for advertising campaigns. Marketing team (that likes airtable) was adding the invoice as a file field to the table. That file attachment is not added to any "email" or "external" sync features of airtable, making it impossible to add it programmatically to an accounting software or to a shared accounting drive. Using zapier doesn't fix it since it's just not the file or a link to it in any of the api calls, only a reference field. It also doesn't export when you do an export of the table. You have to manually go in and download the file from each record (in the ui) which makes putting it there vs dropping it into a shared drive pretty useless as far as time savings is concerned.

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

#300

Post by epolanski »

arethuza wrote: post #253
torgard wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first internship was as a Dynamics AX dev. Me and another guy. Our mentor was a super-duper senior architect something something. He once asked us what we were planning on doing, career-wise, and we were kinda surprised; obviously we were working towards becoming Dynamics AX devs, and were hoping for a job at that place. He got a somewhat wistful look in his eyes, and said (more to himself than to us) he wished he…

I think a lot of ERP stuff is like that - pays well but few people regard it as fun - not least of which is that end up with knowledge of very niche technologies that don't really progress very rapidly. Edit: Mind you for job security and cash generating potential they are can be pretty good - years ago I knew of people on £3000 a day in the UK working on very niche financial systems - but you basically had to have a…

Honestly, I do mostly web development and unless you're really interested in the product (which is far from a given) why do you care if it's an ERP or ecommerce or some travel application?
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