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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

#301

Post by jve »

iFelix wrote: post #292
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

As for frontend - you could build reusable components and make possible to use them/build upon them. Microsoft made FluentUI to make consistent and usable components across product line. However each product customizes styling slightly and builds their own components that are not opened up... which is pity.

If you ever plan having different things, better keep them in mind at the beginning - bolting them in afterwards may be cumbersome.

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

#302

Post by CPLX »

tgtweak wrote: post #299
CPLX wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 airta…

I’m a developer and have run development teams. I fucking love Airtable for solving business problems.

I love it for the same reason I love XL, which is that you can turn it on and it just works and normal people can use it. You can create a sheet that tracks something important to the business in 20 minutes, and you have built in slack notifications and cron-type job capability and the ability to call or be called via REST API and so on, plus easy to follow user management and row level commenting and so on all built in.

In the first 20 minutes.

Yeah there’s stuff it can’t do or is bad for. When you get to that stuff use another tool, and guess what you usually can use whatever you did in Airtable as a spec instead of trying to sort out what the business process actually needs in terms of fields and so on.

I absolutely love it. It’s been an incredibly helpful addition to what had been our previous stack of salesforce for CRM and our own rails app/site, and is just so much faster for creating internal business tools than either.

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

#303

Post by vogon_laureate »

nlh wrote: post #187
mattfrommars wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is why are they so successful in doing this. Why do organizations by default use Salesforce. I have never used nor worked at an organization that is built on top of Salesforce. Just a regular web dev.

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 did the same thing. Then the lightweight, elegant, user-friendly, not-Salesforce CRM system that I had convinced the company to depend on (Highrise CRM) was mothballed by 37 Signals. Yes it's possible to export data, but there are usually things that we couldn't export (like notes and files/attachments) and it was a nightmare I will forever avoid at all costs.

After another client found that their Batchbook CRM solution was also being EOL'd, I started to feel like going for the biggest most well-known market-leading CRMs ends up being a good choice just from the point-of-view of data longevity and peace of mind.

I really wish 37 Signals open-sourced Highrise, or that CiviCRM or any of the other open source CRMs managed to get to a level of polish and ease of use so that I could ditch Salesforce, but I've yet to find anything that could justify such a move away from the Salesforce behemoth.

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

#304

Post by vogon_laureate »

lkrubner wrote: post #244

I worked on a "Salesforce killer" that was actually meant to make Salesforce stronger by fixing its biggest known problem: that sales people hate using it. Our goal was to let sales people send text messages, which we would then use NLP to interpret correctly, and then add to salesforce. A sales person might sell a million bottles of shampoo to Hilton Hotels, then she might get in her car and drive home, on the way h…

It is still a good goal. Having to input details into forms is why even the most user-friendly CRMs can still not be enough to get staff to use them. Unless you work in a trendy youngish hipster startup, most companies outside of that bubble have the constant challenge of getting employees to use new tools. I have a client company whose employees only use WhatsApp and email, barely use OneDrive and resist using Slack or Salesforce or any other tools.

If they could just dictate a note and a contact record in Salesforce gets updated, and it does so with near 100% reliability, that would definitely be a game changer.

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

#305

Post by iFelix »

jve wrote: post #301
iFelix wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As for frontend - you could build reusable components and make possible to use them/build upon them. Microsoft made FluentUI to make consistent and usable components across product line. However each product customizes styling slightly and builds their own components that are not opened up... which is pity. If you ever plan having different things, better keep them in mind at the beginning - bolting them in afterward…

Yes! We'll probably need to isolate some of the existing components and commit on their api stability so people know they can reuse them safely

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

#306

Post by iFelix »

chakintosh wrote: post #266

One thing I'd like to see improve is the contrast between UI components on Dark Mode. Currently using a MBP XDR display at 100% brightness and I can barely make out where the components start and stop.

Yes, we agree, this should be fixed before end of next week. Issue here: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/668

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

#307

Post by iFelix »

buzzwords wrote: post #261

This is fantastic. Unfortunately decision makers usually go with what they already know. No one was ever fired for choosing Salesforce. Hopefully over time more people get exposure to this and increase the adoption.

Thanks for the kind words! It's a very long journey ahead of us, that's for sure!

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

#308

Post by [deleted] »

iFelix wrote: post #292
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

[deleted]

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

#309

Post by solardev »

charlesTwenty wrote: post #89
solardev wrote: post #81

How do you get data out of this? I see you mention GraphQL, but is there sample output? Are filters and searches etc. supported? Also, can you write/mutate data via GraphQL too or is it read only?

Yes, we are providing a graphql API that you can find "documented" here: https://docs.twenty.com/graphql/ Right now, you need to provide a JWT token that you can get at login or refresh against a refresh_token (90days expiration). In the future, we plan to also support API keys which would ease a lot headless work. Regarding filters and search, we have added filtering and search features on app.twenty.com. They are d…

This is awesome. Thank you!

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

#310

Post by tgtweak »

CPLX wrote: post #302
tgtweak wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 airta…

I’m a developer and have run development teams. I fucking love Airtable for solving business problems. I love it for the same reason I love XL, which is that you can turn it on and it just works and normal people can use it. You can create a sheet that tracks something important to the business in 20 minutes, and you have built in slack notifications and cron-type job capability and the ability to call or be called v…

Are you interfacing with external apps or systems? If you can keep everything INSIDE airtable, it gives a lot of value out of the gate. If you need to tie into it externally, it's a pain in the ass and some things are simply not possible.
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