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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 317 posts

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

#71

Post by andy_ppp »

paxys wrote: post #16

The biggest mistake a competitor can make is thinking Salesforce is a CRM. They may sell themselves as one, but that is just to get a foothold in a company's sales system. Salesforce actually sells (1) an ecosystem that lets your company connect to any other software out there and (2) a platform on which you can build...basically anything. These two together ensure that every one of their customers is 100% locked in…

I think of Salesforce like an octopus that puts immovable tentacles into the organisation that are almost never removed. It provides as much opportunity to be misused as possible!

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

#72

Post by iFelix »

frabjoused wrote: post #62

Looks neat iFelix! I'm interested to know how much time you've actually spent using CRMs or ERPs yourself. Not clicking around and exploring features, but actually using for something. While I know this is a very early release, my biggest concern is naivety about real world usage requirements, and if you'll be able to manage the feature creep that will be coming with it without just turning into another Salesforce or…

Your question is right on spot. We are three founders with a passion for design (1 designer + 2 ex-Airbnb were design was key to the culture), building this product 2 decades after Salesforce when the tech is different, so we will approach problems with different priorities and ways of thinking than Salesforce did. But there is definitely some naivety and some challenge ahead of us, as none us is an expert ERP/CRM user. We'll be very careful making design decisions on structural elements like like custom fields yes!

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

#73

Post by iFelix »

a13n wrote: post #67

Best of luck. Would be happy to receive an email from your sales team once you have the equivalent of HubSpot marketing enterprise. As an engineer turned founder, I agree these products suck and the market is ready for disruption. Focusing on engineers and product quality is a good play.

Thanks a lot! It's a long-term play but we'll get there

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

#75

Post by iFelix »

solarkraft wrote: post #70
iFelix wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cost us ~$100k from a broker. I've always loved nice domain names and I had some cash because I sold my previous company to Airbnb so I was happy to spend it!

Holy crap, is the name that great?

Haha, it's the usual market price for a nice one-word .com ; I don't see this as money thrown away like spending in ads for example, it's closer to a real estate investment in my opinion

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

#76

Post by codegeek »

xupybd wrote: post #24

We are currently evaluating CRM packages. This is probably a bit too in development for me to recommend but I'll let you know our internal requirements so you have one extra data point in the market. Phone integration is huge for us. We need the CRM to respond to an incoming call by bringing up the contacts details if it recognises the number. We also need a log that the cal began, was answered by, and how long it la…

You should evaluate close.com if not already. They have all the features you mentioned. We use them for sales for our business.

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

#77

Post by iFelix »

dilly_li wrote: post #59

What's your plan to make money? How long is your run way?

We'll focus on providing a cloud hosted version, because not everyone knows how to or want to self-host.

We don't really think in terms of runway yet as the company has just been setup. YC gave us 500k which we haven't spent yet.

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

#79

Post by iFelix »

primitivesuave wrote: post #68

Congrats on launch! I completely agree with the wisdom of launching early as soon as some basic functionality works. If I had to suggest the lowest-hanging fruits for your roadmap, it would be email automation and lead enrichment. I'm an engineering consultant for various sales tech startups which operate within the ecosystem of "build a HubSpot/Salesforce/Freshworks/etc integration for a specific type of sales organ…

I like the "crm.json" image. We definitely want to work on doing something modular like this.

I also wanted to price differently than by seat initially. Because CRMs tends to be the source of truth for the whole organizations, and usually teams like customer support are left out because it's not worth paying a license for them to just read the information the sales have put in, while it would be useful. But we didn't find a better way to price in the end. Pricing by usage feels off since there is no cost associated to usage (a user that logs more activities is not going to cost us more). How would you charge then?

Noted for email automation / lead enrichment!

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

#80

Post by iFelix »

mgaunard wrote: post #78

What's wrong with SugarCRM?

SugarCRM has been sold to a PE fund and close the source years ago. There is a project called SuiteCRM that took over the source code, and they did a great job considering it's a small organization, but it didn't evolve the way it would have if SugarCRM had remained open and under the same ownership
Post reply on HN