First off, this looks awesome. I've heard people complain many times about how they just want a personal CRM for non-business purposes. On the one hand I love the idea because having such a specific use case allows you to make a very simple UI that does exactly what the user needs. On the other hand, I never personally chose to go after it because getting individual consumers to pay for stuff seems hard.
So I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you stick with it. The "Why Monica?" section of your website sounds like it was written specifically for me, and I'm definitely going to try it out because of that copy.
My main piece of advice: be skeptical of most product suggestions. As someone who has been building a simple CRM for the past ~8 years, I can tell you that everyone wants something different, and if you react to every suggestion you get, your product will end up losing the awesome focus it has right now. That doesn't mean you should ignore feedback, it just means you should make sure the feedback is coming from your actual target audience and not some random person who's looking for Monica to be something it isn't. I fell for that too many times in the early days.
My email is in my profile if you ever want to talk shop.
BTW is there a better way to say that?
"You've been Monica-ed"
Also, consider adding an import feature from gmail, vCard, etc
Finally, why include male/female binary as the only required field besides name. Seems a little odd
[0]: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/common-scenar...
(yeah, I can create a dummy account for that purpose alone, but I rather not bother)
I got added by someone else to a Facebook group that eventually went on a troll raid. I rarely go on Facebook and didn't even participate in any troll raids. Just from being in the group, my account was disabled. I have been locked out of my apps for three weeks and Facebook hasn't answered any appeal I sent them.
It's nice that I don't have to create yet-another-password for a new app as well. I use a password manager so it's not a big deal for me, but for other users it could be so they may just use a shared password and having FB login would be a way to have them not do that.
I get that you might like it, that's fine, but it's not serving any good purpose here. Google login would be more widespread if you must have a 3rd party button. Yes, Google track as well and yes, that's also going to put people off, but if you feel the need to have one at all, get a more useful one. Or better yet, remove them all, have local user registration and put a hook in place for developers to plugin other buttons using different contrib repos. Then you can have both without polluting the core project with 3rd party deps.
I have mainly python experience with python-social-auth, but I see PHP has a few pretty good social auth libraries, to name one, I came across HybridAuth[1].
Also, this may sound stupid, but how do you delete a contact?
everyone will tell you what a great idea it is, and how useful it could be, but no one wants to do any work to that end. it just doesn't solve a real pain for enough people to build a business around (given the product you present on the home page).
however, if you're serious about this space, you will automate the crap out of data collection and make the product a super-passive intelligent assistant (for mobile). make users seem more kind and thoughtful than they otherwise are with this app, and people might just pay for it. there's a potentially big privacy hurdle but i found most people to be surprisingly unconcerned about that if you provide tangible value.
But as I am using my own Nextcloud and XMPP Server I would like to see a simpler setup/update procedure.
that this was designed with self-hosting in mind is a nice nod to privacy though.
Edit: Looks like this is already known: https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/16
I sometimes stumble on some site that only allow five numbers for zip codes and not the six alphanumeric characters we use for postal codes.
I would change "Postal code" to "ZIP" and "Province" to "State" if someone selects US as a country.
Or is the entire idea that each person is logging a unique POV or set of information about someone, rather than the system gravitating towards there being a single, cultivated profile about each person that is shared around?
(right now it's kind of the anti social media -- which seems like a refreshing take. Just curious if that's on purpose)
My one concern: Can you please make all of your contact information downloadable and backupable. My biggest fear would be putting so much precious data in your app and then having you guys go under... then I would lose everything. Also, I don't want vendor lock-in for something as important as this.
e: On birthdays, might be nice to be able to add day/month but no year. I'm working through adding some of my contacts into this and noticing small things as I update/add more.
Disclaimer, I created the last one.
How are you working to guarantee my data is protected from any manner use outside my own?
This is an intriguing idea as a concept but feels like it isn't a sufficient focus. The privacy page hasn't been updated in 18 months either, yet the release notes mention encryption at rest (with very little detail) being added in October 16.
For instance:
> Monica runs on Linode and I'm the only one, apart from Linode's employees, who has access to those servers.
This speaks to nothing about future use, which is what my question specifically asked.
> When you close your account, we will immediately destroy all your personal information and won't keep any backup.
I'd love to hear how you're purging users from your backups, and how long you keep backups.
From the README on Github:
"We provide a hosted version of this application on https://monicahq.com.
If you prefer to, you can simply clone the repository and set it up yourself on any hosting provider, for free. I'm just asking that you don't try to make money out of it yourself."
So to guarantee the privacy of your data, set it up on your own server (maybe even locally hosted if you're that paranoid) and you're set.
An example from one of my projects: https://github.com/elliottcarlson/incidentbot/blob/master/ap...
If its free, how will you pay for your costs? (Ads? Selling my data?)
I plan to provide a paid version with an extremely generous free version. The paid version will contain some great features, and will probably be a couple of dollars per month.
Thank you! We shouldn't trust anyone who thinks otherwise. It should be considered shameful to show paid advertising.
It does not have to be something that makes it difficult to use, an icon at the end of the note could be enough.
This very much undermines the value of a privacy-focused service.
Forgive my ignorance, but with the code under the GPL license, how can you offer exclusive features?
As author he is at liberty to publish his own product under whatever license he wishes.
And if he wants to sell a "enterprise" version under a proprietary license he is free to do so.
1. Import names from Facebook (is this included if I had used Fb to register?)
2. Generate random individual to reach out to, weighted or sorted by when I last contacted them.
1. This is not possible. Facebook does not give me those information through an importer. So it won't happen unless they change their mind.
2. Interesting. I had something similar in mind, I think you'll be pleased when it'll be out.
If not, maybe support fb "archives"?
I suppose this is the price to be paid if one wants to track all of those things, but much like many other CRMs there are integration points that could make this far less work for the consumer.
Thoughts or plans on this?
It's weird seeing the kid number pushed so hard on the dashboard. I'm in college, so that's not really a feature that applies to me.
I'm not a fan of the date picker, an actual calendar popup would be better IMO.
If people are getting unique IDs, it should much rather be a GUID rather than what appears to be an incrementing index.
The first person I added was somewhere in the 2000s, rather than starting at 1.
My first reaction to the "CRM to manage friends..." was, what? Why do I need a business tool for my personal life.
I wonder if there is a better terminology than CRM. You bump up against the social network on one end, and a person tool on the other.
I wrote an executive summary for my business last week, and the feedback I got from an advisor was that they loved the idea that there are these two big existing markets, and that their is a middle-ground between them which hasn't been addressed. I think that is what you've got here, it needs to be named. I haven't quite been able to name mine yet either, so I'm not suggesting this is easy.
What do other think? Is the CRM a good label for a personal tool?
Ultimately the most amazing use would be to have google glass etc and when I see them their name comes up in a bubble.
Noticed a couple of bugs but im pretty sure they have been reported - e.g. not able to link someone like add a child if they already exist. So at present you can only add one parent
Cheers!
There are also two people on IndieHackers who built a mobile version of this who you may want to talk to.
I also own the domain muchcloser if you're interested in it. Let me know if you want to talk.
"Manage food preferencies"
Correct grammar and spelling are easy to overlook and may seem insignificant, but they go a long way in making a good first impression.
Chrome Version 58.0.3029.110 (64-bit) OSX
Looks nice though!
EDIT: It works when accessing https://app.monicahq.com/people - the endless redirect only affects https://app.monicahq.com/
Edit: https://stackoverflow.com/a/32130028/82135 might be what you are looking for.
Allow the default currency for debts to change :) I'm based in England, so Dollars don't help me.
On the People list, make the whole list entry clickable, not just the name.
The list of "Country" is not sorted and slow to load.
Can we add other kinds of relatives, not just SOs and children. What about siblings or Uncles?
Also, love your project! How do I give you money?
Edit: I'll keep an eye out for the link!
It's too bad all of the metadata around a contact can't be kept with the contact in a portable way, and then Monica could just be an API for pointing at CardDAV and other contact servers, and a UI for interacting with them in unique ways. Personal clouds, etc.
I think Monica could be just an open API. The API is definitely something I'll work on in the next weeks, because of its potential.
The "Edit" link under "Personal Information" should also be Blue, like the "Add" links under the other sections. It took me about 40 seconds to figure that out because of the confusion.
Editing reminders would be useful. More flexible reminder timing (things like "end of the month", which could be more or less than 30 days apart, are very useful).
You should be able to select an existing Person entry for the Significant Other field. Also, if you add somebody through the Significant Other field, they should show up as a person.
You should also be able to delete a Person.
Export will be next, too. It's vital to not be locked in.
Editing reminders, yeah, I didn't do it at first because it's way less trivial that it might look, but it's in my todo as well ;-)
Thanks for all your ideas, they all make a lot of sense.
I spent an unreal amount of time gardening my list after tearing myself away from Gmail and Facebook.
This is a private database as I see it, so there is no need for it to be online. And keeping it offline would be good for privacy, and would make it easy for anyone to download and install, rather than the more complex install needed for a web application (or letting someone else host and sacrificing privacy).
If you care about the privacy, you can also host this yourself :-D