Fred Wilson's vision of a family CRM service | Hacker News Reader

Fred Wilson's vision of a family CRM service

avc.com

58 pointsdchs34 comments

The most important problem to solve is that when you do a search, or browse by a tag, that no one slips through the cracks. With a friend organizer, the worst possible thing it can do is become central to organizing your social life, but then silently "forget" about certain friends of yours.

I've thought about this very application (I call it "CRM for hypersocial people") and the most important component is the natural language processing. In particular, you want good autotagging and query expansion, with an emphasis on recall.

More specifically, if one of your ballet dancer friends is manually tagged "ballet" but not "dance", and you search for "dance", you want this friend to appear in the results.

Additionally, if you are looking for "hackers", it should know that it should include people who are "hardcore programmers" or maybe those that program "ruby".

Why did this get downvoted twice? It's completely reasonable, and I happen to agree that it would be useful (and not just for 'hypersocial crm')

I originally offered to share the technology, either free for open source apps or as a business deal if you're using it to make money. I imagine people found that offer distasteful, so I removed that last part from my comment.

I personally included it because I think more widespread dissemination of NLP could improve a lot of technology. But I can understand why people would think that I made my comment merely to scurry up deals, and not to inform them.

The question really is: What problem are we trying to solve?

The answer is: Allowing you to easily find certain types of people over your hundreds or thousands of contacts. Types = certain business or personal relationship, certain skill, certain place you met, etc.

Here are the core features, the minimum viable product. In fact, I would avoid something that is bloated and doesn't focus on these core features:

* Automatically importing and deduping your contacts from a variety of sources: email contacts, linkedin, facebook, maybe twitter.

* Automatically assigning a rank score to each friend, based upon your frequency of contact with them, and analysis of the social graph. You want your spouse to be ranked high, and the guy you met once at a networking event to be ranked low.

* Depending upon interactions with people, you can upvote or downvote them, to change their rank score. Ran into someone you want to hang out with more? Upvote. New girl made a date with you and then stood you up? Downvote.

* You can search or browse by tag. There is smooth autotagging and query expansion, to make sure searches don't miss certain friends.

That's it.

i agree with your first point. when it's time to invite people to the christmas party, i don't want to leave anyone out accidentally

I'm surprised that Fred just didn't ask the etacts guys (https://etacts.com/) for the features he's looking for (or maybe he did and they rejected the requests).

I tried to implement the same thing a few years back, but I got lost in feature creep. Maybe I'll do a quick relaunch to address where I went wrong.

Drill down in the comments to find this pic that Fred posted of himself ROFL'ing in response to one of his commentors... very entertaining: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredwilson/4887958978/

you liked that andrew?

Likely the best comment you've ever posted... Did you take it or someone else?

I have actually been looking for something similar and have considered building it in the past. My biggest concern was how to monetize it. Not sure I would pay a monthly fee for it.

My biggest need was for it to sync names + phone numbers to my phone so I don't run the risk of loosing them when something inevitably happened to my phone.

i would pay as much as our firm pays for mailchimp, $10/month

Much as I hate to say it, seems like this ought to be a facebook app. One of the problems with our family address book is keeping the addresses up to date, and moving that responsibility out to the people in the book would be a win. Of course you app would still let you enter in people who aren't on facebook or aren't in the app, and there is still the private aspect. Tags shouldn't be public unless you want them to be.

Biggest problem there is that if you're successful, Facebook will probably preempt you.

The early facebook pretty much _was_ the MVP of a CRM for your peer group - you could share contact details across a private network, invite groups of people to events and receive reminders of those that you'd been invited to, send public and private messages to custom groups and get notified of birthdays. You got nice pictures to be able to remember who did what the night before too.

If they'd taken their development in a different direction they'd have fewer page impressions but something much more useful.

the reason i don't think that works for me is that my family doesn't have a facebook account. we all have our own with our own contacts. this is about our family contacts

could be as simple as a group then. maybe a fan page/community

The Github founders were working on something like this (famspam) before they founded github.

So, what exactly are the features that a "family CRM" would need that normal CRMs don't have (other than integration with Red Stamp and Pingg)? Is it just the ability to mass email certain filters in your CRM?

Anyway, it's not expressly meant to be a "family CRM", but its simplicity and design seem perfect to me for this sort of thing. My buddy is building http://www.karmacrm.com which is still in beta.

it's more to do with the features a normal CRM would have that a "family CRM" wouldn't - you wouldn't be interested in tracking "leads", putting a value against "proposals" or managing "pipelines" but you would want open ended relationship groupings

exactly. less features more elegant

Anyone up for building this?

Sure. What is your background?

Seems like a good side-project and I want in. I mostly do whatever visitors see: HTML, CSS, JS, some 'good' UI/design skills (+ hacking python/django most recently).

Count me in, if you are interested in the MVP I propose above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601840).

I can contribute leet NLP + ML skillz.

I'm putting my name in as well. This struck me as something I really would like to use.

I'm a rails dev but I have python experience as well. my email is in my profile, is anyone taking the reigns? Or should I?

The cofounder of elgg is apparently: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/the-family-crm-service.html#...

Could be a modified version of this codebase: http://www.simplecustomer.com/

beware, major security flaws within. I've patched it heavily, and will be committing the changes to github soon.

Wow!

I started building this about a week and a half ago after watching my wife and my mother-in-law tediously exchanging contacts across the country. And then spending hours filling out thank you cards for gifts on the recent birth of our daughter.

I'm still in development of it, but should be in beta in a week or two.

I'd love if all the interested people would sign up to get early access: http://kindrd.com/?hn=1

If you leave the hn=1 in the query string, I will be able to discern the HN'ers.

I've been pondering how to solve this too. Bought a domain for it recently but haven't decided what form it should take.

The CRM angle is one I hadn't thought of, though it's kind of an obvious leap (in hindsight of course). I've been thinking more of a CMS plus address book.

Oh boy! Serendipity.

I just wrote about that exact same thing yesterday.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599944

I've been thinking the exact same thing for my family and am busy building https://szpil.com.

ok just want to throw this out there that i bet Fred's family is unlike most families. most people don't excel their friends and relationships. I think something like this needs a larger sample size to validate its audience.

Wouldn't Highrise be ideal for this? (sans pretty invite integration, of course)

I use a wiki for my family.

Tonido workspace (http://www.tonido.com/app_workspace_home.html) fits Fred's requirements exactly.

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