Show HN: I made a CRM system to make sales fun

There's a few unanswered questions that I hope it's helpful to point out;

* Importers -> If I want to switch, how long will it take me to move from a potential system (Excel, Google Sheets, Salesforce, etc) into Wobaka?

* Integrations -> If I send an email can that come from my Outlook Gmail and be shown? Can I see emails from my colleagues towards a contact if they want to?

* What does a workflow look like? A gif of going from New Contact -> Adding them into an Org I'm talking to -> Sending the first message would do a lot here.

* How do I engage with my colleagues? Can I tag them in tasks, or pass things along to them?

Marketing page doesn't convince me that it's a different CRM. Lists usual stuff. Actually quite lacking if the business cannot apply their customizations/business rules/validations/workflows.

Bad, yes. But boring? I really don't look for fun and excitement from work software.

Excel wouldn't become any more useful if it was painted pink and had wacky icons

The brand colors look so similar that you could get the impression that it's a Basecamp product. It almost looks like you took their background color and changed it by the smallest amount possible just so it wasn't an exact match if you compared the hex colors.

I think it's hard to differentiate on design fully as a basic CRM. One idea you could look into as both a feature set and a focus of your marketing is leaning into the idea that you're the ideal first CRM and you make migrating to Salesforce dead simple.

You can snag ppl like our company who have been told you'll eventually need to be on Salesforce but aren't ready for all of that overhead. Then once you've got a community of users, you have a chance at adding more and more functionality that will get people to stay with you instead of migrating.

I've always thought there was a market opportunity around that.

Good luck

This is what I look for first when evaluating CRM software, which gives me an idea of the underlying schema and how to extend or integrate the software.

Most smaller CRM's do not support multiple price books, for example, that can be critical to businesses that have price differences between sales channels and regions.

A typical use case, customer story, for your solution would be helpful.

Cheers

Does not answer why I would choose this over all the other 1000000 of CRM offerings (just in our office we tried Zoho, Close.io, Salesforce, Pipedrive,....).

Plus, not fully sold on the "Built to last - Wobaka is like your favorite craft beer or artisan coffee. Made with love and hand-picked ingredients. No mega-corp here." pitch.

Great effort tho.

In any case, good luck with your business!

What I really like is when there's a video showing what it's like to use the product.

I launched my leave tracking app (https://leavetracker.app) a couple of months ago and once I'm finally happy with the design I'll be making a video for it, I think it can really help with conversions.

I'm always impressed when one person alone builds a product and actually ships it. It's a very different journey to working in a team on a startup. Best of luck!

CRMs are tools for sales managers (and folks further up in the hierarchy) to know what's going on in their org. An incidental benefit is that reps have useful views of what's going on with their prospects, but ease of use for them is just not a concern of the buyer (hence the wild success of Salesforce, which just sucks to use).

In some categories of enterprise software, ease of use is a benefit. I was at Box in the early days when one of the big value props is that people would actually use it, because at the time they were using unsanctioned tools like Dropbox. The issue there was that managers didn't have an easy well of telling when people were using those tools, so the idea that good UX would entice users to stick with company-approved software was a good selling point.

With CRMs, that's not the case. As a rep, you're judged on your performance, and the way people see your performance is via the information you put in your CRM. If you're tracking a bunch of leads outside of your CRM, your manager will know (because you have to keep them in the loop on your deals). Thus, there's no reason for sales management to be concerned about ease of use - their CRM is going to get used because the alternative is that the reps are going to get fired.

My impression based on your marketing pages and this post is that you didn't really take the time to understand the CRM market and buyers before you built this. Your $49/month for a whole team pricing structure makes no sense - companies are absolutely willing to pay more (and are very willing to pay per user). Having a price point that low is more likely to scare off serious buyers than entice them. The fact that all of your messaging is directed at a rep is a huge problem. You need to focus on things that matter to your buyers (reporting, lead routing, pipeline management, etc.). "Wobaka is the CRM system that will make you smile" is a bad tagline - the folks buying this don't care if the people using it smile. They care about money. If your product doesn't make money (by improving time to close and/or likelihood of close), then they're not buying it whether people smile or not.

The good news is you've solicited this feedback early, and the fact that you have a well-designed UI definitely isn't a bad thing. If I were you, though, I would stop development and spend most of your time getting this in front of people in sales management to see what their feedback is. Find out what problems they have with their existing CRMs and try to solve those.

But Hubspot gets one thing right that I never understood other CRMs can't do. If Hubspot sees an email from name@company.com, they automatically make a new contact for that name, and a new organization for that company (derived from the @company.com), enrich it all with available data (employee size etc), which I guess they get from some Clearbit-like data. This is super useful, because it means all relevant organization about a new lead who just reached out is just there. The only manual logging I ever have to do is eg log calls or write internal notes. No bookkeeping whatsoever.

Similarly, if I want to log someone I met at, say, a conference, I just enter their email address from their business card (or whatever) and -poof- the contact and organization are there. Maybe I'll add the phone number if they're oldschool like that, but that's it. All the otherfields are immediately in "good enough" mode.

A while later I tried Close.io, who advertise loudly in the blogosphere about how much other CRMs make you click and type, and I had to make every contact and organization by hand! How is that automation? I simply don't understand how any CRM in 2019 can ship with so much manual data entry. What am I missing? Is my use case such an edge case?

If you'd add stuff like this, then maybe I'd be interested in switching over. But having to manually maintain every single piece of data, when much information is publicly available from various sources, is just not worth my time.

And if you have this feature, I'd highlight it proudly on the website :D

To other HN'ers, if you have suggestions for CRMs that get this right, I'm interested.