Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

> There's a (repeating) notion in this thread that keeping up with people is somehow linked to how much you care about them. I care deeply about many people I meet, personally, but I don't think the two are necessarily correlated.

I wholeheartedly agree. There’s a similar resistance towards books like “How to win friends...”, like you’re a sleazy car salesman for trying to improve your social skills.

It’s like harping on people going to the gym and watching their diet for not being “naturally” fit.

I wonder what are another 2 tools in your stack?

> Is that impersonal? Is it wrong in some way? It's my own very, very private way of keeping people in my life. I don't see it as not genuine or fake.

I agree with you, I do something like this on a much smaller scale to try and keep up with who I have and haven't spoken to recently. I have a lot going on and time seems to slip past me, I can easily go weeks without talking to people and it feel like no time at all. Making a deliberate effort to maintain those relationships doesn't seem like its fake to me.

When you use Monica, do you add and change data directly in Monica (manually)? Or in some scripted/automated fashion?

I looked through the docs and didn't find anything about integrating/importing/exporting. I found lots of open feature requests for integrations.

I've carefully curated contacts and meetings in my Nextcloud instance, so of course I'd like to leverage all that work. I added my thumbs-up to https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/1444

I also started using this tool a couple of years back, when it was posted on product hunt, and I found it pretty useful. I can say it had saved me time and frustration whenever I forgot a name or a detail about an acquaintance.

I had completely forgotten about this, in fact I had been using the notes field on the contacts app, but thanks to this post I’m going back to it again.

What are the other top two of your personal stack?

There is no reason why you could not run any of the (self hosted) solutions you've mentioned in fifty years. Your data is still yours and it's easy enough to transform the database with simple tools in any format you like, if you choose to do so. For me the build in capabilities of these tools can not be beaten by text files. Especially when it comes to searching/filtering and linking your data. In the end the database and business logic are still just files on your hard drive

You can host it yourself on your own server. Or, you can run it within Docker locally.

I contributed to Monica a bit and the “desktop version” was always a huge GitHub issue. That, along with an impossible “E2E” encryption issue, devoid of any understanding of RDMBS or TLS, is why I didn’t go much further with my contributions.

Edit: see issues 531, and 543.

It is funny, because my app https://contactcache.com started like that. It was an Electron app working completely locally. Gradually I moved to a web app that can work locally in the browser, as long as the browser doesn't delete the local storage.

How do you feel about desktop apps that sync to google drive? I just made scrumsheet.app and a friend mentioned that I should do the same for a personal CRM. Do you trust Google with the data or do you really prefer it to be offline-only?

So, once your super secure local app will remind you to contact a friend, how will you message them to exchange detailed personal stories? Gmail? Facebook?

What are your thoughts on data interoperability? I have a few contact lists (names, emails, numbers, addresses across a few services) that I'd like to consolidate into a single list and take that into whatever app I end up using. Is this at all possible? Have you come across any useful standards?

Thank you for writing this. I’ve tried a few methods to keep track of important information about friends, and thought about writing exactly this - especially tracking contact frequency. I just installed Prim and I’m going to try it!

I tried the app, it crashes quite frequently, but seems like a very neat integration with iOS and I would consider using it if I could understand how data mobility is handled per my other comment.

Thanks!

Luckily it's AGPL 3.0 licensed, so you can happily host it yourself, potentially at a much lower cost.

I could host it for you for €49/year: joostwebhost.nl . You'll get email with it too, all running on open source software. :-) I mainly focus on WordPress hosting now, but I will add this to my services too.

There's always people who aren't prepared to pay the asking price. Maybe they should charge more, especially if it means there's a sustainable business that isn't going to get sold and shut down.

You can host it yourself for free.

> I would love to have a social media platform where I can have multiple tiers of friends. Social Media "friends" and separately a circle of ACTUAL friends. You would get more access to the data shared by actual friends.

"Um, /u/galaxyLogic? Why aren't I in you "ACTUAL" friends list? Is there something you want to tell me? Are we not actually friends?"

I see what you're trying to say - Facebook friends are often just random chumps you've met once, never or are distantly related to someone else you've met once - but I think a tiered system could quickly become something of burden on said friends :P

That was Google+

Facebook has this but not many people use it. Google+ also had a good implementation in "circles".

Note: this is written by a Personal CRM (Dex) and is pretty slanted. They put themselves first on the list, which is fine, but have broken URLs (example: https//clay.earth/ ) for most of their competitors and throw shade at projects like Monica, calling them "single developer projects... with relatively limited feature sets".

Check the links in your blog posts. Some are broken. E.g. ZooWho.

You can add mine side project https://contactcache.com to the list :-)

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25273716.

been hosting it for years and it has been stable

I also developed my own version of it and launched it many years ago!

It was extremely simple on purpose, you had two views:

- List of people: sorted based on when you needed to get in touch with them

- The profile: add notes (with a contact more/less often when submitting) and choose social circles (by closeness: Family, Close Friend, Work, Acquaintance... or by situation: Golf Club, Gym, Chess...)

Based on the circles, notes, ratings, etc. the App organized them from top to bottom on a "Who should you contact now". It was cool.

As I grew older I used it less and less and ended up retiring it. It helped me become a better person by internalizing the importance of remembering names, hobbies, FORD method (Family, Occupation, Recreation and Dreams) and improving my small talk or breaking the ice.

If you've never used a personal CRM and you struggle to maintain and nourish relationships I highly recommend you to try something, either Monica or what someone suggested of having text files, a spreadsheet, notes...

I’m guessing more people do this, they just don’t post about it.

I made my own solution to this 6 years ago and use it to this day. my solution leverages google people api so it’s automatically synced as part of the notes field of my contacts, and I have an app in my iphone and on my desktop and a cloud interface to quickly manage and query the data.

10/10 recommend and wish it was more normalized

Yes! They also added CalDAV for birthdays and tasks.

https://github.com/monicahq/monica/blob/master/docs/user/car...

Yep, my PRM is an iOS Notes folder called People, with a note for some people I want to remember facts about. In particular what some like so I can use the list to make gifts. There is also a "debts" notes. I’ve been using this system for a few years and it works well.

The tooling you describe isn't relational. Furthermore, Monica has found great success in helping users with social challenges, maybe with ADHD. The workflow you describe isn't an ideal solution addressing that challenge.

What's the major difference between what you're suggesting and a CRM?

I tend to think back of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and there's an entire chapter devoted to what is basically an analog CRM and devoting time to staying up to date with it (including scheduling calls).

If anything I think a CRM applies even more because I care more about friends and family than I do about a sales pipeline. More effort = more importance, in my book.

Also there's the added bonus of not having to remember these things so I can focus on remembering more useful things.

I totally get this thinking, but I am oriented totally differently from you. I will forget my friend's birthdays, their kids names, their wife's names, things they've talked about recently, etc, etc. I have a terrible memory for this stuff. I'm not sure if it's just me being stubborn, but all of these things just feel very slippery to my mind. On the other end, I will remember in vibrant detail very trivial facts that have no real function for me. Does that mean I care about trivial facts more than my friends? I hope not.

I think of it like this. I don't pay attention to lyrics in most music, I pay attention to the feel/tune. With friends, it's all about emotional connection, not my ability to recall facts. I honestly don't think one or the other is better or worse, it's just different. People show care differently.

For me, who has trouble with things that people often associate with caring (like yourself maybe), this acts as a crutch to help me show caring in a way that other people recognize but that isn't natural to me. I would actually argue that me investing into a program like this actually shows just how much I care that I want to make up for my natural capability with a pretty involved program.

Another side benefit, it's also really nice for acquaintances that you really want to keep up with, but because of irregular correspondence they are very easy to slip from memory.

I have genuine relationships with people, but some days I can't remember how old I am.

You might be both overthinking it, and overestimating some of the people who would use this.

I put friends birthdays in my Google calendar. It's not because I don't care about them enough to remember it. It's because I care enough to work around my own failings for them.

It sounds luxurious to have the capability to “just” remember these things. After decades of being alive, I can tell you with certainty that my mom’s birthday is one of two days each year, but I have no idea which of those two days it is. We get along famously and I’m welcome at any time, because she loves me for who I am, not for what I cannot do: remember her birthday correctly.

I think she’d be more shocked that I was able to remember it than she would mind at all if I kept notes about her so I could remember. I think she would take immense personal offense if I did so using something terrible like Facebook, as would most in my family — but if I’m keeping it local to myself alone, I don’t expect it would be any trouble at all. She trusts that by now I’m competent at the Internet, because she watched me learn how to do my computer jobs as a young child.

I would be the topic of the day at a family gathering for doing this, though! We would all hash out the entire thing in lurid detail over meals and walks. Some would ask to see their records, and I’d happily comply. If I didn’t feel strongly about them, I wouldn’t bother taking notes at all, and they all understand the family rule: only ask questions you truly wish to know the answer to. If they can’t handle what I relegate to a notebook about them, then they shouldn’t ask to read my notebook about them. This is obvious to us. It’s a simple extension of the family rule.

Maybe your social circles are different and less flexible on this matter, but that’s not at all how it would work for mine.

> wouldn't you take the effort to remember everything about them

You mean like the effort of writing it down? I see nothing ingenuine about understanding your cognitive limits and working around them to show that you care.

> I've met maybe 1000 people in my lifetime, I could count in my ten fingers the people I care about. Can people actually care about other people, AT SCALE, to the point where you would need an app for that?

Well I'd like to work on caring about more people. I think with personal CRMS it might help expand out my pool of and push conversations past the same ole small talk each time. Like if I can pull up something from the last convo that'd help.

I think this reads to me exactly like “if you really cared enough to get there you would just be able to run fast enough rather than use a car”.

It’s a weird equation of care and ability while at the same time taking someone seeking out a tool to better achieve X as evidence of not caring about X. One of those connections seems arbitrary to me, the other backwards.

For quite a few people, memory and remembering things isn't a simple issue that can be solved by "effort" or "actually caring".

Perhaps the causality is in both directions. Something I learned from doing Tibetan lamrim meditation - where you use memories and imagined scenarios to produce specific emotions to arise - is that you can start with something quite artificial or forced but this will lead to something genuine later down the line via practice. For example, if I think about all the things my mother did for me through my life, even before it, dreaming about me before she knew me, wishing the best for me, keeping me safe and trying hard to get me the best education, the best upbringing she could and so on… that can start off (and probably did in my case as a selfish ingrate) as a thought without the associated feeling of gratitude but I can tell you that writing that right now brought tears to my eyes as gratitude arose immediately.

In the same way, perhaps it's the case that if you remember more about more people then you will care more about more people? Certainly, making the effort to remember would suggest you care to begin with and wish for that to grow.

Sometimes it’s hard to be the kind of person we want to be for people we really care about.

One way of showing you care is making the effort to remember important things. Another is staying in contact. I’ve used Anki to remember friends kids names, and Monica to remind me to stay in touch. Very occasionally, I use Monica to remember where a friend is in their life last we spoke. Often a tiny cue is enough to jog your memory.

You might consider that “unauthentic”, but I would say people’s brains and memories are just really different —- what’s easy for you is not necessarily easy for everyone else. Using these tools let’s me be closer to the type of friend, brother, son that I’d like to be.

I should add, having moved overseas, Monica has also helped me maintain relationships with people who are very important to me, but who I may only get the chance to speak to every few weeks, or less. I’m quite grateful for it.

I think it feels MORE genuine as the user went out of their way to make sure they could recall information that is important to their contacts. Taking notes in class so you can say you remembered isn't disingenuous.

>My argument is, if you actually cared for someone, wouldn't you take the effort to remember everything about them, rather than saving it in a social relationship database?

I mean aren't you going to have to write it down somewhere anyway? Maybe you're not familiar with the world of journaling/notebooks, but people use them (and have been using them) for the same purpose. Before technology, people still wrote information down about the people they cared about.

> Saving your friend's child's birthday in a database just so you can say that you remembered vs actually remembering their birthday

I mean if you're taking the time to write it down I think that demonstrates a level of genuineness. It's not always possible to e.g. have the foresight 3 months in advance to say "ah I can't do that because my friend's child's birthday is then".

>I would rather have 1 genuine relationship, rather than 100 superficial, inauthentic relationships.

I think authenticity has a lot more to do with experiences you have with a person, which is augmented by making sure you're available to spend time with them on important dates, having awareness of their likes and dislikes, and just taking note of general information. I find that, personally, when I take the time to write these things down, I actually keep them in my memory.

As someone who is utterly awful with names but genuinely remembers people I interact with through the day on campus and at work, Dynalist was what I used to keep track of names with references to where I knew them from. Just whatever would spark my memory.

It wasn't that I didn't care about them, I truly did, but I frequently mix up names of even my closest friends if I'm not paying attention and make great effort to not give others the impression I don't care enough to remember.

I disagree. I simply cannot remember all of the social niceties I’m expected to remember. For me personally, I show that I care for people by giving myself reminders that they have an important event.

Let’s turn this around: if a friend wishes you a happy birthday, do you know or care how and why they remembered?

Please be aware that not everyone has the same capacity for memory about personal details as you. Not everyone using this tool is necessarily recording 1000 different details. Maybe they are just writing information about the 10 people they care about?

>Saving your friend's child's birthday in a database just so you can say that you remembered vs actually remembering their birthday; I feel like there is a huge gap between the two. I would rather have 1 genuine relationship, rather than 100 superficial, inauthentic relationships.

I would say you're looking at it completely wrong and you don't have to forget somebodies birthday that many times before you write it down because all it does is hurt everybody. Some segment of the population forgets these things EVEN WITH the inner circle of people they know.

I forget my own birthday.

You and others probably have a much better memory than I.

I don't use tools though, we have a physical birthday calendar that helps.

This is peak Silicon Valley.

A Personal Relationship Manager feels like something that would be used against you in a jury trial. Not any specific information entered into it, just the fact alone that you were using it.

You aren’t kidding. A 13 question survey AND a 15 minute call to review the app before I can sign up? Plus, there are no available times to call in December. Yeesh.

Monica not being able to sync (two-way) with something as basic as Google Contacts is a dealbreaker imo.

I was ready to pay for it to actually be my source of truth for my contacts database, and store a lot more metadata that I'm currently trying to hack into custom Google Contacts fields (profiles on other sites/services primarily).

True wishlist: A PRM like Monica, which can sync two-ways with Google Contacts / carddav, and which is able to fetch & search through communication history with all linked services for the contact (not just emails but also SMS, DMs in various services, public posts on fb/twitter etc). This could naturally evolve into a multi-messaging tool like the old libpurple based ones (Pidgin etc).

Also, please, if you do a contact manager, let me store humans and businesses as separate contact types. My relationship with "Ada L." is very different to my relationship with "Amazon Business Customer Support Phone Number".

Do you know what format the data is stored in, and if it is human-readable?

moved to?

Just tried it for 5 minutes, the UI looks really clean, the UX is not the best though. I've been trying to add contacts with the "batch" feature, I tick some checkboxes expecting to add them to my list, but there's no apparent way to do so. They stay checked and I don't understand why and what that means.

I'm not sure what "mark people as in touch" is, and to me it sounds the same as adding someone from your contact, but it looks like this is a different operation from adding a contact to the list.

I like the "more" tab and its contents.

Out of curiosity, as I'm interest and work in UX, did you test this app with some real people / how did you test its UX?

They try somewhat to warn what will break in future releases. So you get a few releases of warnings and then a release of THIS WILL BREAK NEXT RELEASE and then it breaks. One thing for PHP is a huge 'customer' is the Wordpress universe and they have been good about not breaking Wordpress. But with PHP 8 that will change.

If you are on PHP4 and are moving to the 7.x series plan for some pain.

My problem is I try to find things that will work with flat files. I just spent some time moving from Mediawiki to PMwiki, because of the database nonsense in keeping that in sync with PHP and Mediawiki.

I'd love to find a CRM tool that had the flexibility shown here but would live in flat files that I may have a chance to import into something else.

Same can be said about writing and text and any form of better than extremely leaky memory or history

I think this is a good augmentation of our own mind, as are the others

my mother made a spreadsheet for this, i think she'll really love monica. thanks for sharing, OP!

You've been downvoted, but it does seem like a high risk for information security.

No, let's sync it to Facebook/WhatsApp/Snapchat/Google, so we know our privacy will be invaded.

Monica is open source, Airtable isn't.

They called out how this differs from Facebook pretty clearly https://github.com/monicahq/monica#who-is-it-for

If the person in question is mark zuckerberg

The GDPR doesn't apply to personal usage of data - only if you're using the data in the course of operating a business.

> In the case of personal or household activities, the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK outlines the exemption as being the processing of personal data in the course of a ‘purely’ personal or household activity, with “no connection to a professional or commercial activity”

(source: https://www.hutsix.io/does-gdpr-apply-to-individuals/)