Show HN: Nat.app, personal CRM that knows who you're losing touch with

For a "more personal" CRM, I'd suggest Monica: https://www.monicahq.com/

Discussion from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295

Discussion from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270001

It's open-source and easy to self-host.

Thanks for sharing!

I'm looking for an easy way to see who I haven't contacted for a while, but also add notes about their family, kids, job situation, last things we spoke about.

It's never been important enough to pay for, so thanks for the Monica link, I'll check it out

To me this feels like treating human relationships as a problem to solve?

Alzheimer's runs in my family, so I should probably start using somethiing like this.

I misunderstood your headline. I thought this was for personal social connections - where at least for me - losing touch with some people is a feature not a bug!

Anyway - cheers on the project. I agree with other comments that my communication with people is multi-channel and it would be great to track all of it.

Thanks for the feedback and comment! Really appreciate it :)

I may have missed it, but this needs to be more than email. for many personal connections I need text, whatsapp, signal integration etc. and now you are in the world of accessing encrypted data. but without all the messaging protocols, the data is misleading.

I dont manage my network through email.

That's totally fine, you're simply not in our market :)

Many people do though, that's why we exist :)

> Many people do though, that's why we exist :)

Are you sure?

> Our approach is very specific: We focus on Google users (which is why there is only a Google login) who communicate mainly through email and put every IRL meeting in their calendar.

That describes exactly _zero_ of my friends/acquaintances, and perhaps low single digit percent of my professional connections.

Even at work, where we use Suite and Google Calendar, internally an overwhelming percentage of our communication is via Slack, video calls, and Jira/Trello tickets. Email is mostly a customer comms channel here (most of who are not Google Calendar users)

I know people who put every personal meeting on their Google Calendar. You wouldn’t know if you did, because they usually don’t send invitations unless they know the other person is the same way.

It's probably a Silicon-Valley-bubble thing :) I don't know anyone outside of tech who does it.

I put all of my meetings and appointments into GCal. I don't use email that much for it but I definitely put it all into the calendar.

That's already 50% of the way :)

> Are you sure?

The site links to an indiehacker article which says they're making $500/mth, so there's at least 40 customers using it

We currently have about 25 paying customers. We do think there must be about 10'000 people like this in the world.

Independent consultants and agency owners for one are niches of people who tend to fit our market very well :)

But your feedback is great and something we've discovered a long time ago. Which is why we don't think this can turn into a big VC-funded business :)

I'm not in your market, but I commend your decision to focus on a specific market and the confidence in sticking to it.

The startup environment today, perhaps "inspired" by "unicorn"s, takes as granted that your product should be infinitely expandable to everyone and everywhere; and too often, that leads to things being watered down and resources spread too thin. Deciding your customers are a specific group makes it much easier to make use of the specifics of the group (eg. Google APIs here) to make a much better and more well-integrated product.

I remember reading a discussion on Reddit[1] where someone was discussing how he uses Salesforce for personal relationships and the reception was less than receptive. In the year 2022 I think this idea actually makes a lot of sense as over the last 2 years it became a lot easier to fall out of touch.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/bfqb26/does_any...

(edit: oh my god I think you actually commented on that post! awesome work keeping up with the idea!)

Did indeed :P

> Personal CRM for relationship building

> Stay in touch with the customers that matter to your business

Is this for personal or business?

For those where the two collide. Otherwise there usually is not enough motivation to pay for a personal CRM :)

Dex is doing ok.

I'm just confused who the customer is. Would I be paying for this out of my paycheck so I would do my job better? Or would my employer buy this for me to use?

For $12/mo, it's far into business use for me. I can't see ever paying $144/yr to remember to text my mom.

For business, that might be reasonable. For personal use, no way.

I agree. The feature set is too shallow for a $12/mo subscription for personal usage. Or the target group is even more niche than I assume.

It depends, I think. I've thought about implementing a system of my own for minimal amounts of contact to keep people in my loop. Otherwise, something of a pareto distribution emerges where I talk a lot to 5 people and unfairly leave some people in the dark.

If I wanted to be extremely mercenary/selfish, I could make absolutely sure that the people who have something I want are definitely always kept in the list, and try to gradually increase their rank-order to get closer to them socially.

> For $12/mo, it's far into business use for me

On a tangent, I do think that software businesses undercharge heavily. It works for VC-funded businesses but for bootstrapped companies, we definitely have to charge real prices.

My monthly Blue Bottle budget is probably around $50, I don't see why I wouldn't pay as much if not more for a piece of software :)

I don't want to downplay what this specific app is doing, and there's obviously some interest in this field. But from my perspective, this (and Dex) are way more expensive per year than something like OmniFocus - published by a bootstrapped company - which can solve 90% of the problem in addition to doing a lot more stuff.

I think a lot of people could use something like Reminders with actions like "Call Mom; repeat every 6 days". And again, for me, this isn't $144/yr better than that free solution. If I were doing this as part of my job, sure, I'd happily ask my company to cover the cost. I don't see a scenario where I would pay that much for personal use.

(BTW, I do literally have a Reminders list called "Maintain relationships" with actions like "Buy a birthday card for my niece", "Call Mom on her wedding anniversary", "Text Joe", and such. It keeps me from getting too out of sync with the people I care about. I'd pay a couple of dollars a month if there were something that helped automate setting up and maintaining that list.)

Ha, I was thinking about something like that since my exposure to a traditional CRM. Good luck.

However this looks like personal business relationship CRM, right?

The line between business and personal is very thin in my opionion. We aim to be somewhere in the middle.

For me, the line between personal and business is mostly very well drawn in the sand, and is rarely crossed and only after very careful evaluation of the possible consequences. Going into business with friends can end very badly. Becoming friends with people you work under or over can end very badly. That's probably not the same worldview as a twenty-something startup founder, but after 3 decades in this game I've got a bunch of boundaries around this stuff.

Good luck with it though.

Not affiliated at all.

Wobaka is another option for a personal CRM. We evaluated it. A great product (and Fredrik the owner-developer was a treat to work with), but we passed on it because it did not fit for our niche use case. At $50 per month, it might be a different fit.

wobaka.com

Also posted in Oct 2020[0] with 175 points, 119 comments.. some useful comments, including some privacy fears

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897812

Yup. was for a side product of our app, we've now merged the note taking and "who am I losing touch with" part into one app :)

I was using cloze (www.cloze.com) for years, but it started to feel a bit outdated.

Moved to Covve (www.covve.com) recently and it's pretty great. It has an ecosystem of features and apps that help a lot especially if your profession is people oriented.

I'll check out yours too.

What personal CRMs have been made recently and died in a year or two? I have found it rare to find personal CRMs at all.

This looks interesting. Can you tell me more why should I believe you to give you access to my inbox?

we wrote some more as to how we handle data here (https://nat.app/privacy) but in the end, you'll obviously have to trust us.

I guess it depends on your needs & use cases. If you feel like you're losing touch with people that matter, you might want to give it a try :)

Oh wow, that sounds pretty useful. Is that to follow-up with people?

Basically. Our algorithm check who you're losing touch with based on your email, calendar, ... data and resurfaces those people for you.