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Comment by random3 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone chime in why this hasn't worked in the past?

It seems a personal/portable CRM could be highly useful. The second aspect is the vertical aspect (professional or "personal")

One thing I keep hearing from people that have sold companies, exited etc. is that they are having a hard time operating within their networks without the CRM.

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Yes. Having been in this space for a bit, there are a few reasons why it hasn't worked (yet):

1. The problem of deduplicating contacts is tough (but solvable). If you don't solve it well, then the utility of personal CRM goes wayyyyy down and you're getting notifications about the same people with different email / WhatsApp / Instagram addresses and that gets annoying.

2. People haven't shown a big willingness to pay very much for this (so far), despite everyone saying they want it. So we're left with the open source solutions that don't solve the problems very well.

3. People are SUPER concerned about privacy. See a comment above about someone who wants the system to automatically scan email, etc. and extract contacts, but that it must be 100% local and privacy-centric. You can't have both of those - to intelligently extract contacts without duplicates (and figure out that @mybestie on Instagram == mybestie@gmail.com == my.c.bestie@corporate.com) you need a big database of who's who to match against.

Everything is solvable I think - we're not talking cold fusion here. But it's tougher than it might seem on the surface.

Could you expand on what options exist currently? You say you are in the space, does that mean you have been keeping an eye on it, that you are working on something, or ?

I'm in the space in that I co-founded a company called Connect The Dots (ctd.ai) that certainly has the potential to solve this problem, but we're not focused on the PRM space right now (see point above re: unwillingness to pay). Perhaps down the road.

The two commercial tools that come to mind are:

* Dex (https://getdex.com/)

* Clay (https://clay.earth/)

Although neither have really nailed it (yet). Clay is more like a Superhuman-for-Contacts, whereas Dex is really going hard at being a true PRM.

The big open source tool out there is:

* Monica (https://www.monicahq.com/)

One problem I've had adopting such a system is that you want the system to help manage some load of work, e.g. maintaining your personal relationships. But using the product is itself work: you need to set it up, remember to use it, keep it up to date, etc. So, just as you've procrastinated keeping up with old friends, you procrastinate using the tool. And, of course, the tool doesn't reduce the workload of keeping up with friends. In fact, done successfully, your work has increased as you need to talk to your friends more often. So you're basically adding work (using the tool) to do work you didn't have the energy for in the first place (talking to your friends).

Everyone loves the idea of talking to their friends, conceptually. But, given ample time and opportunity, many choose not to keep up with friends. It's almost as if people only "want to want" to keep up with friends, rather than actually want it.

Yes yes absolutely 100x. That's another problem with the existing tools - they're a lot of work! You can say "we'll solve the duplicate contacts problem by ignoring it and letting using de-dupe themselves" welllll that's a lot of work!

And then there's the empty-database problem. I installed Monica a while back and the first thing it prompted me to do was.....input all my contacts. No Facebook import, no LinkedIn import, etc. Are you kidding me? I'm not rebuilding my friend graph from scratch. So I ditched the tool immediately (note: I haven't looked at it in years so it might have fixed some of those issues in the meantime).

And absolutely yes - there's the actual work of being in touch with people that you can't (or shouldn't, in a non-dystopian world) automate away. I'm sure someone will figure out how to rig up GPT-3 to do that but ughhhh...shiver please don't.

I believe a plugin (e.g. in Obsidian, Notion, Superhuman) could work better than Monica. In fact I think Superhuman has the bets oppportunity to create this product.

> Can someone chime in why this hasn't worked in the past?

Because spreadsheets and notes are free and good enough.

I used to be a full time shitty cheap car flipper. I used to be single. They're about the same level of communication work. The ROI of a proper CRM isn't there because in both cases your customer is just not that serious about the interaction when they're in the part of the funnel a CRM helps you with and even then it doesn't really help you with the bulk of the customers, it helps you with the long tail. When you're a one man shop squeezing out an extra 1% or whatever a CRM gets you isn't worth the time vs focusing on other areas. (These days I work in a client facing role with a proper ticketing system and integrated CRM so I do have something to compare to.)

No experience, but there is https://github.com/monicahq/monica

CRMs work at scale by selling to executives who are not the end users but are in control of budget. They then have their sales managers enforce data fidelity amongst the sales team who, to keep their jobs, are incentivized to make sure data in the CRM are up to date, or whatever the closest approximation to that is.

So for a personal CRM to work, you'd need to sort out, at minimum, the monetization piece and the data fidelity piece. If you open source it, you still need to make sure people keep the data up to date and that's actually pretty hard.

Executives also want to take the rolodex with them, hence they have an incentive to keep a personal CRM so that they keep their contacts after they leave.

Superhuman sold to executives for $30/month - which is a relevant (high) price point.

I'm not entirely sure what the first point has to do with the second - can you help me understand what Superhuman has to do with anything? It's just a gmail client at the end of the day, isn't it?

My understanding is people who want to keep their contacts have 1) a lot of them in the actual inbox 2) have their Linkedin to fall back on 3) can always fall back to exporting all their contacts when they leave.

Apropos of nothing, $30/month/user is roughly the base price of Salesforce, and they have 3 more tiers significantly above that. High for a consumer, but pretty cheap for professional tools, and they don't sell licenses one at a time.

I've been working on FriendApp the past year. I think it hasn't worked in the past because the average person doesn't realize that they could really benefit from this solution. It hasn't necessarily felt like a burning problem. I think it has to add some value beyond just classifying and adding additional metadata to contacts.

My goal is to develop features that also facilitate sharing of activities, upcoming events that I'm attending that I want to share with people I know. Things I want to do, and making that visible to select groups of people.

Hope you'll check out where we're heading https://www.friendapp.com/

I think it simply would need a lot of discipline to keep up to date and without a manager nagging or bonuses being dependent upon updating it, most people lack that discipline.

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