How to Start Your Startup's CRM | Hacker News Reader

How to Start Your Startup's CRM

wishery.com

42 pointscoopr17 comments

I helped write an in-house CRM for my current employer as a transition away from Dynamics. It does leads, ownership, billing, conversion, all that stuff and it's built as a part of our existing backend systems, which is great for providing extra customer detail and insight you wouldn't get otherwise.

It might become a maintenance hassle five or ten years down the track, or after most of the original developers move on, but for now it was simple to write, the best solution to our problems, perfectly customisable to our precise needs and everyone enjoys using it.

I used plain excel to maintain a "CRM" of about 200 entries for a university society. Works incredibly well, fast and easy - exactly what you would want in a startup - i suppose until you have multiple people needing to work on it, and come upon data permission and file locking issues. I know several large businesses rely disproportionately on excel in this way.

Spreadsheets can make simple and flexible CRMs - and Google Spreadsheet's notification feature helps keep everyone informed of changes.

Keep an eye out for some Google Spreadsheet features coming soon from Wishery.

I forget who said it first, but there's a saying that if you want to look for business ideas, look for where people are complaining about sharing Excel files. That's where they've accidentally built an application that they need (giving you a spec) but which isn't good enough for the job (giving you a way in).

In the post it says that Wishery helps focus on relationships rather that just sales, but it seems like all it does is send Gmail contacts over to MailChimp. Isn't an automated email blast the opposite of a real relationship? Are people really sending drip email campaigns to investors? I've never raised money but I was under the impression that you're expected to have personal relationships with investors.

Disclaimer: I make my own CRM product, so I'm certainly biased.

An un-targeted email blast isn't a great way to build a relationship - but a message sent to a specific segment of your audience might be just as effective as a message sent to a single person. Founders are constantly making tradeoffs - I'm advocating for trading a little personalization (sending to a group instead of to an individual) for a lot of time savings (sending one message through MailChimp instead of sending a personal message to each person on your list).

Yes, you should have a personal relationship with your investors - but sending all your potential investors the same "progress update" is just as relationship-building as sending that progress update to one potential investor at a time.

Does your CRM have an API? Perhaps Wishery could integrate with Less Annoying CRM!

We do have an API, but it's very basic right now (https://www.lessannoyingcrm.com/help/topic/API). We're more focused on serving traditional small businesses rather than startups, and most small businesses don't even know what an API is. We'll need to build it out soon, but it hasn't been enough of a priority yet.

Good luck with Wishery!

Slightly off-topic, but can anyone recommend a reasonably-priced (full-fledged) CRM system run under a SaaS model that has a nice API that I can use for Web site integration and data analytics? Salesforce seems really overpriced for what you get.

What I want most is to tie this into my phone (iPhone but willing to swap if there really is not an app for that)

I assume this should be easy but I don't knwo how

have all my contacts sync'd to gmail (doable) have all my mails to a contact tracked (standard email functionality, plus seems to be what this post is about) have all my calls to from a contact not only kept on my phone but also exported and synched Ba k to this crm bonus points for an app that let's me add notes after a call and syncs those too

amazingly enough I had this on an old nokia n95 back in the day.

Well, I guess you need a Galaxy Note..

I'm truly puzzled by the notion that a CRM-for-prospective-investors should be more important to a business^ than a CRM-for-customers

^ yeah, I'm old-school and still think startups should be businesses first and foremost

In their earliest days, startups tend to depend much more on their relationships with investors than with customers. In fact, for some startups, there may be a period of many months where they have, essentially, not relationship with customers because they have nothing for the customers to use (because they are still building it - with the money the investors invested).

That is exactly why this post is about a CRM for a startup that can be easily grown out of as the relationship management needs change.

i'm sorry but this just seems a bit too complicated

Which part?

for me, it's really just the whole terminology of the CRM. think it just over complicates what it really is. i guess my question comes down to, does Twitter/FB also fit in to the realm of CRMs? i see a lot of startups now use Twitter/FB as the main communication line w/ their userbase.

If your users uses Twitter and Facebook as a primary communications channel, then "going to where they are" is a good strategy.

However, if they aren't already there, then focusing on Twitter/Facebook will cause you to miss many users.

Also, as a startup you have multiple audiences - your users might be on FB/Twitter, but I doubt your investors are (to the same extent) - you must match the communications channel with the audience's existing preferences and behavior - they won't switch channels just to hear from you ; )

I'd love to hear your thoughts - is Gmail + MailChimp + Wishery an effective and efficient startup CRM?

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