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Comment by nickelcitymario | Hacker News Reader

I work at a company that uses Salesforce as the system that runs the whole business. CRM barely touches on what we use it for.

We use it for inventory, logistics, accounting, customer support, managing our partners (dealers), managing our suppliers... as well as sales.

I spent 2 years as a Salesforce developer, and still dabble in APEX from time to time.

All of that is context for what I'm about to say:

Salesforce is a nightmare to develop and maintain. The concept of a central system to run the whole business makes sense. But Salesforce has no focus, IMHO.

I like how simple and easy to use Twenty is. But what I'd love to see is something like AirTable. Yes, call it a CRM so that you have an instant use case. But make it easy to do custom development. Make sure there's a great API. Much like Wordpress, make it easy to know where I can safely extend the platform.

Do all of that, and I think you might have a winning product!

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To be honest, it sounds 100% like SAP / ABAP. A lot of terribly outdated stuff. But it can do everything you can imagine. If it can't, there's 1-2 recommended products that expand features on top of SAP.

The moment your business wants to do things a way that isn't SAP's way, you completely butcher everything though. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541092

My first internship was as a Dynamics AX dev. Me and another guy. Our mentor was a super-duper senior architect something something. He once asked us what we were planning on doing, career-wise, and we were kinda surprised; obviously we were working towards becoming Dynamics AX devs, and were hoping for a job at that place.

He got a somewhat wistful look in his eyes, and said (more to himself than to us) he wished he could go back and choose not to do that.

I'll never forget that. He was earning an insane amount of money, working super high-level at one of the largest IT firms in the country.

I think a lot of ERP stuff is like that - pays well but few people regard it as fun - not least of which is that end up with knowledge of very niche technologies that don't really progress very rapidly.

Edit: Mind you for job security and cash generating potential they are can be pretty good - years ago I knew of people on £3000 a day in the UK working on very niche financial systems - but you basically had to have a lot of domain knowledge (financial consolidation) and decent development skills.

Honestly, I do mostly web development and unless you're really interested in the product (which is far from a given) why do you care if it's an ERP or ecommerce or some travel application?

My guess: If you are implementing any type of software, you usually see an UI, input and output. For SAP and ERP you can also have this.

But it's really ugly, messy, and you might have to implement 5 corner cases of what the german government has thought of to complicate the lives' of everyone in regards to capital gains taxes in combination with church taxes, in a year in which you got married but one of the two left the church the same year. Oh, and what if you also got a kid that year and moved cities? And during implementation there is another law passed to change stuff?

In other words: So out of the world that noone finds it interesting anymore :D

Part of the problem is that the final output from SAP is typically financial reports that need to conform to standards. That limits the design flexibility of any modules or core components that touch anything that might need to be accounted for. Anyone who has done custom systems development in this space are painfully aware of this. This is aside from the non-business logic parts ie counterintuitive development idiosyncrasies.

SAP was in such a lucky position in tech history... they did solve a problem that was extra profitable for them, but they got greedy and sedentary on the glut...

And then it just became too expensive for their clients to move away. (i hate that company)

but the marketplace for displacement in this space is still ripe, else we wouldnt be seeing startups like this.

Thanks! One of the reasons there hasn't been that many good alternatives is indeed that the product surface is very big. We asked ourselves before launching here if it was too early but the reality is that there will always be more features we can build. Odoo is an example of a super successful open source project in that category but it took them many years of development to get there. I hope that we can find a product market fit faster, by starting with simpler CRM use-cases and expanding slowly to new use-cases (CPQ, Marketing, Commerce) once we've got the basics right.

To be brutally honest, Airtable is a dog to get data out of... the sync is delayed, the API calls to pull data are atrocious and the cost/complexity to exfiltrate data from Airtable is hugely prohibitive.

I wouldn't use that as a source of inspiration, at least not on the "connectivity" end.

Maybe so but it’s incredible as a rapid prototyping tool to solve actual business problems at reasonable scale and it’s one of the few platforms that is constantly improving in intuitive ways.

Emulating AirTable usability with a CRM focus would be a category killer if successful.

Nothing pisses me off more than non-devs saying how AirTable is for devs when all the devs I know hate interfacing with it or having to work with it.

If you want pretty spreadsheets, cool. If you want to use this as a CMS or CRM, and it has to interface with an external tool, god rest your soul.

edit: a candid example, we were using it to track some payables for advertising campaigns. Marketing team (that likes airtable) was adding the invoice as a file field to the table. That file attachment is not added to any "email" or "external" sync features of airtable, making it impossible to add it programmatically to an accounting software or to a shared accounting drive. Using zapier doesn't fix it since it's just not the file or a link to it in any of the api calls, only a reference field. It also doesn't export when you do an export of the table. You have to manually go in and download the file from each record (in the ui) which makes putting it there vs dropping it into a shared drive pretty useless as far as time savings is concerned.

I’m a developer and have run development teams. I fucking love Airtable for solving business problems.

I love it for the same reason I love XL, which is that you can turn it on and it just works and normal people can use it. You can create a sheet that tracks something important to the business in 20 minutes, and you have built in slack notifications and cron-type job capability and the ability to call or be called via REST API and so on, plus easy to follow user management and row level commenting and so on all built in.

In the first 20 minutes.

Yeah there’s stuff it can’t do or is bad for. When you get to that stuff use another tool, and guess what you usually can use whatever you did in Airtable as a spec instead of trying to sort out what the business process actually needs in terms of fields and so on.

I absolutely love it. It’s been an incredibly helpful addition to what had been our previous stack of salesforce for CRM and our own rails app/site, and is just so much faster for creating internal business tools than either.

Are you interfacing with external apps or systems? If you can keep everything INSIDE airtable, it gives a lot of value out of the gate. If you need to tie into it externally, it's a pain in the ass and some things are simply not possible.

I'm the founder of a startup (www.getsubsystem.com) that builds solutions on top of Airtable, so I'm familiar with their systems. While it's true that their REST API has some sharp-edges, particularly around linked fields (columns), rate-limiting, and filtering records, I think it’s mostly solid and user-friendly.

Getting records from a table is as straightforward as making an API call to: `/{baseId}/{tableId}`. For getting the actual ids, there's a metadata API. The docs are also quite comprehensive. I’m curious as to where you have run into issues?

As a user of airtable and not a developer of an airtable app/plugin, the api calls are burdensome (dereferencing lookup fields, data types) and if you want to do any serious work on large bases, you hit rate limits/call limits very quickly.

They make it trivial to import/push data in but accessing it or pulling it out looks like an intentionally hindered dark design pattern (like egress on aws). I have resorted to writing extension scripts in their godforsaken nonstandard javascript framework to access and aggregate data before pushing it out. Accessing google sheets programmatically is a walk in the park, comparatively.

Template library.

There should be a template library and a way to do a really high-level business model NODE style work flow and it pulls the templates needed to make that

A NODE TREE builder for a crm would be valuable, if it doesnt already exist - start with "departments" and then have children recommendations for each, such that Inventory is a Child of Receiving and all the requisite models/modules in such....

The context is the explanation: they don't need to excel because they've got you. Every business should consider this when picking solutions.

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