Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on launch! I completely agree with the wisdom of launching early as soon as some basic functionality works. If I had to suggest the lowest-hanging fruits for your roadmap, it would be email automation and lead enrichment.

I'm an engineering consultant for various sales tech startups which operate within the ecosystem of "build a HubSpot/Salesforce/Freshworks/etc integration for a specific type of sales organization". What I would love to see in an open-source CRM is an easy way to bring these integrations directly into the CRM - imagine a `crm.json` file which configures a CRM web app and imports custom code modules from a central repository, similar to `package.json` and NPM.

A big issue end users bring up with Salesforce/HubSpot is the high cost, especially for sales organizations which only need the core features you have in your demo today (track leads, deals, companies, etc) but have to buy a seat for each salesperson. A managed service for a hosted CRM without feature/usage/seat limitations would be an easy sell if you can reliably ingest existing CRM data and provide some level of integrations/customization.

I like the "crm.json" image. We definitely want to work on doing something modular like this.

I also wanted to price differently than by seat initially. Because CRMs tends to be the source of truth for the whole organizations, and usually teams like customer support are left out because it's not worth paying a license for them to just read the information the sales have put in, while it would be useful. But we didn't find a better way to price in the end. Pricing by usage feels off since there is no cost associated to usage (a user that logs more activities is not going to cost us more). How would you charge then?

Noted for email automation / lead enrichment!

If you look at medical EMRs (essentially a CRM where patients are customers and salespeople are doctors) there is a similar situation as the CRM market, where a few big players dominate the scene with crappy software and feature creep (i.e. Epic = Salesforce). Based on the clean UI you have so far, you're definitely on the way to building a better user experience for CRMs, but at the end of the day you have to sell this to a salesperson, just like people selling better EMRs have to sell to hospital administrators who don't care how great the code is.

Consider an organization spending $10k/year on HubSpot. They're also spending at least a million a year on salaries/commissions for their sales staff. Optimizing software costs addresses 1% of the total spend, while making sales people more efficient optimizes the other 99%. In general, if your target customer is sales management, I would pitch support/customization contracts to streamline sales organizations when you're picking up initial customers. This would also likely bring you perspective on the wide range of customizations out there.

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