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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

"Poppy turns your contacts into a living garden. Gentle reminders, zero guilt."—bleh, at least write your own taglines :/

This is a neat idea that has been tried about 300 times over, but since it's contingent on already being cognizant of keeping up with relationships, people that install it aren't going to people that need to be using it.

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> This is a neat idea that has been tried about 300 times over

Could you share the top 3 attempts that tried it and are better at it? I only know that things like this should exist, but didn't look any further into this class of things, yet.

My idea of what to look into is some kind of CRM for my personal contacts.

Not sure if it's top 3, but I use Monica https://www.monicahq.com/ which does advertise itself as a personal CRM. I certainly underutilize its features but things like birthday reminders + a place for a few notes (where do they live again? who's their partner?) is nice

I just put that stuff into obsidian here. Only thing I miss are the birthday reminders but there's probably a plugin for that :)

oh interesting, I never thought about using my obsidian vault for that.

Can you share a bit more about how you structure this and how you would recommend getting started ?

I recommend keeping it simple. The Obsidian "Bases" feature is a good fit for this if you don't want to go deep w plugins and DIY (which is also viable but has more learning curve and overhead).

Well I just have a folder in obsidian and a template for friends. So I can fill in the various fields like address, names of kids/pets, things they like for when I need to buy a present etc.

The rest I just freeform.

But reminders would be nice.

You can also self-host Monica, either via Docker or on metal if you're comfortable with Laravel.

Check out https://github.com/Relvio-AI/relvio, its an open-source personal CRM that connects to Gmail and automatically extracts your contacts. You can add notes, tag people by relationship, set follow-up reminders with overdue tracking, and see who you're losing touch with. LinkedIn import works via CSV.

Free, runs locally on your machine with no cloud or subscription, takes a couple minutes to set up

I mean, I’m a pretty ADHD guy, very in the moment, and although I sporadically invite friends or old colleagues to catch up for lunch, I mean to do it regularly, but I might forget to invite them for years at a time, so this might be good for me. I could really used an “Anki for lunch”, spaced repetition reminders for people in my Rolodex, as it were.

You just need a tickler file.

Please give it a good and let me know which parts don’t work for you :)

Makes me think about a neat feature possibility -- a constraint that means having a garden means others can see into it in some sense, just like a real life garden in your yard. A garden demonstrates to others your care and attention toward it

Very interesting idea! One of the features of the app is the no signup no data associated to you which has to change if I want to allow peeking into your friends garden to see “anonymous views” of their garden.

Haha thanks, that’s what the MVP is for. Although I appreciate your feedback. Even if this helps 100 other people, that’s all the validation I need.

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