I have a real lo-tech solution for that. I carry a bound memorandum book (field notes or the like) in my pocket and write down the everything I know about each kid. One kid per page.
Example:
Julian, blonde, in same class, 3rd and 4th grade
Sister: Kiera, two years younger, big hello kitty fan
Mother: Monica, red hair, glasses.
Dad: ??, looks like Ron Swanson.
I just fill in the blanks when I learn them. By the time I'm exchanging phone numbers, I usually have the names down.
Families move and friendships change, so I don't invest a lot of time memorizing details.
I think I’m my parents’ generation this anxiety may have been well placed but today we are all so information-addled that the rules are quite bent. I see parents in my child’s school and activities and hang onto the names of only a few. Everyone seems genuinely unembarrassed to be reintroduced once in a while.
As kids get older and friendships more solid, I can see this changing.
turns out it does not really matter. i either call people so-and-so’s mom, or i simply ask them to remind me their name. it turns out it’s not a social faux pas to not know the names of your kid’s friend’s parents. it’s common and forgiven.
I looked into Monica recently, but feel that it's way too complicated TBH. Information paralysis, too many fields you can fill with irrelevant information.
The lack of mobile apps is also a massive issue - I want to look up information right before I meet someone, and remember most to note down right afterwards.
For my usage the simplicity of Hippo (https://gethippo.app/) makes me much more likely to actively use it.
There’s a lot of improvement to make apps like these less tedious with data entry. I’d also love to see more examples of products that excel at balancing the data-driven nature of technology with personal, empathetic human relationships. It’s a difficult line to walk well.
I like the idea behind a personal CRM. Personally, however, I don't think I've come to the point in my life where I forget about people when I meet them in-person.
On top of that, my biggest issue with tools like these (not bashing, really appreciate that products like these exist) is that they don't intrinsically flow with my life. Honestly Apple Contact is probably as far as I'll go (if even that... I leave a lot of calls without properly IDing them). Personally, I find filling out all the info about a person into some database takes a lot of time... which I guess overtime may save some time based on if you're really utilizing it. This is similar to photos: I am a strong privacy advocate, but Google Photos simply is a far greater product than if I were to spend 10x the time combing through photos to create animations and videos.
Obviously, however, in business, a CRM is a great tool (CRM for investors for example). Which makes me think... maybe I haven't met that many people?
Love the idea of the product and appreciate it exists. I think I'll stick to Apple Contacts and Twitter.
Perhaps it's just about what you're good at. I find it very hard for some reason to remember names or other details like which set of kids are with which parents, even for fairly close family. I've used anki to good effect on this kind of thing but it's not quite the right structure for looking things up.
I've been meaning to try Monica because it's a structured place to store the kind of information I find myself forgetting easily and that is harder to ask again.
Something like this is what I need. I have an awful memory and need something to catalog the people I meet and know. Which would probably sound a bit odd if the people found out but otherwise I wouldn't remember.
My issue is ubiquity and reliability. This doesn't seem to have a mobile component and I'm not sure how reliable the service or even company is. The latter of which can come in time.
It's cool, though. I've been thinking about using something like Airtable for this sort of thing.
(1) is a native mobile/desktop app instead of web-first, because there’s no reason my most personal stuff should be available globally
(2) stores data in a REALLY open format like JSON or YAML, because I want maximum interoperability and minimum but rot
(3) synchronizes across devices using generic file sync tools like Dropbox, google drive, or One Drive, because all my other stuff is in there and they’re as secure as anything gets
(4) runs anywhere without administrator privileges or special run times, because I want to be able to use it at work
(5) federated the data store so I can have a single view into personal, professional and proprietary information, while storing and sharing them appropriately to the sensitivity of the data.
I’m the same and have been using it mostly just to keep track of the names of everyone’s jobs, SO, and kids. The site on mobile is usable, an app might help but isn’t required. As for your data, it lets you export everything quite easily (as JSON IIRC). And since there’s a version you can host yourself, if their service goes away, you can export and self host.
It’s pretty easy to get going on a free Heroku instance too. Consider trying it out if you’re interested in a tool like this.
I would be very interested in this if it can be used as a Carddav server. I run a Nextcloud instance solely as a central point for managing contacts. It syncs with my phone, alias lists for NCID and various other bits and pieces.
Something that specialises in this a bit more, but will still fill in that piece would be quite attractive.
These types of software has, to me, some big pitfalls:
1. The administrative burden: In over for the software to have any value, the user is imposed a huge documentation burden all the time.
2. Privacy: This is probably the worst. Imagine that you write down intimate details of your friends of family, and the platform has a leak. Also, the subjects have _no_ data control what so ever. In the privacy regard this is probably worst in class.
Please don't forget that you can self-host it, so you can own your data. But yes, the administration burden "killed it" for me, too, or at least the enthusiasm to make further edits, although it is a really promising app. I can only imagine taking care of such complex task as your main hobby when you're obsessive to take digital notes of everything. It's not been a year since I've spent a couple of days creating profiles, taking notes of events, conversations, etc, so it might be helpful in a couple of years when I can't remember any of these notes. However, as a self-hosed app, it might not survive that long and I could shut it down to give its resources to something else. Still, a great project, I hope it finds its target audience.
As a non-native English speaker I'm quite surprised at the use of the word "CRM" for “children of all your friends // your brother // your grand mother”
Customers, seriously? Can someone educate me on this particular use of the terms? (to me it was only viable in business situations)
Regardless of the second, third meaning of "customer" in English, I'm afraid the word just won't fly in e.g. Western Europe where it only has 1 meaning (someone who pays you for a service), and people often deplore that business, money distort relationships... It's just a cultural mistake to call Monica a CRM over there. It would be like calling a software "union organizer" to manage your -personal- group of friends in the US... not exactly a "neutral" term, nor one remotely related to "friends". Lots of subtexts in some words, translations not 1:1.
PS to authors of Monica: I can help with a French translation ;-)
"Customer" has the same connotations in US English to native speakers. You aren't missing anything, and nobody would call their friends "customers."
But the software is using "CRM" as a term with its own meaning. It's kind of like "MP3" - the M and P come from "MPEG," where they stand for "motion picture." But really, "MP3" means "audio format 3 from the MPEG standard." Nobody thinks that MP3 users are calling audio files "motion pictures."
Here, "CRM" is playing off of the concept, rather than the literal meaning.
A CRM in practice is a social relationship management tool. So, calling something like this a "CRM" is meant to show people what the tool is used for using a familiar term.
It's a little odd, but I understand what they're getting at.
I wonder how many paid users are there for the hosted version and how the pricing was arrived at. Paying $90 a year for a personal CRM seems quite high since this is for each user. The application allows adding people, relationships, notes about people, events, contacts had with people, etc. There is no integration with any data source to pull information automatically. There is no integration with any platform or application to communicate with others.
I believe the hosted application could earn a lot more to support development and maintenance at a lower price point and reaching many more people.
You're paying somebody $7.50 each month. That's... a latte and a half for the Starbucks crowd. Even at minimum wage, you're paying somebody to do 45 minutes of work for you.
And if organizing your contacts/keeping a log/finding pertinent info is significantly less than 45 minutes/month of work, may I humbly suggest you don't need a CRM?
And my wild guess is the devs know that, and they know that they'll lose the casual crowd anyways. "We make it up in volume" doesn't work if the volume just kicks the tires and leaves.
In my experience, what people really want when they're in that range is not something to manage your contacts - you want help with keeping a household book. (Or butler's book). And I really haven't seen an app to help there yet.
I've tried to use monica and make it work but I find it's a product that doesn't fit with my needs and lacking a lot of simple and useful features.
For example, you have to manually import contacts. You import your 600 contacts and you can't even bulk remove /edit contacts. You're stuck with this huge list of contacts from your phone. Just the simple things such as bulk editing contacts are missing.
So you end up with a list of contact on your phone / email, in addition to monica and it all ends up out of sync.
I want one source of truth for all my contact and people I want to remain in contact with. With everything synced: CRM, phone, email contacts, etc.
My app is in the same space (or at least the original idea of it) but over time I really doubt it is a space to make any money in. People just don't pay for a personal software like this.
I am glad to see that they have over 40,000 users (maybe not active tho) so it proves that the idea is not completely unreasonable. Maybe it just needs a little bit different approach, I don't know.
I myself struggle with what to do with my own app in the space.
I used to use Facebook as essentially a CRM, especially for birthdays. I haven’t used FB in years now and I ported the “CRM” data into google calendar and contacts manually. An actual dedicated CRM makes a lot of sense and it never really dawned on me. Thanks for posting this (and of course thanks for building it!)
i have seen this one on trending php projects on github quite often.
as a side note, the php community is quite good at coming up with cms projects. i wonder what makes the language so nice for writing content management systems in? might be interesting to learn about.
> i wonder what makes the language so nice for writing content management systems in? might be interesting to learn about.
The fact that you just need to drop a file on an Apache server to have a functional web app. It's not so much the language itself but the execution model of the code. No need to stop/start a server when the code changes, no need to actual write a server since Apache fronts everything.
so it has nothing to do with the language, it's about the CGI style model and its simplicity.
PHP is web-first, built for the web, and it does it's job well for that purpose. In the years before this boom of SaaS web apps and platforms, the only thing you needed on the web, in almost all cases, was some sort of CMS.
PHP was traditionally used for CMS', because that's what was needed (and still is) on the web. It's not a glamorous job, but those CRM, ERP, and other data systems are what power the modern business world. And a large number is written in PHP.
Case in point: Serbia's largest government-owned telco "Telekom Srbija" used to use a CRM system written in ASP.NET with WPF client software. In January 2019. they started to migrate off of that solution onto a web based platform written in PHP. It's still kind-of in progress, but I think it will bring them more success.
SBB, Serbia's largest alternative telco, has been using that same PHP-based solution for years, and has a smooth customer acquisition process, because it can be done from anywhere due to the web UI.
Of course, you can have a Web UI with any other language, but PHP is web native and isn't any worse than other languages, but may provide some advantages.
Also, before nodejs was invented, the only truly accessible (as in - simple to develop in, with a tolerant dev environment) language was PHP, if you wanted to do web and web only. There was (and is) Python, Ruby, Java, etc., but they were never easy to use, manage and deploy. Most of the new tools we take for granted weren't available in, i.e. 2005., when the standard dev procedure was to upload files via FTP for a large amount of the world.
And lastly, nowdays, I don't think PHP is any worse than other scripting languages for web usage, especially for CRUD information system UIs. And if you need more than it offers, you will find luck only in .NET [Core] or Java, not in Node or Python.
Ironically, the company I work for is strictly a no-PHP shop, and does no PHP projects for clients, except half of the Intranet that spans many countries (Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia, USA, Netherlands, Germany, Phillipines, UAE, etc.) and management systems are written in PHP. It's just useful for the task, and there's no need to change it, or waste money on something that works. The company is old-ish (from 1998.) but hasn't outgrown the systems (yet). I said ironically because I really like PHP, but do .NET with Oracle at work.
I've tried the self hosted version. What kind of app on android should one use? I think there's supposed to be chandler and I either did not find the app in play store or it did not work. It has been many months since I tried that though.
I evaluated Monica a few years back but it lacked some features so I picked Highrise (from Basecamp). Then Highrise went maintenance mode and Monica still flourishes it looks. If there is a migration tool, I'll be happy to move.
[+] [-] eb0la|6 years ago|reply
I guess the killing feature for me would be remembering names of parents if my kids schoolmates.
You end up calling people "the mother of $KID" for KID in kids in classOf($my_kids).
[+] [-] officemonkey|6 years ago|reply
Example: Julian, blonde, in same class, 3rd and 4th grade Sister: Kiera, two years younger, big hello kitty fan Mother: Monica, red hair, glasses. Dad: ??, looks like Ron Swanson.
I just fill in the blanks when I learn them. By the time I'm exchanging phone numbers, I usually have the names down.
Families move and friendships change, so I don't invest a lot of time memorizing details.
[+] [-] subpixel|6 years ago|reply
As kids get older and friendships more solid, I can see this changing.
[+] [-] techslave|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristofferR|6 years ago|reply
The lack of mobile apps is also a massive issue - I want to look up information right before I meet someone, and remember most to note down right afterwards.
For my usage the simplicity of Hippo (https://gethippo.app/) makes me much more likely to actively use it.
[+] [-] benhurmarcel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wil5for|6 years ago|reply
There’s a lot of improvement to make apps like these less tedious with data entry. I’d also love to see more examples of products that excel at balancing the data-driven nature of technology with personal, empathetic human relationships. It’s a difficult line to walk well.
[+] [-] sdan|6 years ago|reply
On top of that, my biggest issue with tools like these (not bashing, really appreciate that products like these exist) is that they don't intrinsically flow with my life. Honestly Apple Contact is probably as far as I'll go (if even that... I leave a lot of calls without properly IDing them). Personally, I find filling out all the info about a person into some database takes a lot of time... which I guess overtime may save some time based on if you're really utilizing it. This is similar to photos: I am a strong privacy advocate, but Google Photos simply is a far greater product than if I were to spend 10x the time combing through photos to create animations and videos.
Obviously, however, in business, a CRM is a great tool (CRM for investors for example). Which makes me think... maybe I haven't met that many people?
Love the idea of the product and appreciate it exists. I think I'll stick to Apple Contacts and Twitter.
[+] [-] IanCal|6 years ago|reply
I've been meaning to try Monica because it's a structured place to store the kind of information I find myself forgetting easily and that is harder to ask again.
[+] [-] CGamesPlay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|6 years ago|reply
My issue is ubiquity and reliability. This doesn't seem to have a mobile component and I'm not sure how reliable the service or even company is. The latter of which can come in time.
It's cool, though. I've been thinking about using something like Airtable for this sort of thing.
[+] [-] edraferi|6 years ago|reply
(1) is a native mobile/desktop app instead of web-first, because there’s no reason my most personal stuff should be available globally
(2) stores data in a REALLY open format like JSON or YAML, because I want maximum interoperability and minimum but rot
(3) synchronizes across devices using generic file sync tools like Dropbox, google drive, or One Drive, because all my other stuff is in there and they’re as secure as anything gets
(4) runs anywhere without administrator privileges or special run times, because I want to be able to use it at work
(5) federated the data store so I can have a single view into personal, professional and proprietary information, while storing and sharing them appropriately to the sensitivity of the data.
[+] [-] w33ble|6 years ago|reply
It’s pretty easy to get going on a free Heroku instance too. Consider trying it out if you’re interested in a tool like this.
[+] [-] anotherevan|6 years ago|reply
Something that specialises in this a bit more, but will still fill in that piece would be quite attractive.
[+] [-] Operyl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dejj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weinzierl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madsbuch|6 years ago|reply
1. The administrative burden: In over for the software to have any value, the user is imposed a huge documentation burden all the time. 2. Privacy: This is probably the worst. Imagine that you write down intimate details of your friends of family, and the platform has a leak. Also, the subjects have _no_ data control what so ever. In the privacy regard this is probably worst in class.
[+] [-] 713233eb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stoicShell|6 years ago|reply
Customers, seriously? Can someone educate me on this particular use of the terms? (to me it was only viable in business situations)
Regardless of the second, third meaning of "customer" in English, I'm afraid the word just won't fly in e.g. Western Europe where it only has 1 meaning (someone who pays you for a service), and people often deplore that business, money distort relationships... It's just a cultural mistake to call Monica a CRM over there. It would be like calling a software "union organizer" to manage your -personal- group of friends in the US... not exactly a "neutral" term, nor one remotely related to "friends". Lots of subtexts in some words, translations not 1:1.
PS to authors of Monica: I can help with a French translation ;-)
[+] [-] geofft|6 years ago|reply
But the software is using "CRM" as a term with its own meaning. It's kind of like "MP3" - the M and P come from "MPEG," where they stand for "motion picture." But really, "MP3" means "audio format 3 from the MPEG standard." Nobody thinks that MP3 users are calling audio files "motion pictures."
[+] [-] bovermyer|6 years ago|reply
A CRM in practice is a social relationship management tool. So, calling something like this a "CRM" is meant to show people what the tool is used for using a familiar term.
It's a little odd, but I understand what they're getting at.
[+] [-] __initbrian__|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newscracker|6 years ago|reply
I believe the hosted application could earn a lot more to support development and maintenance at a lower price point and reaching many more people.
[+] [-] groby_b|6 years ago|reply
You're paying somebody $7.50 each month. That's... a latte and a half for the Starbucks crowd. Even at minimum wage, you're paying somebody to do 45 minutes of work for you.
And if organizing your contacts/keeping a log/finding pertinent info is significantly less than 45 minutes/month of work, may I humbly suggest you don't need a CRM?
And my wild guess is the devs know that, and they know that they'll lose the casual crowd anyways. "We make it up in volume" doesn't work if the volume just kicks the tires and leaves.
In my experience, what people really want when they're in that range is not something to manage your contacts - you want help with keeping a household book. (Or butler's book). And I really haven't seen an app to help there yet.
[+] [-] tiborsaas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kilroy123|6 years ago|reply
For example, you have to manually import contacts. You import your 600 contacts and you can't even bulk remove /edit contacts. You're stuck with this huge list of contacts from your phone. Just the simple things such as bulk editing contacts are missing.
So you end up with a list of contact on your phone / email, in addition to monica and it all ends up out of sync.
I want one source of truth for all my contact and people I want to remain in contact with. With everything synced: CRM, phone, email contacts, etc.
[+] [-] o-__-o|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpastuszak|6 years ago|reply
I notoriously bad at keeping in touch with people/responding to text messages earlier than in 3 days, so this seems to hit the spot for me.
[+] [-] petr25102018|6 years ago|reply
I am glad to see that they have over 40,000 users (maybe not active tho) so it proves that the idea is not completely unreasonable. Maybe it just needs a little bit different approach, I don't know.
I myself struggle with what to do with my own app in the space.
[+] [-] edraferi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] city41|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blondin|6 years ago|reply
as a side note, the php community is quite good at coming up with cms projects. i wonder what makes the language so nice for writing content management systems in? might be interesting to learn about.
[+] [-] aikah|6 years ago|reply
The fact that you just need to drop a file on an Apache server to have a functional web app. It's not so much the language itself but the execution model of the code. No need to stop/start a server when the code changes, no need to actual write a server since Apache fronts everything.
so it has nothing to do with the language, it's about the CGI style model and its simplicity.
[+] [-] milankragujevic|6 years ago|reply
PHP is web-first, built for the web, and it does it's job well for that purpose. In the years before this boom of SaaS web apps and platforms, the only thing you needed on the web, in almost all cases, was some sort of CMS.
PHP was traditionally used for CMS', because that's what was needed (and still is) on the web. It's not a glamorous job, but those CRM, ERP, and other data systems are what power the modern business world. And a large number is written in PHP.
Case in point: Serbia's largest government-owned telco "Telekom Srbija" used to use a CRM system written in ASP.NET with WPF client software. In January 2019. they started to migrate off of that solution onto a web based platform written in PHP. It's still kind-of in progress, but I think it will bring them more success.
SBB, Serbia's largest alternative telco, has been using that same PHP-based solution for years, and has a smooth customer acquisition process, because it can be done from anywhere due to the web UI.
Of course, you can have a Web UI with any other language, but PHP is web native and isn't any worse than other languages, but may provide some advantages.
Also, before nodejs was invented, the only truly accessible (as in - simple to develop in, with a tolerant dev environment) language was PHP, if you wanted to do web and web only. There was (and is) Python, Ruby, Java, etc., but they were never easy to use, manage and deploy. Most of the new tools we take for granted weren't available in, i.e. 2005., when the standard dev procedure was to upload files via FTP for a large amount of the world.
And lastly, nowdays, I don't think PHP is any worse than other scripting languages for web usage, especially for CRUD information system UIs. And if you need more than it offers, you will find luck only in .NET [Core] or Java, not in Node or Python.
Ironically, the company I work for is strictly a no-PHP shop, and does no PHP projects for clients, except half of the Intranet that spans many countries (Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia, USA, Netherlands, Germany, Phillipines, UAE, etc.) and management systems are written in PHP. It's just useful for the task, and there's no need to change it, or waste money on something that works. The company is old-ish (from 1998.) but hasn't outgrown the systems (yet). I said ironically because I really like PHP, but do .NET with Oracle at work.
[+] [-] muglug|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StuffedParrot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] undreren|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ratiolat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandeboevrie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|6 years ago|reply
I created a mobile app that lets you do this in one step. You just need to configure it with your API key: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twilam.mon...
[+] [-] flakiness|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sathishmanohar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SlowRobotAhead|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedieaston|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply