Having implemented a few different CRM systems, I think that CRM systems should be opinionated and enforce business rule best practices for most users.
When I meet a CRM salesperson, and they're like our software will do whatever you want and we will create it, you have to read between the lines and translate it. What they really mean is "Our software isn't designged to work for most general use cases, implementation will require a team of really expensive developers to create and maintain, we will tell you we are making custom fitting "cuture" software and you will be sending us a boat load of money for the rest of your company's life if it works or you will burn a giant pile of money until it doesn't work.
This isn't my first rodeo. If you have to extensively customize the software then the cost of the software will end up being moot and the cost of the people to run it will end up costing a fortune forever.
After all, they just want to re-implement their current, CRM solution (which is terrible, and is why they want to buy a new one in the first place) in the new fancy CRM.
By opinionated, do you mean buying specialized off-the-shelf CRM solutions for a specific industry? For example, if the customer runs a legal firm, they should buy a CRM with functionality targeted towards legal firms?
I'm pretty sure this implementation gap is done partly for a good reason and partly for a bad reason.
The good reason is even within an individual industry each company is different enough that the software needs to be extremely customizable or there will be too much adoption pain required. I don't think opinionated does it when you would need to enforce change across large swathes of people. I have seen this tried and be an expensive failure across more than one organization where malicious compliance basically killed multimillion-dollar rollouts of this kind because people simply weren't prepared to change their workflows. I've seen the CTO of a very large organization first instruct, then ask, then plead, then beg for people to adopt the CRM that had been installed at great cost all to no avail.
The bad reason is that lots of big software companies (but definitely CRM people like Salesforce) rely on big consultancy firms to sell their product. Consultancy do that because they "don't sell software, they sell solutions", meaning they come in and do the implementation etc. They wouldn't do this if they didn't get the sweet sweet billable hours, so your software better be customizable up the wazoo for them to be interested in being your sales army.
And then piled on top of that, salesforce have created an ecosystem of developers who do the customization. So if you're a small bank, you might want ncino to do your loan workflows etc. That means Ncino are selling salesforce everytime they sell their product etc.
If you can't customize the software, then you'll implement external hacks and workarounds that are much uglier and costlier to maintain than customizations layered on top of a more flexible system would be, or else you just won't use the software.
This isn't my first rodeo either, and in my experience, most firms have at least a few idiosyncratic rules and process that they aren't willing to change just to conform to the limitations of software.
If you build opinionated software, your customer base will be limited to businesses that either already operate according to the assumptions you've baked in to your design, or else have the resources to implement their own solutions -- at higher complexity than customization -- to compensate for what's missing from yours.
I like the idea of an open source CRM, it means you can take it and do the customizations in-house (as opposed to paying consultants to do it) or both. Out of the box and on a small scale, this feels very much like a self-hosted version of Notion.
Can it be built as layers - a flexible platform, with an opinionated product built on top of it? That way, simple use cases are easy and complicated use cases are possible.
I can't tell from your comment: are you saying that TwentyCRM is not opinionated or enforcing business rule best practices, or is this just a general blanket statement about CRMs that may or may not be relevant to the submission?
Soooo many things missing on first sight. Did the authors ever see a real system in a real company?
Also please fill the demo with at least 10.000 to 100.000 items - it makes no sense showing your software with five data items, it looks like a demo for some home work then. We want to see how it behaves with millions of data.
I like that you signed up just to comment on this. It probably means we're doing something that matters even if you think we don't do it well :)
We'll work on a real demo environment with a lot of records, we just haven't prioritized it yet. Right now it's not really a demo environment, but a real account that happens to be provisioned with a few example records. Putting more records wouldn't really make sense (you have to delete those records manually to start using the CRM).
Yes that’s why we created this. For my previous company I couldn’t find anything I liked. I wanted something built with modern technologies and by people who care about design.
There are still a lot of things we need to develop to be at feature parity with big players but we are shipping fast and we will get there!
> Dank. I've always disliked most open source CRMs because they are either outdated or hold back too many features as paid.
It's the open source circle of life. The same thing will happen to Twenty in a number of years. Things to watch out for: someone launches a competing hosted version of thr CRM.
TLDR is that the cloud version hasn't been our primary focus yet and we put a high pricing on purpose that is not the final pricing, while we figure out the good pricing strategy. As of today everything is free without any limitation, we don't enforce any limit. And when we rollout the real pricing, it will be more compelling
It’s already a good CRM for basic tasks like tracking contacts and opportunities. It’s stable and mostly bug-free. Next month we will ship custom objects and the API, then email integration. And next step is to make it truly extensible (right now your best option to do something truly custom is to fork it which obviously isn’t great).
Based on my experience, one of the most challenging aspects of CRM is having sales agents manually enter customer data and log activities such as calls and emails, especially when dealing with messaging across different platforms. While many SaaS and open-source CRM systems offer basic contact, lead, and opportunity management features, they often lack comprehensive solutions for these issues.
it looks like a notion clone on first inspection. your github/website could be more powerful if you highlighted some differentiators! I see there is an "emails" tab. Does it allow you to track emails like HubSpot?
Odoo is an open source ERP so they're doing a lot more than CRM. They also want to replace Docusign, Shopify, Workday, Notion, Intercom, Google Sheets, and more.
We will focus on a narrower scope and try to do it very well instead of going into that many directions
Open source or not, apparently the no cost version is limited to 100 contacts, making that version a toy at best. At $29/seat/mo, it's not far away from far more mature all-employee Zoho One at $37/seat/mo (paid annually).
Since VSCode is the most popular editor, it sets a pre-configured environment for people who want to contribute. For exemple it suggests extensions we recommend using.
You're linking to your own post, self-judge that it's a good post, it has a call-to-action for a "free of charge consultation" at the bottom (which, ironically, leads to a page with 2 separate loading bars before still showing a flash of unstyled content) where you will presumably (based on the homepage and pricing page) be sold a competing product to TwentyCRM. Is there any redeeming way in which your comment is not just spam / trying to use this thread as free advertising space?
[+] [-] daft_pink|2 years ago|reply
When I meet a CRM salesperson, and they're like our software will do whatever you want and we will create it, you have to read between the lines and translate it. What they really mean is "Our software isn't designged to work for most general use cases, implementation will require a team of really expensive developers to create and maintain, we will tell you we are making custom fitting "cuture" software and you will be sending us a boat load of money for the rest of your company's life if it works or you will burn a giant pile of money until it doesn't work.
This isn't my first rodeo. If you have to extensively customize the software then the cost of the software will end up being moot and the cost of the people to run it will end up costing a fortune forever.
[+] [-] bluedino|2 years ago|reply
After all, they just want to re-implement their current, CRM solution (which is terrible, and is why they want to buy a new one in the first place) in the new fancy CRM.
[+] [-] danjac|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanhunter|2 years ago|reply
The good reason is even within an individual industry each company is different enough that the software needs to be extremely customizable or there will be too much adoption pain required. I don't think opinionated does it when you would need to enforce change across large swathes of people. I have seen this tried and be an expensive failure across more than one organization where malicious compliance basically killed multimillion-dollar rollouts of this kind because people simply weren't prepared to change their workflows. I've seen the CTO of a very large organization first instruct, then ask, then plead, then beg for people to adopt the CRM that had been installed at great cost all to no avail.
The bad reason is that lots of big software companies (but definitely CRM people like Salesforce) rely on big consultancy firms to sell their product. Consultancy do that because they "don't sell software, they sell solutions", meaning they come in and do the implementation etc. They wouldn't do this if they didn't get the sweet sweet billable hours, so your software better be customizable up the wazoo for them to be interested in being your sales army.
And then piled on top of that, salesforce have created an ecosystem of developers who do the customization. So if you're a small bank, you might want ncino to do your loan workflows etc. That means Ncino are selling salesforce everytime they sell their product etc.
[+] [-] Gormo|2 years ago|reply
This isn't my first rodeo either, and in my experience, most firms have at least a few idiosyncratic rules and process that they aren't willing to change just to conform to the limitations of software.
If you build opinionated software, your customer base will be limited to businesses that either already operate according to the assumptions you've baked in to your design, or else have the resources to implement their own solutions -- at higher complexity than customization -- to compensate for what's missing from yours.
[+] [-] isodev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mavelikara|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cloudquelle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iFelix|2 years ago|reply
We're currently rewriting the backend and will ship a new version on October 30 that will be much more powerful (with a flexible data model)
[+] [-] CRM_CHILD_IDENT|2 years ago|reply
Also please fill the demo with at least 10.000 to 100.000 items - it makes no sense showing your software with five data items, it looks like a demo for some home work then. We want to see how it behaves with millions of data.
[+] [-] iFelix|2 years ago|reply
We'll work on a real demo environment with a lot of records, we just haven't prioritized it yet. Right now it's not really a demo environment, but a real account that happens to be provisioned with a few example records. Putting more records wouldn't really make sense (you have to delete those records manually to start using the CRM).
[+] [-] kaliqt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iFelix|2 years ago|reply
There are still a lot of things we need to develop to be at feature parity with big players but we are shipping fast and we will get there!
[+] [-] sangnoir|2 years ago|reply
It's the open source circle of life. The same thing will happen to Twenty in a number of years. Things to watch out for: someone launches a competing hosted version of thr CRM.
[+] [-] Linusvq|2 years ago|reply
— deleting my previous comment -
[+] [-] iFelix|2 years ago|reply
As for the cloud version, I replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808121
TLDR is that the cloud version hasn't been our primary focus yet and we put a high pricing on purpose that is not the final pricing, while we figure out the good pricing strategy. As of today everything is free without any limitation, we don't enforce any limit. And when we rollout the real pricing, it will be more compelling
[+] [-] dizhn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iFelix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamnk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guluarte|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hosteur|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yieldcrv|2 years ago|reply
removing those limits in an open source alternative doesnt help that crowd
but yeah there’s definitely a sliver of an audience that can do system design and wont just roll out their own microservices and database
[+] [-] honeybadger1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmkelly4444|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iFelix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaza|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iFelix|2 years ago|reply
We will focus on a narrower scope and try to do it very well instead of going into that many directions
[+] [-] RagnarD|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkey_monkey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulmendoza|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victorbjorklund|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbarrera_dev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aiunboxed|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iFelix|2 years ago|reply
Storybook here: https://storybook.twenty.com
When it's mature enough we'll isolate this into a UI lib anyone can use
[+] [-] nurettin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iFelix|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garyclarke27|2 years ago|reply
What is CRM Why use CRM?
https://www.onedb.online/blog/what_is_crm_why_use_crm
[+] [-] lucb1e|2 years ago|reply