[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) - Open-source CRM
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Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) - Open-source CRM
Hello HN, Seven years ago, I complained about Salesforce on HN.
Somebody said: "one day, someone will do better". That stuck and
today we're trying to be that "someone" with my co-founders Thomas
(design) and Charles (eng like me). Our company is called Twenty
and our repo is here: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty We want
to fix two issues: most CRMs aren't enjoyable to use and they often
clash with engineering teams. YC encouraged us to launch early.
What you see now is about two months' worth of feature development.
Our tool only does a small part of what big CRM players offer, but
we focused on providing a great user experience on the basics,
instead of spreading ourselves thin across a vast range of features
and delivering them half-heartedly. Plus, we've found that many
small companies like the product as it is because they don't need
all the complex stuff. Once we have covered the basics, we'll soon
be working on three big features: - Moving to a robust metadata-
driven architecture; - Providing innovating ways to extend the CRM
with Typescript; - Making it easy to connect data sources, and
fetch data in real-time like in BI tools. The startup world is
littered with ghosts of so-called "Salesforce killers", so we know
it sounds naive to pitch ourselves in a similar way. But we think
that if someone ends up changing this market, it will most likely
be through a community-led effort. And there hasn't really been any
serious attempt to start a great new open source CRM in the last
decade. Twenty is built with Typescript, React, and NestJS with
GraphQL, and licensed under AGPL. We plan to make money by offering
a hosted version. Our docs are here: https://docs.twenty.com. Try
on cloud: https://app.twenty.com. Dev setup and demo:
https://www.loom.com/share/7b20b44d8d5146fea8923183511bb818 (Loom
said they couldn't provide a transcript because they don't support
"language other than english" haha... apologies in advance!) We're
very eager to get your feedback as we haven't launched anywhere
before this post. What's your CRM story? What should we prioritize
next?
Author : iFelix
Score : 169 points
Date : 2023-07-19 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
| fuddle wrote:
| The first thing that popped out to me when looking at your github
| repo is this need to be updated:
| https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/blob/main/server/README.m...
| charlesTwenty wrote:
| Thanks! Yes :D We are publishing the repo as it is, and we know
| we have a ton of things to improve, including documentation! I
| had actually forgotten about this readme, will make sure to
| remove it https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/764
| [deleted]
| bitlad wrote:
| I think your open source story is weak. Your narrative is we
| shatter build vs buy. CRM in today's day and age is mostly buy
| decision. If you want custom analytics or workflows, you would
| hook up various point-solutions like segment, hightouch and
| various business automation tools.
|
| Also, it is not very clear which market segment you are going
| after. If it is midmarket then my narrative is kind of what
| happens there. In early stage you have low ticket size problem.
| In enterprise, you have hubspot, salesforce and various other
| tools.
|
| Building a salesforce knock off does not make sense. As you said,
| `The startup world is littered with ghosts of so-called
| "Salesforce killers"`, there must be a reason why. Most likely ,
| it is the fact that there is no market for salesforce killers.
|
| I think your pricing is off. It is $30 per user per month, Post
| 50 users, your platform is more expensive than hubspot's CRM
| suite which includes everything.
| yahelc wrote:
| How hard was acquiring the domain twenty.com?
| iFelix wrote:
| It cost us ~$100k from a broker. I've always loved nice domain
| names and I had some cash because I sold my previous company to
| Airbnb so I was happy to spend it!
| solarkraft wrote:
| Holy crap, is the name that great?
| iFelix wrote:
| Haha, it's the usual market price for a nice one-word .com
| ; I don't see this as money thrown away like spending in
| ads for example, it's closer to a real estate investment in
| my opinion
| dban wrote:
| Rooting for your success, legacy CRMs are without exception just
| unspeakably bad
| iFelix wrote:
| Thank you!
| Mandatum wrote:
| You should have launched with integration. This is a waste of a
| launch.
| iFelix wrote:
| There is a ton of great feedback from users in this thread that
| will help us build a better product, that's enough to justify
| this launch in my opinion :)
|
| Noted for integrations as a top-priority!
| Closi wrote:
| Best of luck!
|
| Generally agree with launching early - although this feels _very_
| early! We are currently looking for a replacement to our HubSpot
| account, however this appears to be very buggy to start with and
| misses some basic functions:
|
| * Doesn't seem to be a way to name / describe an opportunity
| (pretty fundamental)
|
| * Cannot quickly add an opportunity without setting up the
| company (most other CRM products have a quick-add)
|
| * 'Contact' appears to have a quick-add when adding an
| opportunity, but it doesn't work.
|
| * All opportunities automatically default to Lost
|
| * Dragging an opportunity into an 'empty' bucket does not always
| behave as expected (e.g. if you drag it to below the 'new'
| button)
|
| * No way to add additional pipeline stages
|
| * Users can remove all companies/deals/contacts from the system
| in two clicks with no limit and no way to reverse (:
|
| * If you invite a user to your workspace, they are immediately
| admin and can kick you out of your own workspace.
|
| This is after like 10 minutes of testing so I assume there are
| lots of other issues too...
|
| Broadly at the moment I don't think it passes the 'Being a better
| CRM than Trello' test, but hopefully with time it will. At the
| moment though it feels very under-baked.
| umrashrf wrote:
| Just in time for my app (Cancelly.ca) to use a CRM. I was going
| to code a CRM myself. I hope it stays open source. Like how
| OpenAI went from being Non-profit to for profit.
| iFelix wrote:
| Yes it will! Not sure if you're going to self-host but we
| haven't published any click-to-deploy buttons yet so let us
| know if you'd like to self-host and have issues doing it
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Looks exactly like what I have built with two notion tables :man
| shrugging:
| lefstathiou wrote:
| My two cents based on how we use Salesforce
|
| 1- being able to bcc or better yet have a gmail extension to log
| emails sent to prospects and clients is a foundational
| requirement for us. Be sure to have that asap. Outside of being a
| CRM, our SF is the knowledge base of all customer interaction.
|
| 2- Opportunities and funnel management are critical workflows for
| us. Being able to define rules on qualification and auto activate
| / expire a prospect is important.
|
| 3- documentation is important. I know there are armies of SF
| consultants I can tap into if needed. In the absence of that, a
| strong wiki will be important as you start offering customization
|
| 4- speed speed speed. My team much preferred SF classic over
| lightening because it was significantly faster
|
| 5- for us, mobile is overrated. Most work is done on the laptop
| or desktop. Mobile is more about reading details and freshening
| up on client ahead of the meeting
|
| Lastly, I've dabbled with the idea of offering a light-weight CRM
| to our clients (we serve a niche industry that has onerous
| onboarding requirements and the vast majority of clients don't
| use an off the shelf CRM). Once you polish this off, if you're
| open to chatting about a white labeled solution feel free to
| connect.
|
| Good luck.
| iFelix wrote:
| Thanks! 1 - We should have that soon yes 2 - Auto-activate
| would be based on what kind of trigger? 3 - We'll work on that
| and creating a strong community 4 - Good to know it's also a
| customer priority and not just dev obsession! 5 - Good to know
| 6 - Our current license is AGPL which might not be ideal for
| this but we are very open to chat and adapt. We'll focus on
| building strong foundations in the next few months but once we
| have that, this would be a great use-case. My previous company
| was in a similar situation (in the property management
| industry) and I ended up building an in-house CRM for our
| partners. I probably wouldn't have done it this way if there
| was a good/extensible/open source solution available. My email
| is felix [at] twenty.com if you ever want to get in touch
| paxys wrote:
| The biggest mistake a competitor can make is thinking Salesforce
| is a CRM. They may sell themselves as one, but that is just to
| get a foothold in a company's sales system. Salesforce actually
| sells (1) an ecosystem that lets your company connect to any
| other software out there and (2) a platform on which you can
| build...basically anything. These two together ensure that every
| one of their customers is 100% locked in and will continue to pay
| whatever Salesforce asks for all eternity. The actual CRM part
| (basically tables of data with a UI) is trivial, and not really
| their "special sauce" that you can disrupt with something
| shinier.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Salesforce is basically the OS for your company.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| What's SAP then?
| vxNsr wrote:
| Same thing, as is servicenow, they're all cloud platforms
| angling to be the "Company OS" all coming at it from
| different angles. Salesforce comes in at the sales side of
| things, SAP invades as a finance app, and ServiceNow begins
| their encroachment as an IT ticketing system, but they all
| wanna be THE only cloud platform your company needs.
| LrnByTeach wrote:
| good to know what these "Company OS" stands for
|
| > Salesforce comes in at the sales side of things,
|
| > SAP invades as a finance app, and
|
| > ServiceNow begins their encroachment as an IT ticketing
| system,
|
| but they all wanna be THE only cloud platform your
| company needs.
| iFelix wrote:
| Good summary!
|
| And Microsoft through the Productivity apps? (Word,
| Excel...)
| phkahler wrote:
| It seems like a good solution would have clean interfaces
| between various pieces so they can be easily replaced.
| Sales, purchasing, payroll, HR, and IT stand out to me,
| but there may well be others.
| alemanek wrote:
| A virus
| nickstinemates wrote:
| An OS for Finance :)
| jarym wrote:
| An OS for bleeding companies dry
| SystemOut wrote:
| Replace Salesforce and CRM with ServiceNow and ITSM and it's a
| similar story. They call it "Land and Expand". There's a reason
| they have a 99% or so renewal rate.
| scrapcode wrote:
| ServiceNow can't be worse than BMC Remedy... I hope.
| esafak wrote:
| You can say the same thing (lock in) about any product that has
| migration costs. If everybody thought that way nothing would
| get built. I say to Felix: just do it, but think about these
| problems.
|
| Fortunately there is a whole field of business devoted to this
| problem: go-to-market strategy. Target a niche, offer a
| compatible product, offer a significantly better product, offer
| a different product, offer a cheaper product ... the options
| are endless.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > You can say the same thing (lock in) about any product that
| has migration costs. If everybody thought that way nothing
| would get built.
|
| Not all "migration costs" are the same: to quote General
| Turgidson, _" It is necessary now to make a choice, to choose
| between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless
| _distinguishable _, postwar environments: one where you got
| twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a
| hundred and fifty million people killed. "_
|
| In the case of software migration costs, the cost of
| migrating away from a proprietary application-platform with
| zero-to-little code and data portability, will be orders of
| magnitude higher than the cost of migrating away from a
| proprietary infrastructure-as-a-service platform.
|
| This isn't anything new: while Cloud-y platforms like
| SalesForce present even higher barriers to exercising our
| rights to data-sovereignty than what we had previously with
| SAP (because at least with SAP you can defenestrate the
| machines), it's all too similar to the 4GL vs. SQL wars of
| the 1990s. I honestly can't think of any orgs from then that
| regrets betting on a SQL-based RDBMS, while there are still
| companies out there depending on FoxPro, Progress, or
| worse...
|
| This is also why I flat-out refuse to use Firebase.
|
| Another hidden-cost of 4GL-like systems is that eventually
| they run-out-of-steam: hype fades and the vendor becomes
| stagnant and/or can't attract the best minds in the industry
| to design and build the platforms they expect others to use,
| so they lose whatever advantages they might have had which
| justified their proprietary nature - or an even more
| insidious version, whereby too many slow-moving companies
| become dependent on a particular platform that the platform's
| vendors have to intentionally hold-back the platform to avoid
| imposing too many fast-moving potentially breaking-changes
| (Java comes to mind...).
| marpstar wrote:
| Right, but the bigger the organization, the larger those
| costs. Think of a city of Los Angeles switching to a new
| system for tracking their public works department versus a
| township of 3,000 people. Smaller orgs are much more tolerant
| to this. New orgs start small and don't need something huge
| like Salesforce immediately; they need something usable.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I think of Salesforce like an octopus that puts immovable
| tentacles into the organisation that are almost never removed.
| It provides as much opportunity to be misused as possible!
| marpstar wrote:
| Accurate. The licensing (and the "kill switch") at a previous
| job were controlled entirely via Salesforce. Our app would
| "phone home" regularly to check which features are being paid
| for and we'd toggle them on and off in our app accordingly.
|
| I had, at the same company, been asked to evaluate building
| Salesforce apps (using the _custom programming language_ they
| provide) and contrasting that with building new apps on our own
| metadata-driven platform.
|
| Developers hate it, business people love it. It won't be going
| away for lack of paying customers, that's for sure.
| collinc777 wrote:
| Apex is nightmare fuel
| chologrande wrote:
| 100% - having to submit code server side to just get
| compilation results is the worst development loop I've ever
| experienced.
| iFelix wrote:
| I'm really eager to get to the point where we can work on
| CRM extensibility and developer experience. We're hoping
| to bring traditional web development workflows and not
| re-invent anything. We opted for a multi-tenant
| infrastructure for the cloud hosted version so there will
| be some additional challenges to make it work in that
| context!
| vxNsr wrote:
| If you wanna see what that might look like, take a look
| at servicenow, I do basically all my coding in vscode,
| and ctrl+s saves to the dev server. they have one of the
| more robust developer environments I've used.
| iFelix wrote:
| great thanks for the tip, we'll try it!
| iFelix wrote:
| 100% agree. And we are not there yet. But I feel like open
| source is the best answer to 1 (building an ecosystem of
| integrations), and that it will also allow us to build a better
| platform for developers (2): why learn Aura components/Apex
| when you already know and can use Typescript/React?
| solarkraft wrote:
| A "real" development stack might enable users to build
| actually good experiences. The custom (proprietary) stacks
| I've seen so far have always been pretty "meh", lacking
| features, community and tooling, resulting in not-great DX
| and making building some features something between very
| hacky and impossible.
| btown wrote:
| An open-source core is only part of it, because different
| users will need different data models for different business
| domains. One of the biggest challenges here will be: how can
| you allow tenants to run arbitrary plugins that (a) execute
| arbitrary sandboxed server-side code, and (b) can store
| arbitrary new data models and custom fields within your
| instance's centralized storage alongside the canonical model
| types, in a way that allows for indices, foreign key
| constraints, and derived materialized fields?
|
| If you solve this and provide a great developer experience,
| including free sandbox accounts and a payments stack so that
| developers can sell plugins without needing to ever operate
| their own infrastructure, with namespacing to avoid
| compatibility problems between apps, then the ecosystem will
| come.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| HubSpot recently launched something to do this by providing
| a Lambda runtime to generate components within the CRM
| dashboard.
|
| https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/cms/data/serverless-
| func...
| charlesTwenty wrote:
| That's a very good point. In the early stage, we were
| thinking about a single tenant architecture which would
| make this questions way easier. However, I am a strong
| believer in multi-tenant architectures as they allow to
| scale while mutualizing the resources (I personally think
| it's single tenant at scale is non-sense in term of
| ecology) and we will invest into maintaining a multi-tenant
| architecture.
|
| So, as we go through the multi-tenant path, what you say is
| very relevant and will be challenging.
|
| Regarding custom entities and custom fields, we plan to
| introduce a flexible data table backed by a meta-data,
| quite close to what salesforce is doing ; this article is
| gold about how they built it:
| https://architect.salesforce.com/fundamentals/platform-
| multi.... In short, you have a data table (uuid, objectid,
| tenantid, field1, ..., fiel500) where fields are VARCHARs
| and you build your own engine on top of that. This comes
| with a lot of challenges such as performances (indexation),
| typing (we lose Typescript/GraphQL power obviously as we
| deal with flexible data modeling)
|
| Regarding plugins that we want users to be able to create
| and to activate on the marketplace without vetting, here is
| the way we see it right now:
|
| 1) Front-end: serve a dedicated JS depending on what
| workspace you are on. Rebuild this JS when you activate /
| update a plugin
|
| 2) Back-end: we will need to execute the code in a separate
| environment. We were thinking about serverless lambdas for
| the cloud version and keep it local on the main server for
| self-hosting ; kind of allowing two drivers (lambdas +
| local) to execute plugin code in the codebase but using
| lambdas only on the the cloud).
|
| Would love to chat a bit more about it. We will likely open
| a Github discussion thread in the upcoming weeks about this
| specific topic) so we can get the feedback from anyone
| interested into it
| sb8244 wrote:
| The ecosystem is really not about Aura/Apex. I think the API
| is a bigger piece. Pretty much everything in Salesforce can
| be controlled via the API.
|
| That isn't even the big challenge though. The biggest
| challenge is getting people to build for your platform. If a
| sales team uses 10+ integrations (it's honestly probably
| 20-50), then they will pick a platform that supports 9-10 of
| their integrations.
| samanator wrote:
| > The actual CRM part (basically tables of data with a UI) is
| trivial
|
| Although I agree with the general sentiment, I disagree with
| this. I've tried out over 100 low-code ui builder over the past
| year (including creatio,Corteza,ERPNext,Baserow,tadabase,appsmi
| th,nocodb,mathesar,bubble, etc.) and so far none of them have
| perfected "excel like ease with the power of a database".
|
| If anyone has any suggestions, (that's not on my list
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15Pg6y11JscBMK-PK06f7...
| ), please let me know!
| iFelix wrote:
| 2 competitors which I think are getting things right on the
| UI front are Attio [1] and Folk [2]. It's not as powerful as
| Salesforce and the data structure is very loose, but they
| have done a good job with the user-experience. They are not
| open source though.
|
| [1] https://attio.com [2] https://www.folk.app
| samanator wrote:
| One of my requirements is that I must be able to host the
| database myself :-) (with a preference for Postgres)
| epberry wrote:
| The salesforce object model/API is actually pretty reasonable
| and easy to work with. Their UI is horrible but the Lightning
| version is fast at least.
| cpursley wrote:
| JavaScript on the back end? HARD pass.
| iFelix wrote:
| Haha, I was waiting for a comment on programming language
| choice.
|
| It was my first time with JS on the backend and I really enjoy
| the dev experience with Nest. Sadly, we can't please everyone
| lysecret wrote:
| Today I learned that salesforce is like SAP
| sandGorgon wrote:
| this is brilliant (and great name). The true value of a
| salesorce/hubspot killer CRM is integrations. Most people use
| hubspot or salesforce just as a database and use a bunch of other
| tools.
|
| If you want to do one thing - focus on integrations first and UI
| second. Let your integration architecture inform your UI/metadata
| driven architecture.
|
| the good thing is - this is an easy step into monetization.
| Anyone would pay the same cost as hubspot for an opensource
| alternative...but with the same integrations. Managing the data
| pipelines is the hard part.
| iFelix wrote:
| Yes that's exactly what we've seen! A lot of companies we've
| talked with don't have a datawarehouse / reverse-ETL, so they
| use the CRM for that instead,and the integrations are core the
| CRM value prop. That's what makes it hard for small CRMs with a
| nice UI to compete with large players. From that perspective, I
| think being open source will help us a lot build this network
| of integrations faster
|
| Great feedback that we should prioritize it as early as
| possible, thanks!
| pclark wrote:
| Lots of comments about salesforce app exchange, but I will say,
| as someone (unfortunately) very familiar with Salesforce and also
| startups ... I think there is a huge opportunity here.
|
| The Salesforce schema of opportunities is incredibly out dated
| for modern software companies -- you only need to look at the
| explosion of "PLG CRMs" in the past few years -- I think there is
| a massive opportunity for a CRM that integrates natively with
| Segment/Posthog to onboard event data.
| iFelix wrote:
| We initially though pitching "Segment-native" or "Warehouse-
| native" as one of our key differentiating feature (we haven't
| build any of that yet). I agree nailing this would make a big
| difference
| a13n wrote:
| Best of luck. Would be happy to receive an email from your sales
| team once you have the equivalent of HubSpot marketing
| enterprise. As an engineer turned founder, I agree these products
| suck and the market is ready for disruption. Focusing on
| engineers and product quality is a good play.
| iFelix wrote:
| Thanks a lot! It's a long-term play but we'll get there
| Jemm wrote:
| Customer relationship management (CRM)
| iFelix wrote:
| You guessed it!
| crimsoneer wrote:
| ooooh, this is nifty. I was just thinking we needed a good CRM!
| Are there any other good, self-hosted alternatives I hsould be
| aware of?
| walski wrote:
| We use Espo (https://www.espocrm.com/) and while it's not the
| most "shiny object" ever it gets the job done relatively ok for
| our small team
| iFelix wrote:
| Not trying to hide our competition but honestly, we came to
| build this because I didn't find any.
|
| The leader 15 years ago was SugarCRM but sadly they ended up
| getting bought by a PE fund and closing the source. There is a
| project called SuiteCRM[1] that continued with an open source
| fork but in my opinion they lack the "modern" touch that we
| were looking for.
|
| Besides that, other options I've seen are Yeti [2] or Odoo [3].
| Odoo is very successful but it's different because it's an ERP
| so CRM is only a small part of what they do. They tend do do a
| lot of things so can't do all of them very well.
|
| [1] https://github.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM [2]
| https://github.com/YetiForceCompany/YetiForceCRM [3]
| https://github.com/odoo/odoo
| sdesol wrote:
| Here's some open source insights regarding the repos
| mentioned so far.
|
| https://devboard.gitsense.com/twentyhq/twenty
|
| https://devboard.gitsense.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM
|
| https://devboard.gitsense.com/YetiForceCompany/YetiForceCRM
|
| https://devboard.gitsense.com/odoo/odoo
|
| Some notes based on what I'm seeing are SuiteCRM and
| YetiForceCRM are not fully being developed in the open. The
| community around odoo is quite large and has close to 10,000
| historical contributors. Twenty is new and picking up steam.
|
| Full Disclosure: This is my tool.
| iFelix wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! This is so good it could become our
| internal dashboard
| sdesol wrote:
| Hey glad you find it useful. DevBoard just came out of
| stealth mode last week.
| douglascorrea wrote:
| More opensource alternatives:
| https://www.opensourcealternative.to/?category=CRM
| mikercampbell wrote:
| I love this! Having been the "Salesforce guy" at a few companies,
| it's good to see people working to solve those problems.
|
| As a developer, I'm eager to have a solution that limits sales
| teams constructively. The ability to add, edit, and delete fields
| and properties on the fly made creating maintainable client
| software difficult.
|
| It will be cool to see how you go about it!
| iFelix wrote:
| Thanks! We plan to add custom fields in August. Super
| interesting feedback. There's indeed a balance to strike
| between: - easy to configure by everyone which ends up in a
| mess - full config-as-code and developers become a bottleneck
| Hasura is an example of an app that started as UI-driven and I
| feel is becoming more code-driven. Probably a frequent natural
| path as product evolve and move from SMB to Enterprise. Since
| the CRM buyer is often the Head of Sales, we'll have to be
| smart to sell them the more restrictive path!
| lancesells wrote:
| Congrats on the launch.
|
| My two cents: I work in marketing and CRM for eCommerce lifestyle
| companies. When I evaluate a CRM I try to understand if it's for
| sales or eCommerce or both. I see in your docs that you mention
| that specific point of sales being dominant in CRM so that's a
| plus.
|
| Then I look at if it natively or easily connects to the tools
| that the company uses. If I'm pointed to using Zapier for
| connections that's usually too costly because you're collecting a
| lot of emails and you can quickly get into millions of calls for
| low quality leads.
|
| Another big miss I notice is not integrating with POS systems and
| only eCommerce so that quickly creates an issue with companies
| opening stores.
|
| On the sales side there's usually less of a sales pipeline and
| more of a clienteling side where you've got sales people at store
| locations reaching out to customers to announce products or
| services or events. It's a lot less of stages because products
| are usually not all that high value.
| iFelix wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! Especially on sales not necessarily
| being modelled as a pipeline, that's something we need to think
| of more. Integrations will come this year.
| tairlanz wrote:
| I get a ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR on submit-form.com when trying to
| request access.
| iFelix wrote:
| You can go to app.twenty.com ; twenty.com is our marketing
| website for a general audience so the form there is useless for
| now (we'll launch soon but our current focus on Github /
| developer community only)
| primitivesuave wrote:
| 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.
| iFelix wrote:
| 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!
| primitivesuave wrote:
| 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.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Our tool only does a small part of what big CRM players offer,
| but we focused on providing a great user experience on the
| basics, instead of spreading ourselves thin across a vast range
| of features and delivering them half-heartedly.
|
| I like this approach. So much software feels completely half-
| assed and frustrating to use. Quality can be a real
| differentiator (it just has to be empathized enough).
| iFelix wrote:
| Agree! Linear is a good example of a company picking up steam
| with a design/quality-first approach when the market leader
| Jira suffers from feature bloat. Hope we can make a similar
| comparaison one day!
| crmtemp1231 wrote:
| Do you have plans to add an API or methods for analytics? It's
| common for me to ETL Salesforce data into to a data mart or
| warehouse to structure the entire data model for analysis and
| reporting.
| iFelix wrote:
| If you self-host then that's easy since you can read directly
| from your own Postgres. We have a GraphQL API but I have to say
| I we didn't think much about how we could make it easier for
| people to export data if they don't self host (besides csv
| export in the app). Is an API enough or you'd expect more
| sophisticated connectors? You would like integrations with
| Fivetran, Airbytes, etc.?
| mgaunard wrote:
| What's wrong with SugarCRM?
| iFelix wrote:
| SugarCRM has been sold to a PE fund and close the source years
| ago. There is a project called SuiteCRM that took over the
| source code, and they did a great job considering it's a small
| organization, but it didn't evolve the way it would have if
| SugarCRM had remained open and under the same ownership
| xupybd wrote:
| We are currently evaluating CRM packages. This is probably a bit
| too in development for me to recommend but I'll let you know our
| internal requirements so you have one extra data point in the
| market.
|
| Phone integration is huge for us. We need the CRM to respond to
| an incoming call by bringing up the contacts details if it
| recognises the number. We also need a log that the cal began, was
| answered by, and how long it lasted. If we could do that on cell
| phones it would be amazing.
|
| The next thing would be ecommerce integration followed by
| integration with our accounting system. Both need to feed
| contacts and contact details into the CRM. What have they
| ordered, how much have they spent. What are their payment terms.
|
| After that it's all just notes.
|
| Oh, and we would need SLAs with good up time and data protection.
| iFelix wrote:
| What type of phone integration would you need? Do you use an
| external provider like Aircall? If you don't, I know Close.com
| has a built-in phone functionality so maybe their solution
| could fit your need?
|
| We definitely need to work on integrations soon!
| xupybd wrote:
| We have a dated IP PABX. But would happily switch to another
| system to enable a new CMS. Thanks for the mention of
| close.com.
|
| As far as integrations go, for us it's an API that is
| critical. Our accounting system is Myob Exonet. So old that
| nothing integrates but it was an API so we can write an ETL
| process to dump data out of it into a CRM. Our Ecommerce
| platform is NopCommerce but that's a bit obscure and so
| heavily customized out of the box integration plugins aren't
| going to work.
|
| Also $29 per seat per month is an amazing price. But I've
| noticed something strange with mentioning pricing to upper
| management.
|
| If I take say Zoho CRM, one we've looked at. The plan we need
| is $55 AUD per seat per month. Realistically we're going to
| have 5 - 10 users of the system so that works out to $3,300 -
| $6,600 per year.
|
| I can get $6,600 per year for CRM operations approved no
| problem. But, If I say $600 per user per year management
| freak out. It's the same number but there is something about
| per user that worries upper management.
|
| Now I always just give them the per year 10 user cost and say
| if we keep under 10 sale and support staff this is the cost.
|
| I don't know if that is unique to my company but if it's not
| some pricing packages with yearly figures might help sell.
| That is true over all SAAS products we use.
| codegeek wrote:
| You should evaluate close.com if not already. They have all the
| features you mentioned. We use them for sales for our business.
| sb8244 wrote:
| I will say this whenever I can: Salesforce has a moat because of
| their ecosystem. Full stop.
|
| You _must_ create an amazing ecosystem to compete. But creating
| that ecosystem is incredibly difficult.
|
| Honestly, my opinion for how you could maybe make it work in
| open-source is to recreate the Salesforce API. That's a HUGE
| effort though, as it has a big surface. (I wonder how much of
| that is intentional to make it so others can't copy it well.)
| iFelix wrote:
| I mentioned it in another comment but Odoo is one of the best
| example of how open source could help us build that ecosystem.
| It has allowed them to work with a network of web agencies that
| customize and implement their solution
|
| Product surface is huge indeed! That's why we're only starting
| with a small/focused piece.
|
| [1] https://github.com/odoo/odoo
| tin7in wrote:
| My 2 cents as a founder evaluating CRMs.
|
| I would prefer to not use Salesforce until I have to - I know
| it's expensive, slow, and hard to customize. At the same SF users
| who I know tell me that nothing else works for orgs of above 100
| people.
|
| The demo looks great and I like that you are focusing on UX and
| performance - I would expect Linear-like experience for a tool I
| use every day. I would prefer a hosted version (my experience
| with self-hosted analytics/business tools was a nightmare).
| iFelix wrote:
| Good points thank you. Right now we are starting to work with
| companies in our YC batch which have relatively simple needs,
| probably like yours (founders doing sales, less than 1000
| contacts, etc.). Our goal is to deliver fast enough so that
| these companies never outgrow us and have to switch. Not saying
| it will be easy to keep that pace given the breadth of
| features/integrations that becomes required as you grow, but
| we'll do our best!
| dilly_li wrote:
| What's your plan to make money? How long is your run way?
| iFelix wrote:
| We'll focus on providing a cloud hosted version, because not
| everyone knows how to or want to self-host.
|
| We don't really think in terms of runway yet as the company has
| just been setup. YC gave us 500k which we haven't spent yet.
| mxcrbn wrote:
| Very cool product, seems like a good example of an SLC version =)
|
| The open-source approach makes a lot of sense especially given
| the need around integration and customization (& awful developer
| experience of competition...)
|
| Congrats on the launch!
| iFelix wrote:
| Thanks Maxime! Had to Google SLC, for those who are reading
| it's "Simple, Lovable and Complete" -- and exactly where we'd
| like to get soon yes :-)
| nathanstitt wrote:
| Congrats on launching!
|
| It looks like you started with Hasura GQL and switched to your
| own implementation (https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/pull/156).
|
| Would it be possible to comment on what influenced your decision
| here? I've built ontop of Hasura in the past and it's permissions
| model seems like it'd be a good fit for a CRM
| charlesTwenty wrote:
| Sure! We want to build something flexible where users can
| define their own custom objects and fields. We were thinking
| about leveraging Hasura that's already providing a flexible
| graphql API based on metadata which is exactly what we need /
| will need to build in the future.
|
| However, there are three reasons that pushed us to go through a
| different way:
|
| 1) We want to build a cloud version which is multitenant (I
| personally think that provisionning single tenant instance at
| scale is not a good vision in a world with restricted resources
| ; there is a significant resource saving when we mutualize
| resources). This means that different users can have different
| data schemas. This is not possible with Hasura that serves one
| unique schema for all users.
|
| 2) We want to offer a good developer experience and Hasura
| comes as a standalone service. This means that installing the
| project gets much more complex than a "yarn && yarn start", and
| creates a harder onboarding curve which we want to avoid as
| much as possible. If you face a Hasura issue during
| installation, you would need to understand Hasura workflows,
| and probably docker too.
|
| 3) Very similar to 2, we want Twenty to be easily self-hostable
| with 1-click to deploy. This would had pushed us to create
| bigger joint images including Twenty + Hasura, making it harder
| to maintain and to debug.
|
| There is a great article on how Salesforce is built here:
| https://architect.salesforce.com/fundamentals/platform-
| multi.... They basically have 1 metadata table and 1 data table
| (uuid, objectid, orgid, field1, ..., field500) where each
| column is a VARCHAR and they have built their own engine on top
| of it. I think we will likely need to do something similar and
| we cannot build it on top of Hasura / we lose the value of
| Hasura by building on top of it.
| michaelsalim wrote:
| Regarding the different schemas / metadata, I would've
| thought that Hasura would still be super useful for
| everything else. So a custom API for metadata and Hasura for
| everything else. That said, I've never used Hasura so I can't
| exactly tell.
| lennard wrote:
| We have been using the CRM as early users for the past weeks and
| are very happy. The Twenty team is super responsive and is
| shipping features quickly. All the best on the launch, Team
| Twenty!!
| iFelix wrote:
| Oh thank you Lennard! Wishing the best for Langdock too!
| crmtemp1231 wrote:
| Reminds me of Zoho. They started with the basic CRM features and
| look where they are now. Keep at it!
| iFelix wrote:
| Thank you!
| douglascorrea wrote:
| Hi Ifelix, I have been working as Siebel Consultant implementing
| it in many companies and then later moved to Salesforce which I
| also work implementing/changing it for companies needs.
|
| As a fullstack developer I already thought multiple times to
| "create my own Siebel" or "create my own Salesforce".
|
| But I faced that, the CRM part of it is very easy to implement.
| That is why there are so many players on commercial CRM area
| (Pipedrive, Insighlty, etc) and even on open-source (vTiger,
| SugarCRM, etc).
|
| But what makes Siebel and mostly Salesforce different is their
| power of customization.
|
| Imagine that there are entire careers (including mine) built on
| top of customizing such applications.
|
| I know current state of Twenty is just the start, but I'm
| wondering how different from vTiger, SugarCRM and other
| opensources solution is Twenty? Besides the UI design that is
| really clean but, from my experience, is not so much what final
| users thinking when choosing a CRM, if you want to compete agains
| the big players as you stated in your CTA: "Building a modern
| alternative to Salesforce"
| iFelix wrote:
| Curious why did you think about building you own? For us the
| frustration came primarily from the design, the developer
| experience to extend/customize, and the way data is pulled and
| fetched. I think that if we nail those 3 points, we would have
| a solution that is well enough differentiated from what
| currently exists in the market
| douglascorrea wrote:
| Well, first of all, becaused we are all trying to build the
| new [put_some_big_company_name_here].
|
| But besides my entrepreneurship, I think the space for
| building such application goes to 3 routes:
|
| 1) Build one "traditional" CRM, to handle accounts, contacts,
| oppportunities, etc, etc. Without or just few customizations
| being possible. So then you felt in the "commodity" bucket to
| compete with all other CRMs in the market (and I'm not
| talking about Salesforce).
|
| 2) Or you build something for a niche/vertical so then you
| can specialize it for a specific scenario. Like a CRM for
| kindergarten schools, so then you can make it a 100% fit with
| their business. This way a few customizations are enough
| since the product is already made for them.
|
| 3) Build such a robust solution that allow the
| user/consultants customize them as the client which allowing
| them to achieve any kind of requirements the company has to
| deal with their clients, and believe me, from mid-size to big
| companies they have a lot of different customizations,
| automations and integrations needed for deal with their
| customers.
|
| I was thinking to build the third one, because that is where
| the money is. BUT, that is a huuuuge job for a one-man show.
|
| So maybe starting with the 1 and eventually going to the 3
| could be an option, maybe I will still invest time on it,
| since my know-how in CRM area is almost everything I know (I
| have been working on this for more than 20 years now).
|
| But getting back to your reasons to create Twenty I think you
| can just let the design go if you want to achieve "developer
| experience/customization". Think that as you let the product
| be customized you can't keep it "clean" because the final
| user maybe needs a ton of fields for their use case, or
| something even weird like 3 screens to then create a record.
|
| So, my 5 cents is: focus on power and ease of customization,
| that is what your potential clients would look for.
|
| In terms of how data is pulled and fetched, I think you are
| talking about Graphql. But I think does not matter to much,
| as long you have a very specific way to, at least, allow 2
| kind of integrations: Online (syncroous via API (rest or
| graphql or soap or anything) and Batch. The later is very
| important since as you are dealing with CRM, loading big
| amounts of data is a must specially when loading leads,
| contacts, etc.
|
| Ah! One last thing, before going after Salesforce, try to
| compare Twenty to the current SMB alternatives like
| Pipedrive, Insightly, Zoho, Hubspot, Close.io, Less Annoying
| CRM, etc. They all have their own beautilful and productive
| UI so you need to look for being different from them.
|
| That are my thoughts I did a lot of research on this market
| area already, so ping if you need something me at
| douglascorrea dot io
| iFelix wrote:
| Thanks for taking the time to write this up! I'd love to
| chat more, especially on database design. I will reach out
| makingstuffs wrote:
| The app looks nice and great to see it as open source. I have one
| thing to nitpick, though. The app hijacks the back and prevents
| the user from being able to _go back_
| iFelix wrote:
| Sorry this isn't intentional! I had just logged an issue here
| from a previous comment:
| https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/763
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| What made you use Blocknote over EditorJS?
|
| https://www.blocknotejs.org/ https://editorjs.io/
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| or TipTap/Prosemirror?
| iFelix wrote:
| I thought building on TipTap would take too much time but I
| was wrong. I've looked into TipTap extensions and it seems
| that in less than a week you can build a very decent Notion-
| like editor. So we will be rebuilding everything with TipTap
| soon.
|
| Initially I chose Blocknote over EditorJS because I wanted
| draggable blocks / something that feels more like Notion. But
| it wasn't a good call to make the decision based on that.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| What issues did you face with Blocknote?
| iFelix wrote:
| It isn't easily extensible (we wanted to be able to add
| images with drag-n-drop). From the moment you need to
| extend, it felt like it was faster to rebuild things
| directly with TipTap
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Thanks
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| 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!
| esafak wrote:
| The context is the explanation: they don't need to excel
| because they've got you. Every business should consider this
| when picking solutions.
| iFelix wrote:
| 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.
| ricopags wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! JFYI, app. and docs.twenty.com are both
| showing cloudflare origin errors at present.
|
| The signup from the main site asked me to message on WhatsApp,
| which I don't use, so I backed out from signing up.
| iFelix wrote:
| Sorry about that, not sure if it's the HN trafic that crashed
| the server or something else. We're looking into it. The signup
| is on app.twenty.com and hopefully it should be back soon, I'll
| reply to this post when it is
| iFelix wrote:
| OK it should be back now
| jklinger410 wrote:
| This is disqualifying, for me. I tried to view the CRM and it
| asked me to log in. There are a lot of dark patterns just at
| first blush that make this feel spammy.
| turtlebits wrote:
| The auth popup also breaks the back button which also is
| pretty crappy.
| iFelix wrote:
| Thanks for letting us know, I've logged an issue, we'll fix
| that this week or next week.
| https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/763
| iFelix wrote:
| Sorry about this. Our focus for this launch was the Github
| repo / local setup, I should have made that more clear. We
| haven't launched to non-developer audience yet, that's why
| our marketing website redirects to a waiting list. If you
| want to try the app quickly you can just go to app.twenty.com
| and put a fake email address if you don't want to give yours.
| The signup is quick.
| blast wrote:
| https://app.twenty.com/ just gives me a blank page right
| now in multiple browsers.
| iFelix wrote:
| Sorry. It was down a few minutes ago but should be back
| now? Could you trying clearing the cache (cmd + shift +
| r)?
| [deleted]
| jklinger410 wrote:
| I just want you to know that I appreciate you coming in
| here an addressing people's comments. HN is a tough crowd,
| so don't take it too personally.
| solardev wrote:
| How do you get data out of this? I see you mention GraphQL, but
| is there sample output? Are filters and searches etc. supported?
|
| Also, can you write/mutate data via GraphQL too or is it read
| only?
| charlesTwenty wrote:
| Yes, we are providing a graphql API that you can find
| "documented" here: https://docs.twenty.com/graphql/
|
| Right now, you need to provide a JWT token that you can get at
| login or refresh against a refresh_token (90days expiration).
| In the future, we plan to also support API keys which would
| ease a lot headless work.
|
| Regarding filters and search, we have added filtering and
| search features on app.twenty.com. They are directly leveraging
| the graphql API.
|
| GQL query example:
|
| ``` query ExampleQuery($where: CompanyWhereInput) {
| findManyCompany(where: $where) { id } } ```
|
| GQL variables:
|
| ``` { "where": { "address": { "contains": "example" },
| "accountOwner": { "is": { "id": { "equals": "user-id" } } } } }
| ```
| charlesTwenty wrote:
| We also plan to support CSV import and export
| dostrin2 wrote:
| The whatsapp app part does not open whatsapp just opens the App
| Store, deep links are tricky to get right,. Feels like a strange
| choice for a signup form /waitlist
| iFelix wrote:
| It led to some fun conversations but most people just ignore
| the WhatsApp link. Definitely not something we're going to keep
| long-term. The initial goal was to be able to engage with a few
| users that were willing to, to do real customer interviews and
| not just have them fill an impersonal form
| tempaway55123 wrote:
| People don't really understand what Salesforce is and what they
| are good at. Yes its PAAS and so on.
|
| But the core skill of the people at Salesforce is that they've
| had this thing online for 20+ years, most of their customers have
| extensive customisations, and three times a year Salesforce push
| new features to the platform while successfully minimising the
| amount of customer customisations they break.
|
| And thats the key - how can you regularly expand and improve your
| PAAS without fucking up the extensive and very complicated custom
| things your customers have built on top of it. Its actually a
| very hard engineering challenge that no-one really talks about
| because its a long term challenge and not many people focus on
| long term engineering.
| iFelix wrote:
| Yes good point, going with a multi-tenant infrastructure makes
| this very challenging as they can't ever leave anyone behind
| mbesto wrote:
| This will be DOA. CRM is a essentially a solved problem.
|
| However, since you are open source I think there is an
| opportunity to either sell the framework to ISVs (think a
| property management system provider who wants to provide CRM
| functionality to their platform overnight... like embedded
| analytics such as Looker) or have the community create industry
| specific CRMs.
|
| Good luck.
| iFelix wrote:
| Yes that's something we've considered. Veeva and nCino are two
| examples of billion-dollar companies built on top of Salesforce
| and verticalized in one industry, so there is a need for what
| you describe. If we want to go this path we would have to move
| to an MIT license. We will learn with the community and adapt!
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > This will be DOA. CRM is a essentially a solved problem.
|
| I was about to ask if it's possible to make money on CRM today,
| given the near infinite number of choices at all levels. But
| maybe it only works if you specialize, as you alluded to in
| your comment.
| frabjoused wrote:
| Looks neat iFelix!
|
| I'm interested to know how much time you've actually spent using
| CRMs or ERPs yourself. Not clicking around and exploring
| features, but actually using for something.
|
| While I know this is a very early release, my biggest concern is
| naivety about real world usage requirements, and if you'll be
| able to manage the feature creep that will be coming with it
| without just turning into another Salesforce or NetSuite.
|
| As soon as you get users it's going to get harder to add in those
| things you're putting off thinking about until later, and
| managing it will become a legacy suckfest. This manifests itself
| in a slow, slow, slow experience and necessary UX decisions that
| make the user scratch their head.
|
| I'd say the biggest example of this is custom fields. It's not
| just another problem to solve at some point, it's probably one of
| the biggest ruins of CRMs.
| iFelix wrote:
| Your question is right on spot. We are three founders with a
| passion for design (1 designer + 2 ex-Airbnb were design was
| key to the culture), building this product 2 decades after
| Salesforce when the tech is different, so we will approach
| problems with different priorities and ways of thinking than
| Salesforce did. But there is definitely some naivety and some
| challenge ahead of us, as none us is an expert ERP/CRM user.
| We'll be very careful making design decisions on structural
| elements like like custom fields yes!
| iFire wrote:
| License AGPL3.
|
| Will not integrate with internal services.
|
| https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/blob/main/LICENSE
| iFelix wrote:
| Do you have a specific use-case in mind that this license is
| blocking?
| 0xferruccio wrote:
| This looks very promising. Excited to see how Twenty develops
| over the next years!
|
| I think they key is to nail the data model and make sure
| replicating stuff from people's products and matching it with
| outside conversations (email, phone etc..) works smoothly
| diggertrock_ng wrote:
| Our team has recently found an open-source sales management CRM
| tool, Meow https://www.sales-funnel.app/, which they are happy
| with. Licensed under AGPL, it might be worth a look for startups.
|
| I guess there are definite reasons why open-source isn't as
| successful in the CRM space. Buyers are mostly not developers and
| the requirements for a CRM are often very diverse. I agree with
| earlier comments, Salesforce is not just a CRM.
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