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Fred Wilson's vision of a family CRM service
- dchs 16y agoAnyone up for building this?
- rodyancy 16y agoSure. What is your background?
- rudasn 16y agoSeems like a good side-project and I want in. I mostly do whatever visitors see: HTML, CSS, JS, some 'good' UI/design skills (+ hacking python/django most recently).
- bravura 16y agoCount me in, if you are interested in the MVP I propose above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601840 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601840). I can contribute leet NLP + ML skillz.
- dzlobin 16y agoI'm putting my name in as well. This struck me as something I really would like to use. I'm a rails dev but I have python experience as well. my email is in my profile, is anyone taking the reigns? Or should I?
- samratjp 16y agoThe cofounder of elgg is apparently: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/the-family-crm-service.html#comment-68509523 http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/the-family-crm-service.html#...
- karanbhangui 16y agoCould be a modified version of this codebase: http://www.simplecustomer.com/ http://www.simplecustomer.com/ beware, major security flaws within. I've patched it heavily, and will be committing the changes to github soon.
- oneplusone 16y agoI have actually been looking for something similar and have considered building it in the past. My biggest concern was how to monetize it. Not sure I would pay a monthly fee for it. My biggest need was for it to sync names + phone numbers to my phone so I don't run the risk of loosing them when something inevitably happened to my phone.
- fredwilson 16y agoi would pay as much as our firm pays for mailchimp, $10/month
- codemechanic 16y agoTonido workspace (http://www.tonido.com/app_workspace_home.html http://www.tonido.com/app_workspace_home.html) fits Fred's requirements exactly.
- wslh 16y agoI use a wiki for my family.
- JangoSteve 16y agoSo, what exactly are the features that a "family CRM" would need that normal CRMs don't have (other than integration with Red Stamp and Pingg)? Is it just the ability to mass email certain filters in your CRM? Anyway, it's not expressly meant to be a "family CRM", but its simplicity and design seem perfect to me for this sort of thing. My buddy is building http://www.karmacrm.com http://www.karmacrm.com which is still in beta.
- notahacker 16y agoit's more to do with the features a normal CRM would have that a "family CRM" wouldn't - you wouldn't be interested in tracking "leads", putting a value against "proposals" or managing "pipelines" but you would want open ended relationship groupings
- fredwilson 16y agoexactly. less features more elegant
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- TrevorBramble 16y agoI've been pondering how to solve this too. Bought a domain for it recently but haven't decided what form it should take. The CRM angle is one I hadn't thought of, though it's kind of an obvious leap (in hindsight of course). I've been thinking more of a CMS plus address book.
- andrewparker 16y agoDrill down in the comments to find this pic that Fred posted of himself ROFL'ing in response to one of his commentors... very entertaining: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredwilson/4887958978/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredwilson/4887958978/
- fredwilson 16y agoyou liked that andrew?
- andrewparker 16y agoLikely the best comment you've ever posted... Did you take it or someone else?
- jorangreef 16y agoI've been thinking the exact same thing for my family and am busy building https://szpil.com https://szpil.com.
- bravura 16y agoThe most important problem to solve is that when you do a search, or browse by a tag, that no one slips through the cracks. With a friend organizer, the worst possible thing it can do is become central to organizing your social life, but then silently "forget" about certain friends of yours. I've thought about this very application (I call it "CRM for hypersocial people") and the most important component is the natural language processing. In particular, you want good autotagging and query expansion, with an emphasis on recall. More specifically, if one of your ballet dancer friends is manually tagged "ballet" but not "dance", and you search for "dance", you want this friend to appear in the results. Additionally, if you are looking for "hackers", it should know that it should include people who are "hardcore programmers" or maybe those that program "ruby".
- kalvin 16y agoWhy did this get downvoted twice? It's completely reasonable, and I happen to agree that it would be useful (and not just for 'hypersocial crm')
- bravura 16y agoI originally offered to share the technology, either free for open source apps or as a business deal if you're using it to make money. I imagine people found that offer distasteful, so I removed that last part from my comment. I personally included it because I think more widespread dissemination of NLP could improve a lot of technology. But I can understand why people would think that I made my comment merely to scurry up deals, and not to inform them.
- bravura 16y agoThe question really is: What problem are we trying to solve? The answer is: Allowing you to easily find certain types of people over your hundreds or thousands of contacts. Types = certain business or personal relationship, certain skill, certain place you met, etc. Here are the core features, the minimum viable product. In fact, I would avoid something that is bloated and doesn't focus on these core features: * Automatically importing and deduping your contacts from a variety of sources: email contacts, linkedin, facebook, maybe twitter. * Automatically assigning a rank score to each friend, based upon your frequency of contact with them, and analysis of the social graph. You want your spouse to be ranked high, and the guy you met once at a networking event to be ranked low. * Depending upon interactions with people, you can upvote or downvote them, to change their rank score. Ran into someone you want to hang out with more? Upvote. New girl made a date with you and then stood you up? Downvote. * You can search or browse by tag. There is smooth autotagging and query expansion, to make sure searches don't miss certain friends. That's it.
- run4yourlives 16y agoWouldn't Highrise be ideal for this? (sans pretty invite integration, of course)
- jwinter 16y agoThe Github founders were working on something like this (famspam) before they founded github.
- jerf 16y agoMuch as I hate to say it, seems like this ought to be a facebook app. One of the problems with our family address book is keeping the addresses up to date, and moving that responsibility out to the people in the book would be a win. Of course you app would still let you enter in people who aren't on facebook or aren't in the app, and there is still the private aspect. Tags shouldn't be public unless you want them to be. Biggest problem there is that if you're successful, Facebook will probably preempt you.
- notahacker 16y agoThe early facebook pretty much _was_ the MVP of a CRM for your peer group - you could share contact details across a private network, invite groups of people to events and receive reminders of those that you'd been invited to, send public and private messages to custom groups and get notified of birthdays. You got nice pictures to be able to remember who did what the night before too. If they'd taken their development in a different direction they'd have fewer page impressions but something much more useful.
- fredwilson 16y agothe reason i don't think that works for me is that my family doesn't have a facebook account. we all have our own with our own contacts. this is about our family contacts
- messel 16y agocould be as simple as a group then. maybe a fan page/community
- mahmud 16y agoOh boy! Serendipity. I just wrote about that exact same thing yesterday. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599944 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599944
- brianbreslin 16y agook just want to throw this out there that i bet Fred's family is unlike most families. most people don't excel their friends and relationships. I think something like this needs a larger sample size to validate its audience.
- sgricci 16y agoWow! I started building this about a week and a half ago after watching my wife and my mother-in-law tediously exchanging contacts across the country. And then spending hours filling out thank you cards for gifts on the recent birth of our daughter. I'm still in development of it, but should be in beta in a week or two. I'd love if all the interested people would sign up to get early access: http://kindrd.com/?hn=1 http://kindrd.com/?hn=1 If you leave the hn=1 in the query string, I will be able to discern the HN'ers.