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Show HN: Nat.app, personal CRM that knows who you're losing touch with
Hi HN! founder of nat.app here.
I've seen so many people building personal CRMs over the past years. Somehow, they all seemed to fail and die a year or two in.
The main reason for this in my opinion is that the personal CRM business is a bad business. People sort of want this and will tweet about in from time to time, but only very few people are willing to pay and put in the effort (aka. reaching back out to people), to make it work.
Those very few people are our market and because it's a small market, there is no way to sustain such a business unless you're bootstrapped and working on this part time (which we are).
Our approach is very specific: We focus on Google users (which is why there is only a Google login) who communicate mainly through email and put every IRL meeting in their calendar.
For those people, we are able to capture 80% of their social interactions with Google's APIs. Which means that our if-else rules are accurately able to identify contacts our customers are losing touch with.
nat.app then acts as a safety net and displays those contacts to our customers.
This product really has been a labor of love over the past 3 years and I'm very happy to be sharing it with you today.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrtksn 5y agoHa, I was thinking about something like that since my exposure to a traditional CRM. Good luck. However this looks like personal business relationship CRM, right?
- nathanganser 5y agoThe line between business and personal is very thin in my opionion. We aim to be somewhere in the middle.
- bigiain 5y agoFor me, the line between personal and business is mostly very well drawn in the sand, and is rarely crossed and only after very careful evaluation of the possible consequences. Going into business with friends can end very badly. Becoming friends with people you work under or over can end very badly. That's probably not the same worldview as a twenty-something startup founder, but after 3 decades in this game I've got a bunch of boundaries around this stuff. Good luck with it though.
- egeozcan 5y agoFor a "more personal" CRM, I'd suggest Monica: https://www.monicahq.com/ https://www.monicahq.com/ Discussion from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295 Discussion from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270001 It's open-source and easy to self-host.
- nathanganser 5y agoThanks for sharing!
- go_prodev 5y agoI'm looking for an easy way to see who I haven't contacted for a while, but also add notes about their family, kids, job situation, last things we spoke about. It's never been important enough to pay for, so thanks for the Monica link, I'll check it out
- cinntaile 5y agoTo me this feels like treating human relationships as a problem to solve?
- MisterSandman 5y agoAlzheimer's runs in my family, so I should probably start using somethiing like this.
- gavin_gee 5y agoI may have missed it, but this needs to be more than email. for many personal connections I need text, whatsapp, signal integration etc. and now you are in the world of accessing encrypted data. but without all the messaging protocols, the data is misleading. I dont manage my network through email.
- nathanganser 5y agoThat's totally fine, you're simply not in our market :) Many people do though, that's why we exist :)
- bigiain 5y ago> Many people do though, that's why we exist :) Are you sure? > Our approach is very specific: We focus on Google users (which is why there is only a Google login) who communicate mainly through email and put every IRL meeting in their calendar. That describes exactly _zero_ of my friends/acquaintances, and perhaps low single digit percent of my professional connections. Even at work, where we use Suite and Google Calendar, internally an overwhelming percentage of our communication is via Slack, video calls, and Jira/Trello tickets. Email is mostly a customer comms channel here (most of who are not Google Calendar users)
- spoonjim 5y agoI know people who put every personal meeting on their Google Calendar. You wouldn’t know if you did, because they usually don’t send invitations unless they know the other person is the same way.
- nathanganser 5y agoIt's probably a Silicon-Valley-bubble thing :) I don't know anyone outside of tech who does it.
- icelancer 5y agoI put all of my meetings and appointments into GCal. I don't use email that much for it but I definitely put it all into the calendar.
- gnabgib 5y agoAlso posted in Oct 2020[0] with 175 points, 119 comments.. some useful comments, including some privacy fears [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897812
- nathanganser 5y agoYup. was for a side product of our app, we've now merged the note taking and "who am I losing touch with" part into one app :)
- dannyphantom 5y agoI remember reading a discussion on Reddit[1] where someone was discussing how he uses Salesforce for personal relationships and the reception was less than receptive. In the year 2022 I think this idea actually makes a lot of sense as over the last 2 years it became a lot easier to fall out of touch. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/bfqb26/does_anyone_else_use_salesforce_as_prm_personal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/bfqb26/does_any... (edit: oh my god I think you actually commented on that post! awesome work keeping up with the idea!)
- nathanganser 5y agoDid indeed :P
- testfoobar 5y agoI misunderstood your headline. I thought this was for personal social connections - where at least for me - losing touch with some people is a feature not a bug! Anyway - cheers on the project. I agree with other comments that my communication with people is multi-channel and it would be great to track all of it.
- nathanganser 5y agoThanks for the feedback and comment! Really appreciate it :)
- sundarurfriend 5y agoI'm not in your market, but I commend your decision to focus on a specific market and the confidence in sticking to it. The startup environment today, perhaps "inspired" by "unicorn"s, takes as granted that your product should be infinitely expandable to everyone and everywhere; and too often, that leads to things being watered down and resources spread too thin. Deciding your customers are a specific group makes it much easier to make use of the specifics of the group (eg. Google APIs here) to make a much better and more well-integrated product.
- TheDesolate0 5y ago
- somberi 5y agoNot affiliated at all. Wobaka is another option for a personal CRM. We evaluated it. A great product (and Fredrik the owner-developer was a treat to work with), but we passed on it because it did not fit for our niche use case. At $50 per month, it might be a different fit. wobaka.com
- mnurbekova 5y agoOh wow, that sounds pretty useful. Is that to follow-up with people?
- nathanganser 5y agoBasically. Our algorithm check who you're losing touch with based on your email, calendar, ... data and resurfaces those people for you.
- throwra620 5y ago
- flightplan86 5y agoI was using cloze (www.cloze.com) for years, but it started to feel a bit outdated. Moved to Covve (www.covve.com) recently and it's pretty great. It has an ecosystem of features and apps that help a lot especially if your profession is people oriented. I'll check out yours too.
- itake 5y ago> Personal CRM for relationship building > Stay in touch with the customers that matter to your business Is this for personal or business?
- kstrauser 5y agoFor $12/mo, it's far into business use for me. I can't see ever paying $144/yr to remember to text my mom. For business, that might be reasonable. For personal use, no way.
- m3adow 5y agoI agree. The feature set is too shallow for a $12/mo subscription for personal usage. Or the target group is even more niche than I assume.
- JetAlone 5y agoIt depends, I think. I've thought about implementing a system of my own for minimal amounts of contact to keep people in my loop. Otherwise, something of a pareto distribution emerges where I talk a lot to 5 people and unfairly leave some people in the dark. If I wanted to be extremely mercenary/selfish, I could make absolutely sure that the people who have something I want are definitely always kept in the list, and try to gradually increase their rank-order to get closer to them socially.
- nathanganser 5y ago> For $12/mo, it's far into business use for me On a tangent, I do think that software businesses undercharge heavily. It works for VC-funded businesses but for bootstrapped companies, we definitely have to charge real prices. My monthly Blue Bottle budget is probably around $50, I don't see why I wouldn't pay as much if not more for a piece of software :)
- kstrauser 5y agoI don't want to downplay what this specific app is doing, and there's obviously some interest in this field. But from my perspective, this (and Dex) are way more expensive per year than something like OmniFocus - published by a bootstrapped company - which can solve 90% of the problem in addition to doing a lot more stuff. I think a lot of people could use something like Reminders with actions like "Call Mom; repeat every 6 days". And again, for me, this isn't $144/yr better than that free solution. If I were doing this as part of my job, sure, I'd happily ask my company to cover the cost. I don't see a scenario where I would pay that much for personal use. (BTW, I do literally have a Reminders list called "Maintain relationships" with actions like "Buy a birthday card for my niece", "Call Mom on her wedding anniversary", "Text Joe", and such. It keeps me from getting too out of sync with the people I care about. I'd pay a couple of dollars a month if there were something that helped automate setting up and maintaining that list.)
- mlejva 5y agoThis looks interesting. Can you tell me more why should I believe you to give you access to my inbox?
- nathanganser 5y agowe wrote some more as to how we handle data here (https://nat.app/privacy https://nat.app/privacy) but in the end, you'll obviously have to trust us. I guess it depends on your needs & use cases. If you feel like you're losing touch with people that matter, you might want to give it a try :)
- skinnymuch 5y agoWhat personal CRMs have been made recently and died in a year or two? I have found it rare to find personal CRMs at all.