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Lots of attempts over the years at this personal crm problem space but no success to date. I did one on Facebook platform in 2008-09 called Socialfly, our tagli

by npunt 4y ago

Lots of attempts over the years at this personal crm problem space but no success to date. I did one on Facebook platform in 2008-09 called Socialfly, our tagline was ‘be twice the friend in half the time’. Problem is there’s a lot of input and upkeep which limits appeal, the most important social data sources (text & phone) are not accessible via api, its a personal tool that you don’t necessarily want to tell others you use which limits distribution & scale, and even after all that in general it’s hard to scale personal authenticity. I think the problem needs to be approached from a different angle along the lines of a personal assistant rather that an explicit data management tool. And it likely has to come from those with access to privileged social data sources like Apple or Google or Facebook.

michaelmior 4y ago
I remember using Socialfly! I wasn't a heavy user, but I actually quite liked it and was a bit disappointed when it went away.
- npunt 4y ago
  Oh cool, so great to hear from a user after all these years! Some of our users were suuper invested, like keeping up with hundreds of people - far more than we anticipated. I think our top user was a pastor in Australia who kept up with like 700+ people. We would have continued a while longer but the 08 recession really burnt us. We were raising $$ in the weeks where banks were literally failing. RIP Good Times era. Our iPhone app was just about ready to ship and we were going to start building integrations like email next, but no runway. We had an angel lined up who’d have gotten us about 4-6mo of runway but I didn’t want to burn that relationship in such an uncertain environment, we were all pretty down about prospects then. Fun fact tho: the app continued to work for years after. FB took a long time to deprecate API and our code was pretty solid.
jxramos 4y ago
Would accompany count? https://www.accompany.com/ https://www.accompany.com/ not really personal, I believe it's business oriented.
- npunt 4y ago
  They were the closest but yeah, biz is where the $ is if you’re anywhere near CRM functionality
moneywoes 4y ago
Don’t TikTok and Instagram access the phone book and hence numbers?
- npunt 4y ago
  Numbers yes, when you last contacted no. Core value prop of personal CRM is ease of keeping up w/ people, which means smarts of reprioritizing people based on several factors sort of like a personal assistant would, which means system should know when you last spoke/texted/emailed/etc. Ideally it'd even have ease of access to transcripts (chat/email logs) so you could jog your memory. The goal is to avoid just a dumb timer saying 'its been 4 weeks, why don't you chat with X'. That's how Socialfly worked, and it was pretty high friction in practical use.

by npunt 4y ago

michaelmior 4y ago

I remember using Socialfly! I wasn't a heavy user, but I actually quite liked it and was a bit disappointed when it went away.

npunt 4y ago
Oh cool, so great to hear from a user after all these years! Some of our users were suuper invested, like keeping up with hundreds of people - far more than we anticipated. I think our top user was a pastor in Australia who kept up with like 700+ people. We would have continued a while longer but the 08 recession really burnt us. We were raising $$ in the weeks where banks were literally failing. RIP Good Times era. Our iPhone app was just about ready to ship and we were going to start building integrations like email next, but no runway. We had an angel lined up who’d have gotten us about 4-6mo of runway but I didn’t want to burn that relationship in such an uncertain environment, we were all pretty down about prospects then. Fun fact tho: the app continued to work for years after. FB took a long time to deprecate API and our code was pretty solid.

jxramos 4y ago

Would accompany count? https://www.accompany.com/ https://www.accompany.com/ not really personal, I believe it's business oriented.

npunt 4y ago
They were the closest but yeah, biz is where the $ is if you’re anywhere near CRM functionality

moneywoes 4y ago

Don’t TikTok and Instagram access the phone book and hence numbers?

npunt 4y ago
Numbers yes, when you last contacted no. Core value prop of personal CRM is ease of keeping up w/ people, which means smarts of reprioritizing people based on several factors sort of like a personal assistant would, which means system should know when you last spoke/texted/emailed/etc. Ideally it'd even have ease of access to transcripts (chat/email logs) so you could jog your memory. The goal is to avoid just a dumb timer saying 'its been 4 weeks, why don't you chat with X'. That's how Socialfly worked, and it was pretty high friction in practical use.