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Launch HN: Twenty.com (YC S23) – Open-source CRM

• ricopags 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      OK it should be back now
  • jklinger410 3y ago
    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.
    • iFelix 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        https://app.twenty.com/ https://app.twenty.com/ just gives me a blank page right now in multiple browsers.
        • iFelix 3y ago
          Sorry. It was down a few minutes ago but should be back now? Could you trying clearing the cache (cmd + shift + r)?
          • blast 3y ago
• sandGorgon 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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!
    • sandGorgon 3y ago
      so its not just about data warehousey stuff. Take Apollo.io for example. Its used for lead gen. Most people will instantly drop any CRM that doesnt integrate with Apollo.io and move leads (e.g. https://knowledge.apollo.io/hc/en-us/articles/4416619021837-Connect-Apollo-to-Your-HubSpot-Account https://knowledge.apollo.io/hc/en-us/articles/4416619021837-...) Same with scheduling - if the CRM doesnt integrate with Chilipiper or Calendly, its most likely an insta drop. Zapier can be used, but why bother ?
• crimsoneer 3y ago
  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?
  • iFelix 3y ago
    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 https://github.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM [2] https://github.com/YetiForceCompany/YetiForceCRM https://github.com/YetiForceCompany/YetiForceCRM [3] https://github.com/odoo/odoo https://github.com/odoo/odoo
    • sdesol 3y ago
      Here's some open source insights regarding the repos mentioned so far. https://devboard.gitsense.com/twentyhq/twenty https://devboard.gitsense.com/twentyhq/twenty https://devboard.gitsense.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM https://devboard.gitsense.com/salesagility/SuiteCRM https://devboard.gitsense.com/YetiForceCompany/YetiForceCRM https://devboard.gitsense.com/YetiForceCompany/YetiForceCRM https://devboard.gitsense.com/odoo/odoo 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 3y ago
        Thanks for sharing! This is so good it could become our internal dashboard
• mbesto 3y ago
  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.
  • rootusrootus 3y ago
    > 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.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    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!
• yahelc 3y ago
  How hard was acquiring the domain twenty.com?
  • iFelix 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Holy crap, is the name that great?
      • iFelix 3y ago
        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
• paxys 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Salesforce is basically the OS for your company.
    • DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      What's SAP then?
      • nickstinemates 3y ago
        An OS for Finance :)
      • jarym 3y ago
        An OS for bleeding companies dry
      • alemanek 3y ago
        A virus
      • vxNsr 3y ago
        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.
• mikercampbell 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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!
• xupybd 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
• ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  What made you use Blocknote over EditorJS? https://www.blocknotejs.org/ https://www.blocknotejs.org/ https://editorjs.io/ https://editorjs.io/
  • halfmatthalfcat 3y ago
    or TipTap/Prosemirror?
    • iFelix 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        What issues did you face with Blocknote?
        • iFelix 3y ago
          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 3y ago
            Thanks
• fuddle 3y ago
  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.md https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/blob/main/server/README.m...
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    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 https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/764
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• nathanstitt 3y ago
  Congrats on launching! It looks like you started with Hasura GQL and switched to your own implementation (https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/pull/156 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 3y ago
    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-multitenant-architecture 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 3y ago
      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.
• makingstuffs 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Sorry this isn't intentional! I had just logged an issue here from a previous comment: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/763 https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/763
• nickelcitymario 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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.
  • carstenhag 3y ago
    To be honest, it sounds 100% like SAP / ABAP. A lot of terribly outdated stuff. But it can do everything you can imagine. If it can't, there's 1-2 recommended products that expand features on top of SAP. The moment your business wants to do things a way that isn't SAP's way, you completely butcher everything though. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541092
• dostrin2 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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
• diggertrock_ng 3y ago
  Our team has recently found an open-source sales management CRM tool, Meow https://www.sales-funnel.app/ 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.
  • Bonapara 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing! We have indeed two personas in our target: devs & Sales/leadership. We believe one will bring the others as Odoo did for instance.
• lancesells 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
• solarkraft 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    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!
• dilly_li 3y ago
  What's your plan to make money? How long is your run way?
  • iFelix 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 :-)
• frabjoused 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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!
    • asielen 3y ago
      As a daily Salesforce user for a decade I'm happy to rant about everything salesforce does wrong from an admin and end user perspective.
    • new2this 3y ago
      You should spend some time with sales leaders to better understand what's needed from a CRM. I took a look at your CRM product and understand that your long term goal is a great ecosystem...however, your UI is missing the point of a modern CRM. A CRM used to be account/contact/opportunity tracking. Now, sales teams use CRM as the de facto customer-focused data warehouse (because no one in sales actually knows how to query a data warehouse). These days I rarely use salesforce for anything besides looking up data that was written there by another sales tool via the API. The product focus should be on developing a great analytics solution for salespeople, not an online Rolodex. I used to work at Salesforce and have deployed it at multiple startups as the founding head of sales. Shoot me an email if you want to talk more; I'm looking forward to the day that Salesforce is replaced by something that better fits the modern sales process.
• dban 3y ago
  Rooting for your success, legacy CRMs are without exception just unspeakably bad
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Thank you!
• a13n 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Thanks a lot! It's a long-term play but we'll get there
• primitivesuave 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 $10k/year on HubSpot. They're also spending at least a million a year on salaries/commissions for their sales staff. Optimizing software costs addresses 1% of the total spend, while making sales people more efficient optimizes the other 99%. In general, if your target customer is sales management, I would pitch support/customization contracts to streamline sales organizations when you're picking up initial customers. This would also likely bring you perspective on the wide range of customizations out there.
• lennard 3y ago
  We have been using the CRM as early users for the past weeks and are very happy. The Twenty team is super responsive and is shipping features quickly. All the best on the launch, Team Twenty!!
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Oh thank you Lennard! Wishing the best for Langdock too!
• solardev 3y ago
  How do you get data out of this? I see you mention GraphQL, but is there sample output? Are filters and searches etc. supported? Also, can you write/mutate data via GraphQL too or is it read only?
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Yes, we are providing a graphql API that you can find "documented" here: https://docs.twenty.com/graphql/ https://docs.twenty.com/graphql/ Right now, you need to provide a JWT token that you can get at login or refresh against a refresh_token (90days expiration). In the future, we plan to also support API keys which would ease a lot headless work. Regarding filters and search, we have added filtering and search features on app.twenty.com. They are directly leveraging the graphql API. GQL query example: ``` query ExampleQuery($where: CompanyWhereInput) { findManyCompany(where: $where) { id } } ``` GQL variables: ``` { "where": { "address": { "contains": "example" }, "accountOwner": { "is": { "id": { "equals": "user-id" } } } } } ```
    • charlesTwenty 3y ago
      We also plan to support CSV import and export
    • solardev 3y ago
      This is awesome. Thank you!
• mgaunard 3y ago
  What's wrong with SugarCRM?
  • iFelix 3y ago
    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
• Mandatum 3y ago
  You should have launched with integration. This is a waste of a launch.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    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!
• Jemm 3y ago
  Customer relationship management (CRM)
  • iFelix 3y ago
    You guessed it!
• tairlanz 3y ago
  I get a ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR on submit-form.com when trying to request access.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    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)
• sb8244 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 https://github.com/odoo/odoo
• tin7in 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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!
  • mfrye0 3y ago
    I 2nd this, minus Salesforce being hard to customize. It's probably too customizable. At a certain stage of a company, sales reps expect Salesforce. So much so, that even when we finally caved and got it, I had reps specifically turn off Lightning and stick with Classic mode. It's like Bloomberg - it's what they know and can move fast in. As much as it pains me to say this, it may make sense to have an option that can mirror the Salesforce UI vs reinventing the wheel. Or maybe even an integration / escape hatch to migrate everything off of Salesforce to this. Basically, if you want reps to adopt it, make it close as possible to what they know.
    • iFelix 3y ago
      In terms of UI, Notion has been our main source of inspiration. Targeting the bucket of Salespeople who enjoy the Notion UI is definitely a smaller one than those who know how to use Salesforce, but I feel like it might be a faster-growing one. It's a good point that it will become harder as we move to larger companies with a higher share of experienced sales reps that don't want to change.
• iFire 3y ago
  License AGPL3. Will not integrate with internal services. https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/blob/main/LICENSE
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Do you have a specific use-case in mind that this license is blocking?
    • iFire 3y ago
      Connect my CRM to an internal system. Let's for example say it's an AI power assistant for the sake of memeing Iron Man. I want to be able tell openai to generate a function calling method that takes a json schema and inserts the code into "Twenty.com" for data retrieval. You can construct an alternative scenario with a bank's financial data retrieval. It's too hard to think through the recursive cases through a network when it's considered "linking" in the GPL3 sense.
      • iFelix 3y ago
        I'm not a licensing expert but I know AGPL has a concept of derivative work that is somewhat blurry for me. We could argue this isn't core to the CRM (if specific to your company) and therefore not derivative work but I agree it's subjective and therefore not ideal. I'm not entirely convinced we made the right choice. Considering your feedback and we will see in a few months what people want to build and if we should revisit.
• pclark 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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
    • pclark 3y ago
      I'd focus less on specific integrations and more on having a modern CRM schema that suits bottoms up SaaS products. Exciting!
• douglascorrea 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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
• lefstathiou 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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
• crmtemp1231 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.?
• crmtemp1231 3y ago
  Reminds me of Zoho. They started with the basic CRM features and look where they are now. Keep at it!
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Thank you!
• 0xferruccio 3y ago
  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
  • Bonapara 3y ago
    Thanks so much! Agreed 100%. Data sync has been in the top of our list since day one. We are still thinking of the best way to build it to make it work smoothly though.
• bitlad 3y ago
  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.
• umrashrf 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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
• tempaway55123 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Yes good point, going with a multi-tenant infrastructure makes this very challenging as they can't ever leave anyone behind
• Closi 3y ago
  Best of luck! Generally agree with launching early - although this feels very early! We are currently looking for a replacement to our HubSpot account (20 person company for context with c4 people who use HubSpot - so probably a potential customer!), 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. * No way to archive an opportunity - the pipelines will just grow so will be totally unusable after a few months. * Basic UI issues from a usability perspective - like two icons for people when you go into an opportunity, and not clear that one of them wants you to put an employee count in it, and then other field where you say employees doesn't actually seem to work. If I go to add people to the opportunity, it shows me people I have already deleted and does not show me someone I just recently created and assigned to the company...! * No way to export data for analysis (e.g. to Excel). Conversely no way to import data (e.g. from Excel) so migration is impossible (companies will have 10's of thousands of contacts) * Basic audit issues... If someone creates a note I can either delete it, or I can rewrite it and it looks like they said it (it doesn't say it was modified by another user and just lets me edit others notes!). 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, and definitely does not pass the 'better than a spreadsheet' test, but hopefully with time it will. At the moment though it feels very under-baked, but wish you luck in building this out into a product which is usable.
  • bravura 3y ago
    What don't you like about hubspot?
    • 3y ago
• calvinmorrison 3y ago
  Looks exactly like what I have built with two notion tables :man shrugging:
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Haha, if we were able to replicate the notion experience in 2 months that's a great compliment! The difference will come from the fact that we hold structured data. Notion doesn't know that a person is a person and a company is a company. That makes it impossible for them to build robust integrations CRM have. You can build rules to replicate some behavior, but once you have more business logic, it becomes too limited. Next month we'll be shipping some features around email (log/send) which should help you see the different direction we're taking.
    • calvinmorrison 3y ago
      > Notion doesn't know that a person is a person and a company is a company. That makes it impossible for them to build robust integrations CRM have. You can build rules to replicate some behavior, but once you have more business logic, it becomes too limited. I literally have a 'person' database and a 'company' database. But yeah fo sho, it will get limiting if i make this much more complex lol
• cpursley 3y ago
  JavaScript on the back end? HARD pass.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  Today I learned that salesforce is like SAP
• tbrooks 3y ago
  What does Twenty do that Close doesn’t or can’t do? (I’m a huge Close fan.)
  • Bonapara 3y ago
    Close is a strong source of inspiration for their opinionated approach. We hope that we can make the difference with the User Experience in the short run (For instance you can uses blocks in notes). In the mid run, open source sounds like a big differentiator as you will be able to customize Twenty to your needs.
• iceburgcrm 3y ago
  As someone who recently built an open source crm (iceburg.ca - Laravel / Vue) I think your choice of license is very limiting. Limiting how the crm can be used will limit the number of users and handicap yourself. Focus on a great crm first and don't worry about others copying you and providing a saas solution better than yours. The more people using your crm is more important than preventing others from making money. I debated whether to use your license because other crms like SuiteCRM are. I quickly discovered getting others interested enough to host their own saas platforms using my crm framework means more user interest in your crm. The hardest part is getting users to try your crm. That's what you want, not to try to capture imagined lost profit on saas hosting. Then with scale you can create a marketplace of addons and widgets that can capture the real profit center
  • iFelix 3y ago
    I really like the metadata-driven approach of Iceburg, great work. I don't have a strong opinion on licensing. We were setup as MIT until last week and ahead of this launch I thought that if for whatever reason we were moving to a more restrictive licence post-launch it could feel like we've been lying to the community. So we decided to adopt a more conservative approach to avoid making promises we couldn't hold later on. If people come to us with projects where this license is a blocker, we'd me happy to discuss and grant exceptions.
• Morluche 3y ago
  Congrats on the launch Guys, seems awesome !
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Thank you!
• noizejoy 3y ago
  If I was running a company of any meaningful size, I would hesitate to allow any 3rd party to become the OS of my company. The OS of my company should be at the very core of my company - highly customized to give me an edge rather than to level the playing field with my competitors. And that means becoming very good at creating and maintaining the internal IT vision and expertise to make that possible. And that in turn means that I better have amazing IT capability in my leadership. The corollary of that is: Without amazing IT leadership, my company is living on borrowed time, eventually to be crushed by dependencies on one or more 3rd parties like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and their ilk. So the only way I’d accept strategic 3rd party software into my company, would be, if I have the ability to fully fork it and take it in-house at any time of my choosing, with at most a very manageable and finite remaining financial obligation after the fork. If Twenty.com has a business model, that can accommodate that, it might be onto something special.
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! We have been discussing this a lot. Here is one of the option we have in mind for the upcoming months and we would love to know if this could work in your opinion. Data ownership: a) Twenty makes the distinction between Twenty owned data models (People, Company, Pipeline) and your own data models. b) Let's say you use the cloud version: you can plug your own external database as a datasource. You would be able to describe your own data model through config file, Twenty would understand it and will keep in sync your data with the one stored in Twenty. Your data will remain the source of truth regarding whatever is tied to this datasource. c) So, if you wish to switch to self-hosted, you can, you will have to transfer Twenty owned data to into your own instance through exports / imports. You would not have to transfer your own data as this was already configured as an external data-source. Extensibility: a) Twenty is exposing a GraphQL API on top of your data that you can leverage. It doesn't matter if you are using the cloud version or if you are self-hosting it. b) We are thinking about a plugin system. To enable that, we plan to provide developers API for both FE and BE that will keep consistent between the different versions of Twenty (of course, they will likely be some breaking changes between major versions but hopefully minimal so you can keep using the latest version of Twenty). c) you can build anything you want using these 3 apis, either an external tool leveraging the GraphQL API, either a front-end plugin on FE API, either a backend plugin on BE API. You will be able to deploy your plugins to the cloud version (we will make sure they only impact your own tenant, which is challenging technically). Here too, if you choose to move to self-hosting, you will obviously also be able to write and deploy your own plugins on your self-hosted instance So, if we provide stable APIs and are able to safely run custom plugins into the cloud, it doesn't matter if you are using the cloud version or the self-hosted version. As both are using the exact same source code, you should be able to switch between the two quite easily. If you self-host, you completely own your data, if you use the cloud you don't but you can still fully benefit from Twenty APIs and extensibility.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• lagrange77 3y ago
  Looks interesting, i think i'll give it a try. BTW your Github readme says: A CRM that ban self-hosted for free, on your own network and close to your data sources. You might want to correct that one :)
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Haha! Yes, fixing it, thank you!
• pacifika 3y ago
  Interesting how you choose typescript?
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    We have mainly chosen to use JS on the frontend and on the backend to lower the learning curve for people that would want to contribute / extend it to their own needs. Then typescript (with its limitations!) it our best shot on top of JS, especially as we are using GraphQL
• tomnipotent 3y ago
  > Making it easy to connect data sources, and fetch data in real-time like in BI tools Please don't roll your own and rather leverage other FOSS projects, such as Airbyte (or Singer). This also puts you in a better position to leverage those tools to push local CRM data to upstream providers, which are incredibly common place for custom workflows.
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Yes, agree! We try to re-use as much opensource software as possible. One difficulty is that we are also trying to make it as easy as possible to self host the CRM. If we start including all these tools by default, it will be hard for people who self host to manage all these tools. Our current plan is to have Twenty supporting different drivers for everything. By default, you only have the basic ones implemented (let's say CSV import + direct connection to Postgres). Then, if you wish and take time to add the right configuration, you can activate Airbyte, Segment... The same goes for file storage for example: by default we use local storage, but we also make S3 drivers) On the cloud version, we would of course made all these drivers available.
• kgeist 3y ago
  My team develops our company's own homegrown internal CRM. It manages basically everything about the company, and contacts themselves is a very tiny part: there're marketing campaigns, followups, accounting, incoming/outcoming calls management, our products' entire licensing/subscription system (neatly integrated into everything else), tech support, inbox/outbox, activities, contacts, leads/lead events, analytics, the backend of the shopping cart on the site (products, pricing, discounts), the reseller portal, integrations with various vendors including payment systems, A/B testing etc. -- to name a few, off top of my head. Before me, there was an attempt to migrate to Dynamics CRM but our current CRM we've being developing for 15 years has so many custom rules/quirks/etc. eventually they abandoned the attempt because of the huge scope and the difficulty to reimplement millions of lines of custom logic in a proprietary CRM. Before I joined the team, the CRM's development didn't follow best practices and now it's very hard to maintain and update, due to architectural problems aka "big ball of mud". Another issue is that it was not designed to be extendable, every small rule the business comes up with is hardcoded in the code, and so there's no way to configure things somewhere in the UI with least amount code possible. So if I was to migrate our CRM to an open source engine/core, the following is a list of things I would want to see: 1) good modular internal design/API so that it was possible to easily add custom complex logic/flows 2) design/API which is extendable and doesn't have hardcoded logic/doesn't assume your company's flows 3) allows to configure as much as possible from the UI 4) an ecosystem of plugins/some sort of marketplace, with, again, solid, standardized API
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Thank you for the feedback. What you said resonates with me a lot. Standardized APIs: While we are designing Twenty, we have in mind to provide three APIs: a GraphQL API (headless), a Front-end React API and a NodeJS API that engineers could use to build their own plugins. We imagine that you could build your plugins in your own repository using SDKs maintained by Twenty. Then on your twenty instance you would be able to install a plugin from your custom repository or a shared marketplace (this would maybe imply a vetting process) There are many challenges around that, especially in resources monitoring and security given we are going into the multitenant architecture API that don't assume custom business logic: Here, we might have a slightly different opinion: we think that Twenty should come by default with a quite opinionated behavior. We will likely introduce a rich library of standards objects and fields that would have pre-defined behaviors. However, we would also enable the users to create custom objects and custom fields if they need that can be customized in whatever makes sense for their business. So: Standard objects/fields + Custom object/fields. We don't know yet if they share the exact same API
• xyst 3y ago
  I love these open source alternatives to big tech and centralized solutions. So far I have seen: - authentication and authorization with oauth: Ory (ory.sh) - payments and billing (alternative to stripe): Lago (getlago.com) and now - CRM: Twenty I'll look into this and see if I can contribute back. I hate SF
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Thank you, happy to see you on the codebase!
• fakedang 3y ago
  I thought CRM choices were a management decision, not a developer one. How do you plan on overcoming that, when management will just go with Salesforce or Freshworks?
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Yes agree being open-source is not enough of an argument to win. It will help us build a community, foster innovation and thus making the product better. But at the end of the day, I agree the product needs to be the best for users, not just for developers.
• hoofhearted 3y ago
  Do you have a hosted version yet?
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Yes! https://app.twenty.com https://app.twenty.com . It's still very early but we are happy to share it and to get feedbacks. We already have a few users that are using it on a daily basis and we are trying to get as much feedback as possible to prioritize our roadmap!
    • hoofhearted 3y ago
      Awesome! Congrats on the launch! Is the pricing for the hosted version?
      • charlesTwenty 3y ago
        The pricing is for the cloud version: you can use it for free if you stay under 100 contacts. Self-hosting is completely free!
        • hoofhearted 3y ago
          Awesome! Good stuff Charles :) What's the best way to contact you?
• fgfm 3y ago
  Really neat job guys! Some people see it as an inferior version of Salesforce, which goes beyond a CRM. But for a dev who loves open source & is looking for something that does only what a CRM does, it looks surprisingly good! I have to give it a try :D
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Thank you, we put a lot of effort into providing a good user experience and a good developer experience. Feel free to jump in on Github issues!
• anonu 3y ago
  AGPL is always scary. If I integrate your CRM code into my tech stack, technically I may need to make my tech open source, per AGPL. Thats dangerous.
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    We are unsure about the right license to use, so this is a great feedback. We had a MIT license one week ago that we know that we cannot hold on long term and we felt we were lying to the community by keeping an MIT license and changing it in one year. By using AGPL, we feel it's the right level of restriction. It's the license used by Metabase for example (https://github.com/metabase/metabase https://github.com/metabase/metabase) that many companies use internally. Obviously, we don't want to restrict people to self-host the CRM for their own needs.
    • version_five 3y ago
      With open source CRM I'd guess there are improvements or derivatives that you'd want to protect under AGPL, but then there are also "configurations" where it's adapted to a user's business and tech as mentioned. Having to release the source for these would be a non-starter for many. It would be nice if there was a way to make a clear distinction between how the two are licensed, though there is some gray area it may be hard to cover, ie when is it a new feature vs a configuration.
• cyberax 3y ago
  > We’re very eager to get your feedback I love the total lack of the Material UI! That being said, can you please make columns in tables to be resizable and the dividing lines between table rows a bit more visible?
  • Bonapara 3y ago
    Thanks! Resizable columns and higher contrasts are on their ways.
• keepamovin 3y ago
  It's amazing to see so many open source companies in YC
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Yes there seems to be a trend! Way behind the number of LLM-related startups, but still quite a large group within the current batch
• cute_boi 3y ago
  Congratulations and good luck :)
• casablancatoast 3y ago
  Alright so I'm going to say it: Make a local install please I'm begging you. As a 1-man consultant, I really don't want to: 1. Download docker or some other LAMP stack 2. Compile and run it 3. Launch a local database everytime I open it from my laptop 4. Voila! I'm into my locally server DB with a nice fronted. No thank you. If you want adoption it has to be adoptable, and most open source crms (SuiteCRM, Odoo, ERPNext, Espo, Crust, Corteza, Civi, etc) I've tried them all. I'm now back to running an Excel workbook split into categories taken from a notion template. Please just make this local :( It's gorgeous!
  • charlesTwenty 3y ago
    Interesting feedback! The recommended install is already local (through yarn). The only piece mentioning docker is to provision a Postgres database, which you need to have to run a CRM anyway. We have planned to replace it by a section explaining how to install Postgres on the different OS. Planned for next week!
  • quickthrower2 3y ago
    They seem to have a pricing page so if you don’t want to do that then use the hosted one?
    • iFelix 3y ago
      Yes! We've setup the pricing page for this launch to avoid disappointing users later on but we're not enforcing pricing at this point.
  • tgtweak 3y ago
    I think you need a js engine to run the entire thing which entails shipping that with the product to make it "locally installable". Then you get into complex version dependencies and require support for upgrading and upgrade paths... yarn is pretty straightforward and so are docker containers.
    • N-Krause 3y ago
• d33d33 3y ago
  tbh - when i noticed, i can't delete my account, i instantly stopped going further. As an european citizen: it might be interesting for you to cover aspects of GPDR, to attract european users (that are forced to use GPDR-conforming data handling).
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Sorry about that, it's not an intentional dark pattern, just the result of a very short timeline to build this. I've just created an issue to prioritize this soon: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/774 https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/774 We are trying to be conscious about data privacy too (e.g. no tracker or third-party cookie on our website)
• mfrye0 3y ago
  I've been tempted to do something similar over the years. I've worked with Salesforce quite a bit, and I dislike almost everything about it. I settled on doing open source company data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35977057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35977057. I think an open source CRM with the all the world's companies could be pretty killer. I created an account and will play around with it. Pretty cool so far.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Nice! Agree this could be great. Is this hosted as an API somewhere?
• jnwatson 3y ago
  I did a CRM bake off for a startup about 5 years ago. It is a super crowded market, probably the most crowded SaaS market in the world. There are even a half dozen open source CRMs. Good luck.
• lkrubner 3y ago
  I worked on a "Salesforce killer" that was actually meant to make Salesforce stronger by fixing its biggest known problem: that sales people hate using it. Our goal was to let sales people send text messages, which we would then use NLP to interpret correctly, and then add to salesforce. A sales person might sell a million bottles of shampoo to Hilton Hotels, then she might get in her car and drive home, on the way home she could talk to her phone, using voice-to-text to create the text message that would go to us. We would then use NLP to convert that text to appropriate objects and actions in Salesforce. The idea is that no sales person would ever again have to log into to Salesforce. Of course, the leadership of the startup was a complete disaster, and the startup ended as a disaster, so we were never able to fulfill the potential of that vision, but I do think the future must involve NLP technology that allows sales people to talk to CRMs. For anyone interested, I wrote a fairly popular book about this misadventure, How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...
  • actionfromafar 3y ago
    I may have too limited an imagination, but using NLP to interact with a computer UI is a Very Hard Problem. To me it feels like the old joke you know, 1 - Use NLP to interact with SalesForce competitor. 2 - something something. 3 - profit! Apologies in advance for the snark, I'm really curious. I mean, how much time would be really saved by talking to the phone vs more traditional inputs? Is it the dictaction which saves most time? If not, what is?
    • mrklol 3y ago
      It’s the advantage (like they said) that you don’t have to login into Salesforce. This tool slows them down, and via voice they don’t have to use the salesforce application directly. Imagine you have awesome ideas and plans and have 8 hours a day. But if you can only be productive for ~6, you’re losing a ton of time just because the tool is bad designed/planed/slow/{insert more words here}. If you want more about that, I would recommend reading the book. Quite interesting read :).
• catsarebetter 3y ago
  It does seem very similar to my notion CRM setup... Could this be on purpose?
• rodolphoarruda 3y ago
  I worked as an implementation consultant during the 1st or 2nd generation of CRM apps back in the fist decade of this century. Then, since 2010 I became a CRM end-user, mainly of Salesforce. After all those years listening to sales people complain about workflows and broken UI/UX, I realized the perfect system for this type of user is a message driven minimal UI app. System would send email/IM to users all day long asking questions about news leads, changes in opps stages, phone calls, contracts sent for signature etc. Sales folks would click a link, fill in a 2 field form and hit save. Call that "micro updates", if you will. The system mimics the sales manager who nudges the sales person for updates. Navigation within the app is minimal, so there is no room for alibis like: "Oh, I'm not updating it because it takes too much of my time. I was doing sales work instead." All this would be for the operational CRM. Analytical/management parts of the system would present the typical UI/UX we all know about.
  • rodolphoarruda 3y ago
    Update: Kommo.com seems to be aligned with the idea to be message driven having integrations with WhatsApp and Telegram (among others).
  • arethuza 3y ago
    "message driven minimal UI app" Via Slack/Teams/WhatsApp?
    • rodolphoarruda 3y ago
      I don't know about Teams. To me, it is more like a web conferencing tool. In case of Slack and WhatsApp, yes, they would be perfect channels to push the update requests for the sales teams. IMHO.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Interesting! Hubspot launched a chat interface[1] but it doesn't have that component you describe where it pro-actively asks you for things. I think logging will eventually become much less painful than it is today with good integrations and LLM, most of it could be done automatically. [1] https://chatspot.ai/ https://chatspot.ai/
• buzzwords 3y ago
  This is fantastic. Unfortunately decision makers usually go with what they already know. No one was ever fired for choosing Salesforce. Hopefully over time more people get exposure to this and increase the adoption.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Thanks for the kind words! It's a very long journey ahead of us, that's for sure!
• cynusx 3y ago
  There's a lot to do in this space. As a former CTO, almost every product I worked on had a request coming in at some point to create an internal CRM and I do believe in embedded CRMs as a software category. There are even SaaS categories that could use some CRM-like ability (e.g. link building tools, procurement tools, debt collection, ...) Open-source would be a good fit for that model cause you could take it in-house if you need a lot of customizations. Some painful CRM issues I encountered: - Pregnant funnels when sales sets up the funnel stages in a way that leads can go back through the stages (e.g. "next meeting scheduled", "follow-up" or "offer sent") so a deal passes through the same funnel steps several times. Not sure there is much you can do about that except for dynamically creating more stages in the funnel - Last-stage-changed-at Another issue is that CRMs don't keep event logs of what actually happened and just keep the last stage and when you changed that stage; this makes it impossible to analyze stage-durations and correct for cyclical stage switching (see pregnant funnel problem) - Call quality You would think that in 2023 voice-over-IP would be super reliable and works every time but I can guarantee you that in a 30 people sales team you will have many! complaints about call quality if you only rely on VOIP. Always have the ability to call the salespersons' real phone number (over the traditional telco network) and then call the client once the sales person is connected. (a sort of conference call). This kills all call quality issues as there is a fallback to dedicated phone networks. - Call activity recording Call activity recording is actually very important because apart from pipeline reviews, tracking sales call activity is one of the only leading predictors of sales success (it also catches lazy sales ppl). Related to the above, some CRM's are able to record the calls with VoiP but fail to do so when real phone networks are involved. - Cell phone masking When using CRM calls, in hubspot and zendesk you can spoof the phone number; this is typically set to the salespersons' cell phone so the client can call back but when the client calls back the call goes unrecorded. - Lack of IVR menus IVR is a part of every PBX setup but they almost never play nice with CRMs; only Aircall integrates IVR menus but it relies only on VoiP and was a huge nightmare (see call quality issues). - Treating leads and deals as separate records It's surprisingly hard to build funnels that go from "this person filled in this field and has these UTMs parameters" to "which UTM parameter made actual money because almost all CRMs have a dual LEAD/DEAL record. They typically destroy the lead and it becomes a contact which often has no stages anymore. Nobody in Sales and marketing thinks about it that way though, it's more "here's a lead and then the lead progressively discloses more information" I always think the best datamodel for a CRM is an event-sourced log with a giant json blob representing the latest stage that can be rebuilt from the event-source log. - Outbound email chains Most CRMs use their own email address and the main company domain to chase prospects (and setup automated email chains), which as you can expect sometimes get spam-listed; the ability to email through a separate domain and to capture replies properly is needed. My current solution is to just ban the use of automated email chains but I've seen other companies use mailgun to create a proxied salesperson' inbox. - Closing the loop with marketing Google analytics and facebook has tags you can use to indicate the actual deal value of the generated lead. You can say this click led to 1k in revenue; except it's a huge pain in the ass to do this because of the lead/deal breakup and often the original contact details change as the sales person gains more trust. Another option would be to export events to analytics tools like Amplitude so you can get a complete marketing-product-sales funnel
• chakintosh 3y ago
  One thing I'd like to see improve is the contrast between UI components on Dark Mode. Currently using a MBP XDR display at 100% brightness and I can barely make out where the components start and stop.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Yes, we agree, this should be fixed before end of next week. Issue here: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/668 https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/668
• ganarajpr 3y ago
  Can you talk a bit more regarding your go to market strategy ? How will you approach potential customers and what is your pitch going to be for them to get rid of SF in favour of your "untested" product - as how they would see it ? I am more interested in the marketing strategy since I am working on a very similiar problem, but in a slightly tangential software which is monopolising the market. Any advice / insights on this would be appreciated.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Salesforce is the end-goal but we wouldn't be a serious alternative for enterprise customers today. Our strategy is to start working with companies in our YC batch which have relatively simple needs, and then deliver improvements fast enough so that these companies never outgrow us and have to switch. It's a tedious process to get off a CRM, and particularly Salesforce, so it's much easier to target companies that are not using any tool at first and grow with them.
    • ganarajpr 3y ago
      What was that factor that made YC accept you into their batch then ? What differentiator did you guys bring ?
• amerf1 3y ago
  Congrats on launching! Great tool, love the minimal UI and the "coming soon" features I've used CRMs for the last 10 years, starting with an internal built CRM for a bank that I worked at and moving on to the salesforce, hubspot etc.. Here's what I've noticed being a user/developer - Users will always complain! If it takes more than 2 minutes to get something done they'd rather not do it - All CRMs have a learning curve, once users get used to the workflows they're comfortable with, they don't want anything to change. (e.g. when one of the CRMs relaunched with a new UI, a few users refused to use it for a long time) - Users prefer the work done for them, no one wants to spend time thinking. If you have a library of pre-built workflows it goes a long way. Even better, do all the analysis and let users make a binary decision This is one space that really interests me, let me know if you wanted to chat. My twitter is in my bio
  • iFelix 3y ago
    Betting on user's laziness is usually a good path! I mentioned it in another comment but I think the way we log activities is something that will evolve a lot with good connectors and LLMs. And once you have the right data logged you can think about suggesting the next tasks, performing actions on behalf of the user, etc. I've followed you on Twitter!
• texas2toss 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on where this sits between a custom Airtable/Notion CRM and something more purpose built like Wobaka, Attio, Folk, LessAnnoyingCRM? Both focus and solve CRM issues for smaller companies. Would love to hear three main items: 1) Which company profile (size, revenue, industry/use-case, etc) is Twenty best suited for and which of the above do you has at the closest target profile overlap? 2) Which aspects of a CRM does this solve now and in near future (Q4 2023)? eg: is it email sequences, existing customer tracking & BI, prospect enrichment, etc? 3) What sales/CRM stack are you using internally at Twenty // what are your peers using? How do you send bulk emails? How do you track signed contracts, revenue start dates, and so forth? Would love to get some info about not just dogfooding your own product but what you/peers use for your GTM.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    It would sit in the second category. And probably even more on the right than the companies you mentioned on a spectrum going from "agnostic database UI" to "opinionated CRM tool with a rich set of standard objects/APIs coming out of the box" (which doesn't mean that you can't customize it). 1) Building a full-featured CRM is a long-journey. Our strategy is to start working with companies in our YC batch which have simple needs, and then deliver improvements fast enough so that these companies never outgrow us and have to switch. 2) We're focused on a simple B2B Sales use-case for now (log tasks, kanban, etc.). Next we will focus on data integration, connectors and extensibility. The goal is to become the best system of records for the company. That should allow connecting external tools to bring the best of breed app for each category (e.g. customer engagement, support tool, phone). Later on we will eventually invest in building our own Marketing/Support apps like Salesforce did but we're still very far from there. 3) Prior to this launch we only had a handful of people we were talking to so a simple Kanban in Twenty, no automation. And after that, we will remain focused on product development in the coming months so our team is probably not the best example in terms of Sales playbook. But once we want to scale the team and have built integrations, we will likely take the "best of breed" approach I was mentioning above, using Twenty as the central piece to connect Aircall, Braze, Docusign, etc. (Great questions by the way, thanks)
• jve 3y ago
  Make it extensibe. Usually businesses require this little customization here and there and given you provide the customization points, excellent. OOTB hasn't worked well for me... probably I can use excel then more easily. Consider Microsoft Power Platform / Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement/Sales for which I'm a developer. Obviously this is a behemot and much more than CRM, but it was born out of CRM! But I want to share things I love about the platform. The following customization points for power platform goes a VERY LONG WAY to adjust CRM to business needs and I yet have to see a significant roadblock for any customization business has needed: - Custom tables which are 1st party citizens in all the ways and doesn't have any shortcomings. It supports all the auditing, security model and ability to link to first party tables and other way around. - Custom attributes for 1st party tables. - Robust Plugin-Architecure - everything is a message (API calls, CRUD, special operations, etc) - I can "plug-in" into the pipeline either for my messages or 1st party messages and have pre-operations and post operations. I can do sync/async plugin. For sync plugin I can live within same database transaction and make it so that all the transaction succeeds or rollbacks if I choose it so. - 1st party JS library API that enables limited interaction with the form (show/hide fields, set required, get/set values) - An option to create own Custom APIs, add a plugin to API and you have a nice extensibility. - Powerful, consisten WebApi for integration that also supports my custom tables and stuff - CRUD operations and API calls. Can build a completely custom client for the CRM if the platform is lacking somehow. - Custom components framework - whenever builtin controls/JS is lacking, I can build full-blown control in my choice of JS framework that has particular integration points when hosted within CRM. As I see it, consistency makes things like that possible.
  • iFelix 3y ago
    I aspire to achieve all of this someday! The key challenges I foresee are: - Backend: offer extensibility that is powerful while secure in our multi-tenant cloud service. - Frontend: ensure that custom plugins don't feel limiting while not disrupting the unified design, as the overall software appearance, not just the core, shapes the end-users' brand perception/experience
    • jve 3y ago
• moneywoes 3y ago
  Am I hallucinating or was this posted a couple of days ago?
  • iFelix 3y ago
    We posted yesterday (and never before)
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• alanaan 3y ago
  this looks super cool and great ux (love the keyboard shortcuts, dark mode, notion-like experience). congrats on launching it! do you have any plans to automate data entry? i currently use airtable and have tried folk, attio, etc. but my biggest frustration is it takes so much time and energy to manually add information about people and companies. would immediately pay $20/mo or more for a product that can automatically enrich any person/company data for me and sync with my calendar, email, twitter, linkedin, etc. to add people/companies.
• slotrans 3y ago
  Just as food for thought, the two big problems I see with every single Salesforce deployment are: 1. Excessive customization. Ever seen a Lead record with fewer than 300 custom fields? I haven't! I have no idea what you do about this from a tool design standpoint but... think about it. It's a huge problem. 2. Synchronization. If you have Your System, and then you adopt a CRM, now you have state in two places. And commonly that state is allowed to mutate in both places, and now you inhabit a permanent nightmare hellscape. Figure out how to discourage this. Think about ways of modeling relationships to outside systems (ala NetSuite's externalId) and enforcing unique connections. Make it easy to request supplementary data "live" so that there's less reason to copy it in. Good luck!