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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, logisti

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 A lot of terribly outdated stuff.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
- torgard 3y ago
  My first internship was as a Dynamics AX dev. Me and another guy. Our mentor was a super-duper senior architect something something. He once asked us what we were planning on doing, career-wise, and we were kinda surprised; obviously we were working towards becoming Dynamics AX devs, and were hoping for a job at that place. He got a somewhat wistful look in his eyes, and said (more to himself than to us) he wished he could go back and choose not to do that. I'll never forget that. He was earning an insane amount of money, working super high-level at one of the largest IT firms in the country.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    I think a lot of ERP stuff is like that - pays well but few people regard it as fun - not least of which is that end up with knowledge of very niche technologies that don't really progress very rapidly. Edit: Mind you for job security and cash generating potential they are can be pretty good - years ago I knew of people on £3000 a day in the UK working on very niche financial systems - but you basically had to have a lot of domain knowledge (financial consolidation) and decent development skills.
    - epolanski 3y ago
      Honestly, I do mostly web development and unless you're really interested in the product (which is far from a given) why do you care if it's an ERP or ecommerce or some travel application?
      - carstenhag 3y ago
        My guess: If you are implementing any type of software, you usually see an UI, input and output. For SAP and ERP you can also have this. But it's really ugly, messy, and you might have to implement 5 corner cases of what the german government has thought of to complicate the lives' of everyone in regards to capital gains taxes in combination with church taxes, in a year in which you got married but one of the two left the church the same year. Oh, and what if you also got a kid that year and moved cities? And during implementation there is another law passed to change stuff? In other words: So out of the world that noone finds it interesting anymore :D
tgtweak 3y ago
To be brutally honest, Airtable is a dog to get data out of... the sync is delayed, the API calls to pull data are atrocious and the cost/complexity to exfiltrate data from Airtable is hugely prohibitive. I wouldn't use that as a source of inspiration, at least not on the "connectivity" end.
- CPLX 3y ago
  Maybe so but it’s incredible as a rapid prototyping tool to solve actual business problems at reasonable scale and it’s one of the few platforms that is constantly improving in intuitive ways. Emulating AirTable usability with a CRM focus would be a category killer if successful.
  - tgtweak 3y ago
    Nothing pisses me off more than non-devs saying how AirTable is for devs when all the devs I know hate interfacing with it or having to work with it. If you want pretty spreadsheets, cool. If you want to use this as a CMS or CRM, and it has to interface with an external tool, god rest your soul. edit: a candid example, we were using it to track some payables for advertising campaigns. Marketing team (that likes airtable) was adding the invoice as a file field to the table. That file attachment is not added to any "email" or "external" sync features of airtable, making it impossible to add it programmatically to an accounting software or to a shared accounting drive. Using zapier doesn't fix it since it's just not the file or a link to it in any of the api calls, only a reference field. It also doesn't export when you do an export of the table. You have to manually go in and download the file from each record (in the ui) which makes putting it there vs dropping it into a shared drive pretty useless as far as time savings is concerned.
    - CPLX 3y ago
      I’m a developer and have run development teams. I fucking love Airtable for solving business problems. I love it for the same reason I love XL, which is that you can turn it on and it just works and normal people can use it. You can create a sheet that tracks something important to the business in 20 minutes, and you have built in slack notifications and cron-type job capability and the ability to call or be called via REST API and so on, plus easy to follow user management and row level commenting and so on all built in. In the first 20 minutes. Yeah there’s stuff it can’t do or is bad for. When you get to that stuff use another tool, and guess what you usually can use whatever you did in Airtable as a spec instead of trying to sort out what the business process actually needs in terms of fields and so on. I absolutely love it. It’s been an incredibly helpful addition to what had been our previous stack of salesforce for CRM and our own rails app/site, and is just so much faster for creating internal business tools than either.
samstave 3y ago
Template library. There should be a template library and a way to do a really high-level business model NODE style work flow and it pulls the templates needed to make that A NODE TREE builder for a crm would be valuable, if it doesnt already exist - start with "departments" and then have children recommendations for each, such that Inventory is a Child of Receiving and all the requisite models/modules in such....

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

torgard 3y ago
My first internship was as a Dynamics AX dev. Me and another guy. Our mentor was a super-duper senior architect something something. He once asked us what we were planning on doing, career-wise, and we were kinda surprised; obviously we were working towards becoming Dynamics AX devs, and were hoping for a job at that place. He got a somewhat wistful look in his eyes, and said (more to himself than to us) he wished he could go back and choose not to do that. I'll never forget that. He was earning an insane amount of money, working super high-level at one of the largest IT firms in the country.
- arethuza 3y ago
  I think a lot of ERP stuff is like that - pays well but few people regard it as fun - not least of which is that end up with knowledge of very niche technologies that don't really progress very rapidly. Edit: Mind you for job security and cash generating potential they are can be pretty good - years ago I knew of people on £3000 a day in the UK working on very niche financial systems - but you basically had to have a lot of domain knowledge (financial consolidation) and decent development skills.
  - epolanski 3y ago
    Honestly, I do mostly web development and unless you're really interested in the product (which is far from a given) why do you care if it's an ERP or ecommerce or some travel application?
    - carstenhag 3y ago
      My guess: If you are implementing any type of software, you usually see an UI, input and output. For SAP and ERP you can also have this. But it's really ugly, messy, and you might have to implement 5 corner cases of what the german government has thought of to complicate the lives' of everyone in regards to capital gains taxes in combination with church taxes, in a year in which you got married but one of the two left the church the same year. Oh, and what if you also got a kid that year and moved cities? And during implementation there is another law passed to change stuff? In other words: So out of the world that noone finds it interesting anymore :D

tgtweak 3y ago

To be brutally honest, Airtable is a dog to get data out of... the sync is delayed, the API calls to pull data are atrocious and the cost/complexity to exfiltrate data from Airtable is hugely prohibitive. I wouldn't use that as a source of inspiration, at least not on the "connectivity" end.

CPLX 3y ago
Maybe so but it’s incredible as a rapid prototyping tool to solve actual business problems at reasonable scale and it’s one of the few platforms that is constantly improving in intuitive ways. Emulating AirTable usability with a CRM focus would be a category killer if successful.
- tgtweak 3y ago
  Nothing pisses me off more than non-devs saying how AirTable is for devs when all the devs I know hate interfacing with it or having to work with it. If you want pretty spreadsheets, cool. If you want to use this as a CMS or CRM, and it has to interface with an external tool, god rest your soul. edit: a candid example, we were using it to track some payables for advertising campaigns. Marketing team (that likes airtable) was adding the invoice as a file field to the table. That file attachment is not added to any "email" or "external" sync features of airtable, making it impossible to add it programmatically to an accounting software or to a shared accounting drive. Using zapier doesn't fix it since it's just not the file or a link to it in any of the api calls, only a reference field. It also doesn't export when you do an export of the table. You have to manually go in and download the file from each record (in the ui) which makes putting it there vs dropping it into a shared drive pretty useless as far as time savings is concerned.
  - CPLX 3y ago
    I’m a developer and have run development teams. I fucking love Airtable for solving business problems. I love it for the same reason I love XL, which is that you can turn it on and it just works and normal people can use it. You can create a sheet that tracks something important to the business in 20 minutes, and you have built in slack notifications and cron-type job capability and the ability to call or be called via REST API and so on, plus easy to follow user management and row level commenting and so on all built in. In the first 20 minutes. Yeah there’s stuff it can’t do or is bad for. When you get to that stuff use another tool, and guess what you usually can use whatever you did in Airtable as a spec instead of trying to sort out what the business process actually needs in terms of fields and so on. I absolutely love it. It’s been an incredibly helpful addition to what had been our previous stack of salesforce for CRM and our own rails app/site, and is just so much faster for creating internal business tools than either.

samstave 3y ago

Template library. There should be a template library and a way to do a really high-level business model NODE style work flow and it pulls the templates needed to make that A NODE TREE builder for a crm would be valuable, if it doesnt already exist - start with "departments" and then have children recommendations for each, such that Inventory is a Child of Receiving and all the requisite models/modules in such....