Comment by skrig
1 day ago
I'm working on boiling the ocean - we're building a new CRM to compete with some of the big players. I tried very hard to avoid doing this, but I've helped enough business owner friends set up CRMs to realize there's MUCH to be desired. My goal is to create a CRM that people rave about - something that is very rare. Pretty much everyone I help views CRMs as a necessary evil. Our bold challenge is - can we make a CRM that is delightful to use?
Of course we have to slap "AI" on it in this market, but we plan on adding AI features that are actually thoughtful and not just a glorified chatbot.
Sounds interesting! As someone who works in Revenue Operations the CRM space is ripe for disruption, especially around using CRM data to help sales teams explore the data.
I vibecoded a POC of what something I think would work (around the latter part around exploring the data). Need to complete it and start testing it.
Thanks! I totally agree. It starts with getting the basics right. I think this is where most CRMs get it wrong - getting users to correctly enter and maintain clean data is a challenge. We're trying to build smarter schemas for contacts, quotes, sales, etc. but we're also making a really intuitive UI for easily updating information. Further still, we're trying to automatically fill in data for the customer. Many fields can be automatically inferred based on the context of a deal.
Once we get this right, I think the next step is exactly what you said, building really good tools to explore the data. Making it easy for non-technical users to run machine learning on their data to make business decisions or see cool visualizations. We realize that so many of our customers want to know this stuff and have no way of getting at it! We've got a lot of ideas for both visualizing and analyzing the data. I think there's a ton of potential for cool things here. Heatmaps, spiderwebs, interactive charts, etc. Stuff that brings the data to life. One of the common asks from some of our early customers is a heatmap of the world to visualize their sales/reach and see changes over time. Visualizing progress per sales region, etc. I think sales especially has a lot of opportunities for better lead generation and qualification as well.
i'm currently unemployed but i have experience as a CSM and account manager for multiple companies (all have used Salesforce) if you ever want feedback or bounce ideas.
This would be awesome, we're in hardcore MVP build mode right now - when we get closer to launch I'll hit you up.
I'm a little delusional, but I think there's ground to steal back from Salesforce. Most folks I talk to hate how complicated Salesforce is (one even calls it Salesfarce). I've heard a story or two about smaller companies trying to adopt it and wasting a hundred thousand or two implementing Salesforce only to have it never get used. On top of that, you need to train your employees to use Salesforce effectively.
The key is simplicity, building a CRM that anyone can instantly understand just by looking at it. This is insanely hard but I think we'll pull it off. I'll show you more what I mean when I reach out. Thanks!