My glib take to every CRM like this: If you don't ship with a programming layer you're DOA. Salesforce thrives off of Apex and friends. You _need_ to let people program your CRMs if you want to go after SFDC. Or, more specifically, you need to _host_ people's programs so they don't have operational questions.
Salesforce gets the ubiquity the same way that Wordpress does: randos can copy some code fragments off of a website and stick it into a file/textbox, and get new functionality.
So... Twenty, hire one person whose job it is to layer AWS Lambda over your system :)
Hey, just seeing this thread now. Agreed!
We've started a year ago and have done probably just 10% of what is needed to really get to Salesforce.
We need (1) a flexible data model, (2) a flexible layout, (3) code execution.
We've done (1) but have yet to do (2) and (3) this year.
Next step of the plan is to let people build and share apps that leverage those 3 blocks, that's where open source will really shine!
Can you elaborate on what "a flexible layout" means in this context? Is this data layout, i.e. serialization format(s)? UI layouts for displaying values in the data model? Something else?
(We too are in the "let people execute their code on our servers" space; providing a flexible data model seemed to have been key)
Most businesses are not big enterprises that need a programming layer. You can focus on that later on when you actually found some traction and move up-market. I don't think starting with enterprise features is "DOA", it's just smart prioritization.
You don't want to go through enterprise sales cycles when you are just starting your company.
I've worked with big and small businesses that use salesforce and they all have some kind of programming layer. Small businesses tend to buy plugins or pay some contracting firm to write customizations.
> You don't want to go through enterprise sales cycles when you are just starting your company.
There's definitely a gradient here. If you are good at juggling sales cycles, you can close "small enterprise" deals. And if you have a good programming layer, instead of going through a full dev process for each thing, you get "integrators" working on things.
The advantage here: once the design is done, you're writing a handful of 10-line scripts. You can have a design meeting, have a person sit down for an hour, and ship out a thing that closes a deal. And the design can be done for _just_ the company's needs instead of a full flow. You can charge an "integration fee" to the customer in this case as well.
A programming layer lets you remove a huge level of tension that comes with B2B sales: juggling specific client needs with your product needs.
I run a CRM platform for many years. And while this is true, that if you want to go after a subsection of SalesForce type customers, you do need a programming layer. However, that is only a specific section of the market. There are vast amount of users out there that do not need that and will never will. They need a CRM. Not a Platform-that-is-also-a-CRM.
We offer 100% API access, and customisation from the data layer to the UI (very very flexible), but I'd be reluctant to invest time in adding an actual programming layer like APEX on top of it. I don't think I'd want to even go to that level of "enterprise" customers and everything else that comes with it.
Edit: just because I've seen people plug their products here as well, I'll add mine: https://cogmento.com
I think it is easier said that done. The GTM completely changes of a product like this. Now you have to build API, DSL and eco-system to support it. I absolutely agree that your take. But building an eco-system is hard.
You don't need a DSL if you, for example, "just" use Javascript. You need an API anyways. You do need to do some operational fudging around of course.
I'm going to also counter with something super important: you build out stuff like this, and suddenly you can handle your own feature requests faster. User wants X to happen after Y? Write a tiny event script that they install into their env. They need some bespoke field? You have custom models, and now your events reply to that.
In the fractal of requirement differences that is sales pipelines, not doing this just feels like causing yourself a bunch of dev pain.
Not sure. In my experience a lot of companies dont do any custom coding for their CRM and if they do it is usual basic stuff that can be done with a zapier integration (add lead to CRM when form is filled). An API is probably good but dont think every CRM customer needs APEX level API.
Yes, we(Windmill)'d be a kick-ass combo. We're users of twenty ourselves. As both open-source projects, a third option that I'm often recommending is having such great integration in both products such that their users can independently chose to use and install Windmill (self-host or cloud) and have it power all of the orchestration and arbitrary-code needs of the third service without the need for a formal whitelabel.
A few months ago I was looking for some software that was CRM-like. We are a bit non-traditional, and don't fit neatly into the typical CRM use cases.
Twenty was almost what we needed. It was extremely easy to set up, the customization is very promising, and the REST API worked ok.
The main issue is that it was pretty alpha-version, and I ran into quite a few small issues that just just made it not quite work for us. Either way, I'm keeping an eye on it, and will re-evaluate again at some point. Hopefully it keeps its customizability.
My startup [0] works with a lot of companies that are non-traditional, as you put it, and gives you the tools to design a CRM (and other business tools) that actually suit your business, if you want to check it out
We are academic group who is looking to increase collaboration both in industry and academia. While we have "products" (which we don't sell), we also have other initiatives like an education program. We also may want to set up a consortium with industry, which may include them giving us money, but not in a "buy a product or service" sense (but still needs to be thoroughly tracked).
So I'd really like a platform that holistically tracks people and our engagement with them. Some of this is done by traditional CRM, but the focus on selling products & services is too narrow.
Some desired features:
* Tracking our contacts, so we don't forget to follow through on something (CRM generally does this)
* Tracking people through time. If/Where they did their PhD, postdoc, are they in industry now. CRM I've looked at tend to be very fixed-point in time.
* What their research interests are and have been. Are they in an area we are looking to expand into? What conferences do they typically go to?
* How they have engaged with us before. Was it through an educational workshop? Did we mentor them in a mentorship program? Just someone we met sometime and seemed interested? People can be part of multiple groups.
* If they are using our projects, how are they using them? We are looking for good stories to give to our own funding agencies (and for general marketing).
* If they are interested in giving us money, what is the status of those talks?
If there's a better term for software that does this kind of thing, I'm very open to ideas. This isn't a strength in academia, as is pretty obvious, and I'm very new at this :)
What features were you missing? Currently Im part of a team making a CRM based on more niche kind of customer and were trying to retrieve more information about what other CRMs lack
I wish them the best, but I think they would have been best not drawing the comparison to Salesforce. IME people buy Salesforce not for the CRM but for the force.com platform. The ability to seamlessly build business logic over the entire flow of a business is Salesforce's bread and butter. CRM is a small part that definitely gets heavy use, but it's only a small part of the larger picture.
If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.
It's probably wise as a startup to not go for Salesforce parity while building out the core roadmap. You can build a decent business catching new companies and paying attention to their needs unencumbered by the expectations of "switchers".
I agree with your points about what people want / expect from Salesforce. Would kind of be cool to see a CRM have AppExchange + SF data model interoperability.
I'm not a fan of Elon-style "pitch FSD or promise things that you don't have" either. But we had to find the right balance between expressing our vision and expressing where we are which you can see through screenshots/product demos.
The vision is definitely to have something extensible and more powerful than force.com ; we aren't there yet because we need to build strong foundations before that. We already try to separate our business apps from the core engine in the code base to learn what will be the right api and get ready for that next step when it's time.
If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.
I'm curious. What would you use for that today? MS Dynamics? Airtable? Budibase? Appsmith?
100%. You also buy Salesforce because your salespeople demand you too. It's something users are familiar with and excel in. Dislodging an incumbent is a lot more than just the technical product itself.
Twenty would be better served not marketing itself as an alternative as it isn't really an alternative. Instead, focus on their strengths and hone it on a niche audience. Useful guide by April Dunford, who's a guru at positioning (and coincidentally had repositioned a CRM tool previously!): https://www.aprildunford.com/post/a-quickstart-guide-to-posi....
What's ironic about ecosystems is that (as an integration developer), getting devs to build on your platform is so easy if companies would just help them connect to users to better understand their needs, and then give them the necessary endpoints.
I, and many others, would jump to build on basically any tool that facilitated those relationships.
Yeah IMO its a red flag to compare yourself to Salesforce unless you:
* Offer a managed database system that can support common ETL workloads, custom fields, event hooks like post-save, etc
* A embeded-DSL for scripting custom actions, no an API does not replace this functionality
* Consultants/Support-engineering/and other escape valves when a really important business process needs to get fixed or built NOW
* A lot more
And frankly many startups don't have the muscle for this. Its not easy to do database work and its not easy to create functional (not necessarily good, just functional) DSLs and programming languages. These are harder computer science problems that take real talent to solve well. There are valid reasons Salesforce has the market cap it does.
Nice! It's great to have more open source platforms in the CRM space.
This feels a lot like Directus [0] except that the latter is a more general data platform you build upon. They have a 100 Apps in 100 hours playlist where they build sample apps on top on Directus, even a simple CRM [1].
I wonder whether it's possible to write custom code on the platform (to automate processes)? In Salesforce, it's called Apex, a Java like language which allows to write trigger, and is the server-side language for frontend interfaces (written in LWC, Visualforce, etc.). Speaking of, is it possible to extend also the Twenty interface with custom written code?
Salesforce has barely evolved in the last 15 years. Apex (as mentioned previously) has not changed the slightest. In 2010, there was Visualforce, it's been pretty good despite a bit slow. LWC just got slower in general while trying to look fancy with some CSS. And the rest has been the lack of competition making the success of Salesforce, or, in the defense of Salesforce, Salesforce has been way ahead of the competition 15 years ago. And maybe the competition is finally catching up?..
I am looking for a personal contact manager that has integration with a personal calendar. I have talked about this with my wife who has moderate ADHD: it is harder for her to manage relationships, because she generally lacks a perception of time. Getting gentle reminders to follow up with a friend or acquaintance would be very helpful. But none of these are business relationships, so maybe looking for CRM software is barking up the wrong tree, even if open source and extensible. Is there anyone in a similar boat that has found a good solution?
Consider https://legendapp.com/ or https://noteplan.co/ for nice note integration with your calendar. You could easily create a list of contacts in these systems and trigger various events (singular and recurring).
This one grants a right for the service to use your content however they wish. An absolute showstopper for me, honestly.
From their Privacy Policy:
"You retain any and all of your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Service and you are responsible for protecting those rights. We take no responsibility and assume no liability for Content you or any third party posts on or through Service. However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms."
Readit News
Salesforce gets the ubiquity the same way that Wordpress does: randos can copy some code fragments off of a website and stick it into a file/textbox, and get new functionality.
So... Twenty, hire one person whose job it is to layer AWS Lambda over your system :)
(We too are in the "let people execute their code on our servers" space; providing a flexible data model seemed to have been key)
You don't want to go through enterprise sales cycles when you are just starting your company.
Your assumption is that having a programming layer in a CRM is only for big businesses. But that's not true at all.
There's definitely a gradient here. If you are good at juggling sales cycles, you can close "small enterprise" deals. And if you have a good programming layer, instead of going through a full dev process for each thing, you get "integrators" working on things.
The advantage here: once the design is done, you're writing a handful of 10-line scripts. You can have a design meeting, have a person sit down for an hour, and ship out a thing that closes a deal. And the design can be done for _just_ the company's needs instead of a full flow. You can charge an "integration fee" to the customer in this case as well.
A programming layer lets you remove a huge level of tension that comes with B2B sales: juggling specific client needs with your product needs.
We offer 100% API access, and customisation from the data layer to the UI (very very flexible), but I'd be reluctant to invest time in adding an actual programming layer like APEX on top of it. I don't think I'd want to even go to that level of "enterprise" customers and everything else that comes with it.
Edit: just because I've seen people plug their products here as well, I'll add mine: https://cogmento.com
I'm going to also counter with something super important: you build out stuff like this, and suddenly you can handle your own feature requests faster. User wants X to happen after Y? Write a tiny event script that they install into their env. They need some bespoke field? You have custom models, and now your events reply to that.
In the fractal of requirement differences that is sales pipelines, not doing this just feels like causing yourself a bunch of dev pain.
That's what I read it as the first time through. How annoying.
Programming And Workflows are keys
Twenty was almost what we needed. It was extremely easy to set up, the customization is very promising, and the REST API worked ok.
The main issue is that it was pretty alpha-version, and I ran into quite a few small issues that just just made it not quite work for us. Either way, I'm keeping an eye on it, and will re-evaluate again at some point. Hopefully it keeps its customizability.
Never found anything more suitable, though.
[0] https://noloco.io
I'm curious to understand more.
Do you mean you're non-traditional in how you track Pipeline and working a customer through your sales funnel to Close?
(which I am struggling to understand what could be non-traditional about that)
Or are you referring to something else?
Genuinely curious, which is why I ask.
We are academic group who is looking to increase collaboration both in industry and academia. While we have "products" (which we don't sell), we also have other initiatives like an education program. We also may want to set up a consortium with industry, which may include them giving us money, but not in a "buy a product or service" sense (but still needs to be thoroughly tracked).
So I'd really like a platform that holistically tracks people and our engagement with them. Some of this is done by traditional CRM, but the focus on selling products & services is too narrow.
Some desired features:
* Tracking our contacts, so we don't forget to follow through on something (CRM generally does this)
* Tracking people through time. If/Where they did their PhD, postdoc, are they in industry now. CRM I've looked at tend to be very fixed-point in time.
* What their research interests are and have been. Are they in an area we are looking to expand into? What conferences do they typically go to?
* How they have engaged with us before. Was it through an educational workshop? Did we mentor them in a mentorship program? Just someone we met sometime and seemed interested? People can be part of multiple groups.
* If they are using our projects, how are they using them? We are looking for good stories to give to our own funding agencies (and for general marketing).
* If they are interested in giving us money, what is the status of those talks?
If there's a better term for software that does this kind of thing, I'm very open to ideas. This isn't a strength in academia, as is pretty obvious, and I'm very new at this :)
That's what your standard business says and it is often business with bad practices that say that
If they had a way to quickly spin of LOB apps like Salesforce does, and had implemented a CRM on top of that... I'd say they would be much more apt drawing the comparison. Particularly if that doesn't require code to do. I know a LOT of companies that would pay dearly for such a hosted platform, GPL or not.
While being able to update the platform seamlessly without breaking that logic.
I agree with your points about what people want / expect from Salesforce. Would kind of be cool to see a CRM have AppExchange + SF data model interoperability.
The vision is definitely to have something extensible and more powerful than force.com ; we aren't there yet because we need to build strong foundations before that. We already try to separate our business apps from the core engine in the code base to learn what will be the right api and get ready for that next step when it's time.
Twenty would be better served not marketing itself as an alternative as it isn't really an alternative. Instead, focus on their strengths and hone it on a niche audience. Useful guide by April Dunford, who's a guru at positioning (and coincidentally had repositioned a CRM tool previously!): https://www.aprildunford.com/post/a-quickstart-guide-to-posi....
I, and many others, would jump to build on basically any tool that facilitated those relationships.
* Offer a managed database system that can support common ETL workloads, custom fields, event hooks like post-save, etc
* A embeded-DSL for scripting custom actions, no an API does not replace this functionality
* Consultants/Support-engineering/and other escape valves when a really important business process needs to get fixed or built NOW
* A lot more
And frankly many startups don't have the muscle for this. Its not easy to do database work and its not easy to create functional (not necessarily good, just functional) DSLs and programming languages. These are harder computer science problems that take real talent to solve well. There are valid reasons Salesforce has the market cap it does.
Language on their homepage: The #1 Open-Source CRM Modern, powerful, affordable platform to manage your customer relationships
This feels a lot like Directus [0] except that the latter is a more general data platform you build upon. They have a 100 Apps in 100 hours playlist where they build sample apps on top on Directus, even a simple CRM [1].
[0] https://directus.io/
[1] https://youtu.be/tTrBn9Wvko0?si=IoqQ7o7Y8czfxB31
Salesforce has barely evolved in the last 15 years. Apex (as mentioned previously) has not changed the slightest. In 2010, there was Visualforce, it's been pretty good despite a bit slow. LWC just got slower in general while trying to look fancy with some CSS. And the rest has been the lack of competition making the success of Salesforce, or, in the defense of Salesforce, Salesforce has been way ahead of the competition 15 years ago. And maybe the competition is finally catching up?..
- https://www.swantide.com/
- https://www.sweep.io/
pretty cool but obviously an automation native platform would be cooler and I think Attio is the contender for this
- https://attio.com/templates
- https://attio.com/blog/introducing-attio-objects
Deleted Comment
From their Privacy Policy: "You retain any and all of your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through Service and you are responsible for protecting those rights. We take no responsibility and assume no liability for Content you or any third party posts on or through Service. However, by posting Content using Service you grant us the right and license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content on and through Service. You agree that this license includes the right for us to make your Content available to other users of Service, who may also use your Content subject to these Terms."
https://twenty.com/legal/privacy