Building consumer / power-user software always gave me more joy than FDEing into an enterprise. It did not give me joy to manually add AI tools to a cloud harness for every small new thing, at least not as much as completely local software that is open source and has all the powers of OpenClaw (I can now talk to my CRM on Telegram!).
A week ago, we launched Ironclaw, an Open Source OpenClaw CRM Framework (https://x.com/garrytan/status/2023518514120937672?s=20) but people confused us with NearAI’s Ironclaw, so we changed our name to DenchClaw (https://denchclaw.com).
OpenClaw today feels like early React: the primitive is incredibly powerful, but the patterns are still forming, and everyone is piecing together their own way to actually use it. What made React explode was the emergence of frameworks like Gatsby and Next.js that turned raw capability into something opinionated, repeatable, and easy to adopt.
That is how we think about DenchClaw. We are trying to make it one of the clearest, most practical, and most complete ways to use OpenClaw in the real world.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfACTbc3Bh4#t=43
npx denchclaw
On Dench, everything sits in a file system, the table filters, views, column toggles, calendar/gantt views, etc, so OpenClaw can directly work with it using Dench’s CRM skill.
The CRM is built on top of DuckDB, the smallest, most performant and at the same time also feature rich database we could find. Thank you DuckDB team!
It creates a new OpenClaw profile called “dench”, and opens a new OpenClaw Gateway… that means you can run all your usual openclaw commands by just prefixing every command with `openclaw --profile dench` . It will start your gateway on port 19001 range. You will be able to access the DenchClaw frontend at localhost:3100. Once you open it on Safari, just add it to your Dock to use it as a PWA.
Think of it as Cursor for your Mac (also works on Linux and Windows) which is based on OpenClaw. DenchClaw has a file tree view for you to use it as an elevated finder tool to do anything on your mac. I use it to create slides, do linkedin outreach using MY browser.
DenchClaw finds your Chrome Profile and copies it fully into its own, so you won’t have to log in into all your websites again. DenchClaw sees what you see, does what you do. It’s an everything app, that sits locally on your mac.
Just ask it “hey import my notion”, “hey import everything from my hubspot”, and it will literally go into your browser, export all objects and documents and put it in its own workspace that you can use.
We would love you all to break it, stress test its CRM capabilities, how it streams subagents for lead enrichment, hook it into your Apollo, Gmail, Notion and everything there is. Looking forward to comments/feedback!
Before: LLMs weren't reliable enough for enrichment, scraping was fragile, APIs were expensive. Now: Hunter.io gives 1000 verified email searches for $49/mo, LLMs can accurately summarize company pages, and a couple hundred lines of Python replaces what Apollo does for prospect research.
The practical threshold: if you're spending >$150/month on a lead gen platform and you have someone technical on the team, it's worth a weekend to prototype a custom stack. If you're not technical and don't want to become it, the platforms still make sense.
The hidden cost of the platforms isn't the subscription - it's that they give you contact data but not the enrichment that makes outreach relevant. That last step you end up doing manually anyway.
Prompt injection as a service.
One thing I keep coming back to though - what if the tool could actually watch how you use your CRM and then suggest automations based on what it sees you doing repeatedly?
I've been building something called MemoryLane (https://github.com/deusXmachina-dev/memorylane) that does exactly this - it captures screen activity, spots repeated workflows, and suggests automations. Works as an MCP server so you can plug it into Claude or Cursor. Instead of you having to describe what you want automated, it just watches and proposes stuff.
Have you thought about adding something like pattern detection to denchclaw? Feels like it'd fit really well with the "everything app" direction. For us the most useful engine for executing skills and automations is surprisingly cowork thus far, haha
And the design principals are already pretty well established (accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, custom object model, stages, etc.). It just needs to be turned into a database boilerplate with a bunch of agent tools. Excited to try this out.
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The openclaw-like system built using 'free compute' from github
(Do not use imessage, a Whatsapp user, and we can access that through the browser, which means you can plug it into an extension)
Responding to some HN comments, I understand the focus on Sales Automation and Outreach can be worrysome.
But for me personally, this is where I do all knowledge work. For me it acts like Cursor, Happenstance, News Aggregator, Fun games creator like Pacman (it has an App Store), I can import Notion into editable MD files, create reports and presentations, etc.
I think that a much cleaner messaging on what this tool is for would help.
Also a question about the implementation, why DuckDB for a CRM?
Something like SQLite feels like a much natural fit for a CRM where you primarily create, update and maybe delete records and you really care for the integrity of the data model.
From a quick look on the data model, everything seems to be a VARCHAR, if this is the case, why not just store everything in the file system instead? You do that with the md files and whatever is getting extracted from the SaaS tools.