Hey there - I'm Zvi, CEO of Contactually. Honestly, if cost is a major factor for you, you can build a spreadsheet tool that can work really well. However, it takes the same discipline that Contactually or any other tool would require - just a bit more time.
If you really love self-hosted, SugarCRM is the main open source CRM out there.
Thank you, your service seems great and well worth it's price but I really can't afford $500/y specifically for this right now. So far I've been playing the spreadsheet game but it does take a lot of time - I may eventually write a little django crud/workflow app one of these days... sugar codebase scares me!
I am interested in working on an application focused on personal use that can be self-hosted. Using Airtable in the meantime.
Agreed that most apps in this space are huge and focused on business and sales. I am more interested in software that helps cultivate personal, offline relationships -- as opposed to ScaleMail and such.
For me it would probably be the app proactively reminding me "hey, you marked this person as important but haven't contacted them for a month". Even if this can become a bit annoying it still keeps you in the loop and puts a thought at the back of your head.
<insert it's something meme here>
Another one would probably be the app automatically stalking the person and informing you if they're about to participate in an event where a keyword / tag matches your interests. (That sounds pretty tough to do however.)
@Graham fair point (BTW I'm the CEO of Contactually). We've made it as simple as possible for now (and our users regularly say that), but we are constantly working to streamline the UI. Any feedback, I'm very easy to reach.
Contactually is a relationship marketing platform. We build and host a SaaS CRM that helps professionals stay engaged with the relationships that are important to them. We're revenue generating, venture backed.
We're tackling some hard challenges on both frontend and backend. On the backend, we're dealing with massive amounts of data user and integrations, and making our API-centric infrastructure as performant as possible. On the frontend, building an engaging user interface that people love to use.
@quanticle - There's a balance to be had there. Yes, being continually emailed by a service you had no interest in is a terrible idea. But we've found that people drop off for other reasons - technical issues, walked away and forgot, or had unanswered questions. An easily-ignorable one-time e-mail is harmless
My opinion would be that if you're getting a lot of these kinds of issues, the signup page could well be the culprit.
A much better solution is to have 2 boxes "Email address", "password" and a button to make it Go.
If you need "inside leg measurement", "first pet's tail fur colour", "crazy aunt petunia's whisker count at last birthday", you can ask for that as part of the natural flow of using your service later.
Get people in and using it, make it really clear before they click the signup button what the primary benefit of your service is.
@blueplastic - we do regular security audits and will soon engage with a firm to provide that guarantee as well. In the interim, what would you like to see to alleviate that?
I do appreciate the reply. The only way I'd feel safe is if you never got or saw my emails. Instead of me sending 5 years of my emails to you, I'd rather you send me 2,000 lines of code to analyze my email locally and locally tell me who I need to follow up with. If your analyzation code came to me, I wouldn't even mind if it did NLP and deeply datamined the emails to tell me who I may have missed following up with.
Ideally, I'd like to see unsecure e-mail replaced by crypto communication systems based on OTR and people locally storing their emails on Raspberry Pis, but that's dangerous stuff and I probably shouldn't have even said that.
Thing is, I'm sure you're nice guys and gals right now, but when you're billionaires and have 500 million people's digital data, evil you will turn.
By the way, good presentation at SVNewTech last night.
I have to think about the security of my business. The way to get me to stop running my own SMTP and IMAP is to provide a service which is:
- auditable (our stored messages by us; the whole system by a third party)
- reliable (99.9% uptime, that's not so awful)
- resilient (if you lose a server or a data center, I shouldn't have to worry about it. Ideally I don't notice anything except perhaps a slowdown)
- guaranteed (with a hefty bond against security issues and another one against prolonged downtime, not a pro-rated refund)
Those are the gotta-haves. If you provide a secure clearinghouse to talk to our clients and vendors, that would be a major selling point. It has the chicken-and-egg problem, of course, but also the network value effect.
Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution.
With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the foreseeable future, the primary mode of communication. We're not focusing on making the user send and receive more emails - but we push the realization that e-mail is already where you're doing most of your communication. Why shouldn't you have a tool that leverages that?
Did you totally miss Facebook's existence? Teenagers these days don't even use email. Facebook's sucking in the next generation's messages. Email's too slow and asynchronous they cry. Douglas Rushkoff would bet to differ, but anyway. Facebook's unified messaging was kind of interesting, but I might as well be CCing all my email to Kim Jong-un.
Big as it is, it's still closed. How do I communicate with a person on Facebook when I don't have a Facebook account (I don't). Email has no such barrier: if you have email -- from any provider -- you can email anyone else.
Definitely - when it comes to social communication, there's Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. And that's bleeding across into professional communications as well, with companies regularly monitoring social networks and engaging with customers on there. But e-mail still remains, for professional communication, the dominant platform.
I have the impression from your site that Contactually uses email as a principal interface for the service - I expect I'll find out more as you've intrigued me enough to sign up and try it out.
I started out on the Comms project because most people I know find email a chore, and it seems like everyone is challenged to find their own solution to basically the same set of problems. My worry taking on a new service that uses mail as the user interface is that for many people, the whole problem with mail is the user interface. Did you consider doing it as (say) a Gmail plugin, rather than a service that mails the user?
@sankalpk - I've seen that before, and it's a great post-mortem. I can see why it's hard for a collaboration company that's not solving a strong pain point. We look at the relationships that are live and die via e-mail, and are building a solution for that.
Hah, we might have over-reached by saying spam. We've used it really to help identify people who might be interested, and reached out to them to learn.
If you really love self-hosted, SugarCRM is the main open source CRM out there.