Congrats on your launch! I have some feedback, but please don't take it negatively, it's just my thoughts.

I love to see anyone taking on salesforce.com, but your product so far is way too barebones. It reminds me of something I'd get from just using some admin UI for a database.

I was a salesforce technical architect and consultant for a number of years (hated it.) and what I've seen is that some of the first things people look for are reports, dashboards, workflows, integration. A lot of people think their sales process is super unique and want to see a path of implementing it in a system and that includes integrating it with a bunch of other systems already in place.

For smaller companies, sourcing leads, creating and tracking email campaigns, is probably the first thing they look for.

Some feedback for your website:

* gifs/videos take a while to load and stay blurred

* The linkedin example is great, show more like this

* Ability to add custom fields/objects is expected, doubt anyone would be impressed by that

* Show some canned dashboards and reports on the data

Totally agree we're way too barebones to say we're an SFDC alternative today. Reports and dashboards/views are the next two things on the roadmap. For workflows we've been using our Zapier app so far, but we're looking to potentially do that built-in. Integrations is going to be a long list of work. Going to feel like working at Segment again. :)

For sourcing and campaigns, our initial plan is a two-way Apollo integration. Not sure if you have thoughts on the necessity of doing everything in-house (the Hubspot approach) or just focusing on integrating with the best tools (the Salesforce approach).

Your feedback on the website is well taken. We've got a lot of work to do there.

Yeah, integration work never ends but having a few popular ones built in + api and docs goes a long way. I've honestly never seen anyone in mid/big companies consider Zapier, but it's been a few years since I was in that space, so could have changed. Getting into those bigger companies, you're basically going to need everything, or hope for a small team within the company to like your CRM.

Those small teams/companies basically want a simple Hubspot, not salesforce, but a lot of times, they don't really know the difference. Something that can take Apollo leads, build some "simple" email campaigns [1], some landing pages [2], track one-off emails and report on all that for cheaper than the $25k/yr or whatever hubspot charges would be a great tool. I know, not exactly a CRM, but people call it that.

I don't think it matters if you integrate other providers or build it in, but having an easy setup where users don't have to go sign up, manage and integrate with a bunch of other services could help you get the small/startup space.

[1] Lots of things to deal with if you're taking on the email sending & tracking part, automated clicks, safari privacy, etc. [2] This is a can of worms, but being able to build simple landing pages for people to click on from an email is pretty important.

While the boundaries continues to fade, what you described is generally called a Marketing Automation system. Hubspot is becoming more CRM now, but its roots were and still are Marketing Automation.

Reports are a big time sink. Have you thought of integrating a pre-baked tool? A quick google shows up Carbone[0] (I don't know if it's good; I'm not a customer/investor) but that sort of thing might get you going.

[0] https://github.com/carboneio/carbone

Yep! Agree -- we're currently evaluating some vendors. I don't see much reason to build a bunch of stuff here if we can simply buy it.

No decisions yet on who best fits our needs, so thanks for raising Carbone; it wasn't on our list yet.

vega charts are also decent and very configurable. LLMs know about them and can generate their schema too, which helps.

(I'm one of the cofounders of Okapi)

You're 100% right.

We're missing a bunch of stuff simply because we're early :)

Regarding custom objects and fields, I agree this is not very interesting when compared against Salesforce, but these things actually aren't common in the products we can currently compete with! These are typically low-end, self-service products designed for simplicity and don't afford their users much freedom.

In this sense, we've been able to offer some of our early customers the flexibility of a SFDC product without all the other stuff. A decent chunk of people want exactly that.

A few things on the roadmap include:

* Reporting

* Custom views

* Open API

* Built-in automations (right now we piggyback on Zapier)

All this stuff will take a long time to get right

Do you have a public roadmap available?

Not yet, but we're thinking about it!

Nice, I'll put myself in the mailing list on your page and keep a look out

Cool stuff, I've considered building something similar for my own needs. For me, I would never invest the time to learn and integrate something like this into my business processes if its not open source. But there is a large market of folks who don't care about that (obviously, as Salesforce isn't open source and does well enough), so you have a lot of potential.

I played with the demo for a couple of minutes- one thing I noticed was that to add a field, you have to go up to the drop down menu in the top right and select add field- I would expect to see an "add field" button below the (initially empty) list of fields on an object. Hotkeys would also be really nice at some point as you develop the app. Probably just really early in your development to refine these things.

You mention your path to success being a "modern UX" and I think that is great, if by "modern UX" you mean (at least in part- a major part) "much faster and more responsive than Salesforce". Maintaining the flexibility while also keeping it easy to use and fast is a triple combination of power.

You should check out Twenty! https://twenty.com/ (YC S23) -- they're an OSS CRM.

I totally agree the object management UI is too clunky right now. I want to redo that set of pages, they were the first ones we shipped. Not gonna lie, idk if anyone except me and Ned are really pining to learn hotkeys for managing object schemas, since in practice we're the only ones doing that on a regular basis -- we do initial setup on behalf of our customers.

Yeah, I consider latency part of UX. We're doing some somewhat fancy stuff to reliably replicate every record into a couple of stores, each of which is optimized for different access patterns (search, get latest by ID, etc.). The big central Postgres(TM) is mostly there to be authoritative and to transactionally maintain invariants in the system.

> We're doing some somewhat fancy stuff to reliably replicate every record into a couple of stores, each of which is optimized for different access patterns (search, get latest by ID, etc.). The big central Postgres(TM) is mostly there to be authoritative and to transactionally maintain invariants in the system.

When I, as a perspective customer, read things like this, it makes me question if I can trust you with my data or your platform long term.

What is your technical expertise and what other similar systems have you built? I can’t seem to find it on the site.

Sounds like you guys have a great plan. I will check out Twenty, thanks!

Awesome feedback -- agreed on all counts!

I expect performance and developer experience to evolve as points of competitive differentiation as we mature. We're still too early to make those claims defensibly.

IMO, what makes UX for enterprise software bad is time waiting. Salesforce has multiple redirects and terrible load times with a huge JS bundle size.

Datadog isn't as slow, but it's loads 2.7MB of data. It's unusable on a 4G tethered connection (ie my car's hotspot).

I pray that you keep load times minimal. I see almost 1MB loaded over the wire for a list of 15 objects.

Also, your sidebar icons (Risks/Companies/etc) look too much hotkeys, I was disappointed when I couldn't navigate to a section by it's first letter.

I also feel your pain with datadog, and even GCP’s UI. I used to periodically travel to a relatives house that beamed internet from a cell tower miles away. Not being able to access these in my line of work is pretty critically bad. Unfortunately I don’t think the intersection of low bandwidth internet users and these types of high tech software will ever be large enough to justify an investment in making it work in low bandwidth environments. I bet most companies in the space take a Quick Look at number of users that would benefit and easily decide that it’s not worth the effort. Which is quite unfortunate for people who have to deal with that.

I will say though that the two pieces of software that we are discussing seem necessarily much more bandwidth and data heavy than a CRM. So there isn’t as much justification for large bundle sizes for a CRM in my opinion

Definitely going to add the hotkeys-for-objects feature! That's on my to-do list.

Want to work on reducing bundle sizes. Just haven't gotten a chance to get to that yet. Totally agree that load times really matter here, I've been focused on that and still have a few ways to speed that up.

What this really does is prove the commoditization of the generic SFDC approach to "CRM", where it's horizontal and empty. It's price pressure for force.com, hence their push on "AI" and add-ons, to protect 30bn in revenue.

HubSpot is easier to defend as you get far more OOTB business functionality, rather than a generic, un-opinionated toolbox.

Attacking SFDC via your route is like attacking Excel with a barebones table entry form. Why would a company switch? How do you get your first paying customer and retain them?

/been doing CRM for 20+ years, good luck lads!

+1 for this. This is also a reason why vertical CRMs (ironically many built on force.com), though niche, are successful.

New players will look like CRUD apps with the horizontal platform approach, and will have a hard time unseating existing big players.

But, the more the merrier. Congratulations and wish the authors the best!

I am so looking forward to this. You are 100% correct about the SObject model. Get that right and everything will fall into place.

I wouldn’t get too distracted by reporting - SF classic had the absolute worst reporting engine for decades and they still sold millions of licenses all for the ability to click-to-configure. Pure sales teams use listviews more as a ‘who do I call today?’ list based on rankings and last interaction dates. Serious CRM enterprises have their own report infrastructure and don’t use the built in.

Congrats on the launch! couldn’t login to the demo on mobile but will try from a desktop. All the best.

My personal objective with CRM is always the sales/cs team productivity at different stages and I don’t see the impact of your product yet on that. Every sales or CS agent needs to know what is their next task: they shouldn’t go through the list of the deals or customers to figure that out. Ideally they get their tasks assigned in some round robin algorithm taking into account their availability and skills. If agents nevertheless work with lists, they are going to create several dozens of views filtering certain stages of journeys and build up arcane knowledge on how to look at them. Not great, but if they want it, it must work - they are stakeholders in CRM purchasing process. Overall CRM must be customizable on tasks and journeys level, not just on record field level.

Do you need Apex for that? God, please, no. Apex doubles or triples the cost of Salesforce, because you usually end up spending tens of thousands euro on some agency doing the customization. If you want to compete with SF, offer Java, JavaScript or TypeScript as lambda or managed microservice hosting with fast links to your db/api (and do it better than Heroku). The better are your integration options with custom code, the more attractive it will be for digital services and non-trivial use cases.

I would love to see proper communication management respecting user subscription preferences and consent. Maybe look at Braze for that. If you could handle the calls, both inbound and outbound, internationally and with power dialer that would be awesome.

Task management, lists/views, and general "journeys" management are all on the roadmap. There's a lot of stuff you need to do to be generally competent in this space, we're definitely launching very early here.

When I talked about Apex, I really mean the "scripting language that sees data mid-transaction" aspect of the language. Sounds like you're not really seeing the value there either? I totally agree that good old webhooks or some other trigger is seems almost always good enough if the API is fast.

Appreciate the suggestions re: comms and consent management. We're still not sure how we want to handle dialers.

>I really mean the "scripting language that sees data mid-transaction" aspect of the language. Sounds like you're not really seeing the value there either?

I do see value there as long as it is a general purpose programming language running in your sandbox and not something vendor-specific.

Great job launching your product! This interface looks slick and I'm excited to see your product progress. Hopefully I can get beta access ;)

I have some QA feedback for some quirks I noticed and some potential feature ideas/requests:

1) On the companies list, it would be nice if you automatically grabbed the favicon.ico from the domain. It would be nice if you could tether fields together so information can be automatically derived from other fields. This could include an area for custom scripts to do this automatically.

2) While using the demo I was automatically logged out. I'm wondering if someone else logged in and then my session was killed? Also, when I was logged out, I was given a white screen of death when I clicked back on the history, but was given no redirect. E.g. pressing back sent me to https://app.okapicrm.com/objects/companies but I'm just stuck with a page with the title "Title" and an empty div[id="react-root"] node.

3) Because you end the password with a period, if I double click on the password and copy that, it will put the wrong password in my clipboard. I wasn't sure if this period was part of the password or not until I logged in and tried without the period

4) At first, it wasn't obvious the search feature was only available for the current page you were on. E.g. I tried accessing search on the reminders page, https://app.okapicrm.com/reminders, and I wasn't sure what was suppose to happen after I typed something in. There was no visual feedback that a search query was being processed, or had been processed. Once I tried it on another page was it clear that the search feature was searching for records visible on the current page. Also, because it is so quick, I wonder if this is purely a client-side search. If I have a Records page with a paginated number of records, will the search be able to find records which are not visible on the current page? If not, I would find this super frustrating as a user.

5) If I look at the details page for a company record, the fields for the domain and icon url are not links. i.e. on https://app.okapicrm.com/records/e8e09b41-25ab-4889-92bb-987... I cannot click on QAComet.com or the icon url.

6) I'm not sure I understand why fields which point to an archived record must be cleared. Could you keep those fields and just use some kind of visual indicator (such as a red highlight or background) to show the record being pointed at is archived?

7) When I clicked the archive button, there was no visual feedback the website was loading. It would have been nice to at least change the cursor over the modal to a "cursor: wait" while it was making the archive request.

Hopefully you find these points useful!

These are all great points!

1. Definitely want to improve favicons. For deriving fields, we do have formula fields. Would love to show that to you, it's not obvious enough how to use to enable for this HN launch.

2/3. Sorry about that. This username/password approach for the HN launch is definitely a hack.

4. Right now, search is just on the current type of record you're looking at. I want to fix this, and I just haven't because I haven't made the UI for filtering what objects to search across. The backend is in place though. Glad it seems suspiciously fast! I can assure it's a real FTS talking to a database.

5. I want to fix this too. A way to make data of type "Link" for better UI treatment.

6. Archiving is meant for data that others shouldn't be looking at -- it's a staging ground for data. That's why you can't point into archived data. It's also a precursor for deleting data, and we want to guarantee no dangling references to deleted data.

7. Will fix this.

Hey! I'm glad you found these helpful :)

Feel free to shoot me an email (found in my profile) when you update the product, I'm curious about how the formula fields will work and what kind of interface I'll be given.

P.S. for 4, the speed very impressive!

> We think the way you win in CRM in 2024 is by keeping the flexibility of SObjects, and then tacking on modern UX.

What is driving that thinking? Is it something the market is asking for?

> Salesforce is slow and clunky. And that doesn’t matter because people don’t buy Salesforce to be delighted.

So if they are buying it despite bad UX, it stands to reason that UX isn't important to them.

Who does your CRM attract, if the differentiator is "good UX"?

Tend to agree with this - I think the way you win CRM is to build something that helps customers sell better (and in the background, base it on a technology platform which is extensible so you can take over the world).

CRM space is very red ocean, so IMO a differentiator is required. Remember that these are tools that help people sell more, so that does need to be the focus.

e.g. "We are the CRM that caters to the needs of the domestic cleaning market" or "We are the CRM that automatically arranges sales calls in your diary".

Exactly these two statements are completely contradictory

Love the vision here, always worth a stab at dethroning something this entrenched that everyone seems to dislike so kudos for the swing at it. Feature-wise, pulling in information about the folks i'm interacting with and having customizable views is what I would gravitate towards (especially if you can pull in the person's other social info). In terms of the site, you did this on your about page a bit but what you described here in your description is what people will want to hear (not necessarily the part about Salesforce but your vision of creating something with modern UX with this capability). More thoughts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1ECuZtEuPc

I've done some work with salesforce integrations and from my perspective, the pain comes in when trying to keep a bi-directional link between data in the CRM and data in the custom backend systems. At least in my case, there is a desire for a low latency sync so that the two data sources are as similar as possible.

Salesforce, with its batch loads, open api spec, soap/rest api and 'use mulesoft' approach makes this pretty painful, and quite expensive.

The dream, at least among folks I work with, is for a single pane of glass where salesforce provide contact and case management, and the internal systems provide a source of truth and the apis or screens to fix problems or complete tasks

You should check out https://www.stacksync.cloud/ (YC W24) -- they do a bidi realtime sync between CRMs and databases. Not sure if that scratches your itch!

We are definitely looking to make our API public. We've built our core data model in such a way that business users can't accidentally break API users by, for example, making backwards-incompatible changes to their objects. It baffles me that everyone else in the space gets this wrong. But still, I want to feel really good about making an API that can stick around a long time before telling people to use it to run their business, and we're just not there yet.

A couple years back this may have been useful, but we've pivoted towards a different approach with less reliance on an external crm, except as a routing and presence engine

Shameless plug on https://syncari.com. I'm a founder and this is part of our thesis as. A single data, control and analytics plane for all systems (CRM, internal systems, marketing, support, product usage and billing)

Salesforce really really benefits from network effects. If you survey 100 data integration tools for their list of off-the-shelf integrations, 100/100 would have Salesforce on the list.

Great stuff! I celebrate everyone who gets the world off SFDC. We recently started using https://attio.com/ — how do you guys compare?

Attio is great. I think it's among the best new entrants.

So far, the main difference is that Okapi can be even simpler than Attio if you'd like it to be. There are no mandatory built-in objects, and no enrichments/automations/etc that you can't disable. You can KISS your sales process as much as you like.

To that end, we've also been eschewing self-service onboarding. We just set up customer's CRMs and import their data for them, shooting for the simplest setup they can get away with. The software is generic, and we make it concrete for customers by hand.

Adding another simple point: we're simply earlier than Attio by several years.

Our long-term differentiation will be more obvious as we mature the product and distribution model.

Don't you mean later? You ought to have a clear idea of your differentiation from the beginning.

If I were any good at following best practices, I wouldn't be a startup founder :)

Their websites look so similar....

Blame it on Shadcn/ui

Everyone is using it and they all look the same

It's great to see more builders entering the CRM space. Brace yourself for a long and tough journey, but the rewards will be substantial.

About two years ago, I was testing out the concept of the CRM build on top of Snowflake or any other DWH as a backend [0]. I can implement the core functions using existing drag-and-drop modular components, visualization elements, forecasting, alerting, etc. For basic CRM entities (contacts, deals, companies), tables are created in Snowflake via Unistore. CRM may maintain a separate database of their data containing application state, user permissions, and other metadata. Still, increasingly, the core data used to course through a system of record will be pushed/copied to the DWH.

For a data scientist to make forecasts, there is no need to upload data to the notebook; you can take Streamlit and build the necessary experience within the application. Any alerting logic can be described declaratively. An application or workflow can be created depending on its interaction with the product. The customization limits are almost limitless.

I love you're working in that direction. Reach me if you want to chat more – kidrulit at Twitter

[0] https://nonamevc.substack.com/p/how-snowflake-changes-the-wa...

Congratulations on the launch. I have not seen the product, but please treat contacts, accounts and opportunities as very first class if you don't do it already.

Also, make change data capture easier. This will go a long way in doing cohort analysis, integrations and workflows. Make this first class for things like deal stage changes, and make out of the box reports around this

On day one of product design, we decided to track all revisions by default.

As you're alluding to, I expect this will make reporting vastly easier. In traditional CRM products, seemingly simple -- and important -- tasks like calculating pipeline at a previous point in time turn out to be really difficult.

There's also the non-obvious changes that become really frustrating. To use a SaaS-based example, suppose you wanted to report on historical churn rates aggregated by customer success manager. Seems simple enough ... until you realize that you redistributed accounts and neglected to capture changes to Account Owner.

We figured we'd spare our customers the effort of deciding what changes they need to track. We just track it all :)

This is golden, and not just for reports. If you expose the change data stream as an API, many integrations become 10x simpler for your partners and customers. Providing a consistent definition for read-after-write (or search specifically) will make this even better. This is often problematic because the search index is often a different store and there are lags between primary writes and search index. Many bi-directional integrations need consistent read-after-write capabilities, or at least some way to tell how current the read paths are.

I say this as a founder of a company with a significant part of the product doing integrations with other systems. And most are painful.

I think an omni-channel integration would be great and would have the potential to transform your crm into the first screen. For ex. Matrix.org's Element/synapse with their messenger bridges and sip bridge into your dashboard. Talk to them, they are very receptive and who knows, maybe your partnership with them can create a powerful first-screen for sales people.

You could make an outlook/excel add in. Sales people live in those two apps. Without that you are battling to be that “second screen” as you mentioned and sales folks aren’t generally tech savvy enough to “go it alone” on your solution vs the status quo. Looks nice though good luck!

An Outlook/Excel add-in is a great idea. Something that lets you peek at CRM data related to a person/company, you mean?

We support syncing Outlook email/contacts into Okapi. Definitely agree that outside of tech, Microsoft's stack is predominant.

Oh this is a cool idea.

We've considered working on a chrome extension to help sales people pipe data into our product, but we haven't thought surfacing CRM data to salespeople in other apps.

I really like the fully custom data model and simple UI. As you mention, many CRMs are CRUD apps, some with varying degrees of "automations". While automations and even reporting look great for marketing purposes (admittedly important in a competitive CRM space), many SMBs would get significant value just moving off their spreadsheets onto a scalable & manageable database.

I'm curious about the setup process. The key advantage of something like this over a Salesforce would presumably be the ease of onboarding for SMBs. I saw you comment that you guys are currently handling the initial setup though.

How do you think about your plans for making onboarding as easy as possible and potentially being completely self-serve going forward?

So far, we've been doing setup on behalf of customers precisely because it's the easiest option for our customers.

We're open to exploring self-serve, but realistically that's going to be really hard to get right. I'm imagining we may have templates that customers can choose from down the line, where they can one-click setup a CRM for their kind of business.

I was recently working for a customer that was heavily invested in an older version of Microsoft Dynamics, but they were considering alternatives for their CRM platform. Salesforce was one of the options.

They were a sales organization, so CRM was a very central tool for them, and they needed lots of customization and applications build on top of the CRM. So CRM selection was more than selecting a tool, it was selecting a platform, an ecosystem, method of developing apps etc.

The reason they were considering the alternatives at all was that practically all of the MS Dynamics customization was built based on direct database access, and Microsoft no longer supports the versions that allow that. That, and all CRM development was behind one person, which was huge risk for a multi-billion dollar company.

Salesforce was one of the alternatives, not due to it being technically superior, or even having a better UI, but because this customer was not really a software house, so they wanted to avoid in-house software development as much as possible. One part of that was to outsource CRM-related development, to "focus on their core competencies".

When people say "network effects", this is what they talk about. What would have it taken for them to consider a startup like this as the CRM platform? They did not really consider HubSpot nor 100% custom frameworks as alternatives. You had to be in the Gartner magic quandrant to be considered a serious alternative.

I am not saying you should target customers like this, but I believe it may helpful to think if this is the kind of customer you want to win in the long run, and what would it take to win a customer like this.

In that company, sales wanted MS Dynamics, because that was what the sales people were used to. IT wanted Salesforce, because they believed they could just outsource the CRM-related development work to Salesforce consultants, and integration narrative is strong for Salesforce due to Mulesoft.

They ended up choosing MS Dynamics, because in a sales orgazation, sales brings in the money, so everything else supports sales, and sales calls the shots.

Congrats on your launch and good luck building it, I agree with other comments that dashboards and views are pretty important.

Small bug report: when editing the dropdown, current entries have "API Name" disabled (this is normal), but the value is changend automatically when editing the "Display name". The page errors out (400 error for UpdateObject).

When using devtools and editing "API Name" to stay the same, everything works.

Yup, that's a good catch. Fix going out now.

Login doesn't work :(

I currently created my own CRM in Airtable, and it is basically an automation platform along with CRM. I need that, but not with Airtables row limits and other issues.

I'd love something that has their UX for managing all the customization and expanding it, but also heavy automation options with Zapier and others.

As an ex-Salesforce engineer, you appear to have a good handle on the engineering implementation side. You had the mechanism to build the workflows and reporting on top. Double down on that because that's your table stakes product. Make sure you include some out-of-the-box workflows that people can tweak.

> We think the way you win in CRM in 2024 is by keeping the flexibility of SObjects, and then tacking on modern UX. That first part takes engineering discipline, but the second part is much easier than Salesforce had it 25 years ago. Just about every part of a modern SaaS product has dozens of vendors that do most of the work for you.

It sounds like your business strategy is 'remove legacy code.' I don't hear anything about how you will address network effects or inertia, or which niche user are you solving a problem for.

Good luck.

The plan for winning is: slowly at first, then suddenly. We'll start with smaller businesses transitioning between CRMs, and grow with them. Number one goal is to never give customers a reason to churn.

Why would a smaller business choose you? Over: hubspot, Zoho, Monday, salesforce, and industry-specific CRMs?

we use PipeDrive to track deals (customers and investors) and keep team aligned. most important features for us are getting the team to BCC PipeDrive and automatic attribution of emails to the correct deal.

what I need is a way for any arbitrary team member (not just the sales people that have a PipeDrive account) to be able to BCC PipeDrive/Okapi and get that email linked to the deal. think of some engineering questions being answered directly by hardcore scientists that don't normally have anything to do with sales. I want them to simply BCC and internal address at our domain which forwards to Okapi or PipeDrive. then the person in charge of PipeDrive can attribute those emails to the right deals if the system can't figure it out automatically from previous correspondence)

Right now our email sync is maximally simple, so that it's predictable for customers. If anyone on a thread has the sync set up, then any thread with outside parties gets synced. Each outside company/person is associated with the email. Also no BCC stuff, too easy to forget.

We're working on a simple way to do deal->email association. Right now you can only do deal->company->email, so if you have concurrent deals on a company there's not a great way to disentangle them.

You got thoughts on how you'd want that to work?

Our company, biotech, doesn't want arbitrary extensions grabbing email out of our servers. BCC the CRM is the only way.

Big companies have different departments. You could have a deal with department X at TargetCo and department Y. Generally those are different people (and emails) at each of those departments. So you associate email to the deal based on what email it's copied to.

Just use emails to link to deals. Forget about company.

Company association is useful. But it needs to be a historical association. Example Jonny works at MSFT now. But used to work at FB. Jonny could help you win a deal with FB even if he doesn't work there now.

Interesting idea! Thank you!

How would you compare your vision to EspoCrm? It has nice UX, custom fields, formulas, can be self-hosted, is very low cost, api access, with add-ons for workflows, reports.

Going through auth by clicking on Google Sign in to be met with "Please sign up with you work email" is pretty poor CX.

Thanks for letting us know; we can probably improve that message.

However, for context, we neither offer self-service onboarding nor a free tier.

As someone who finds even guided tutorials annoying, I appreciate that a hands-on sale and implementation isn't right for everyone, but we're confident that's the right approach for our business.

Agreed.For this market segment, it is indeed the right approach.

Congrats on launch. This is a space I've thought about a lot in my 12 years as CTO of a consulting agency that centers around Salesforce.

Salesforce's "killer" feature really is the Custom Object. You can create a new data model, customize a UI and have a production API up and running immediately. I've been wondering when someone would attempt a modern take on this, and this seems like a decent start (from what I can tell in the video, login doesn't work).

Competitors like Hubspot do provide better functionality OOTB, but as soon as you want to automate or integrate, you quickly realize that they haven't "doggedfooded" their API's. Most business's of moderate size & complexity will eventually outgrow the platform.

> One thing we can’t decide if it’s a need-to-have is Apex

You might start with the just more serverless style event hooks that fire after the DB commits, but eventually you will need something that can be more "transactional".

But please... for the love of god... do not roll your own language like apex. Just pick something like typescript and sandbox it.

Same goes for UI components. Don't build your own crappy web component framework... Just figure out how to allow custom react/svelte/etc components to be embedded.

Other thoughts:

- Don't wait to nail down your access control model. One of the most daunting aspects for Salesforce Admin is designing the access control and entitlements model. For Custom Objects make sure to cover both FLS and RLS. IMO, the Salesforce approach here is pretty good, but just the admin UX is an absolute fire full.

- IF you build a low code workflow tool, enable it to transpile to a simple text based language and back. Salesforce Flow is a nightmare to maintain because the visual abstractions mask the details and make it impossible to construct a mental model.

- The SF metadata and deployment model has caused so much pain and they've still never been able to fix it. IaC style configuration could solve a lot of these problems, but I expect it will be a big challenge.

+ What I'd really like to see in this space is "the supabase for business application development". Basically a framework like this, but with complete focus on developer experience.

Would handle all the challenging infrastructure & non-functional areas and just let you focus on writing code for workflow, integration, etc.

I think i’ve built just that, can we get in touch? I would appreciate the feedback

Would love to see it. How do I get in touch (preferably without ending up as a marketing lead in your system)?

Sorry for the late reply, my email is in my profile (and the link to the product if you want to see before contacting me, though in would prefer to get in touch either by email or discord that you can find on the main page)

Congrats on the launch! Always cool seeing a familiar face build something badass

Existing CRMs suck. You guys are providing such a valuable service for the world.

Can’t you made do with Airtable? Isn’t CRM just some tables wired up together?

This does not give me faith in YC's selection criteria...

Congrats. It's good to see new entrants in the entrenched CRM market.

Thanks!

What is the tech stack? I didn't see any pricing.

Looks good! TailwindUI? I'm a fan of this.

Thanks! Yeah, we all stand on the shoulders of the giant that is Tailwind UI :)

account is locked. I wanted to see how email integration works. Do you do any DKIM/SPF checks to avoid spoofs and spam?

Working on the account lock, sorry. Password stuffing alarm is tripped. EDIT: in the meantime, a jank workaround. Just added a few more users:

hn.login.alt1@okapicrm.com

hn.login.alt2@okapicrm.com

hn.login.alt3@okapicrm.com

All have the same password as in the original post: sk9ueEAfhXP9j4cuxLCVmw7. (include the trailing period)

We rely on GMail or Outlook's spam and checks. We only sync emails that made it to your non-spam inbox.

I mean this feedback in the kindest way possible: you are taking a developer-out view of what a CRM is, and prioritizing the problems you perceived with Salesforce as a developer.

If you want to get a customer to pay money for your product, you really need to take a customer-in view. What problems do customers (some segment, perhaps a particular industry or country or type) have with buying Salesforce, and what can you do to make your product a better choice for them?

A flexible object data model and a UX that you as a developer find better are not likely to be those things.

only salesforce is the competitor? not hubspot?

Salesforce is where the money is. There's plenty of competitors.

  {
    "error": [
        "Your account has been locked for security reasons. Please reset your password."
    ]
  }

And that's what I can see in network inspector, while the UI just does nothing after clicking on "Login" button.

Should be healthy again, sorry!

Nope. Same response from backend, same nothing in frontend.

I'm confused why YC funded this.

This is the lowest engagement I've seen for a launch HN. It's because most people are too kind to give you the honest feedback that this seems extremely undifferentiated. It made me think of a CS-class project.

Every significant CRM has custom objects, in-place editing UI, and custom fields. Most have email integrations. Look at Monday CRM for example - it has a very powerful no-code automation engine, and you can upload custom react components. The biggest competitor to Salesforce CRM is HubSpot.

I really, truly hate to be negative but I think someone has misled you about the state of this particular market.

I went back and forwards on this because I don't want to discourage you. Sorry if this seems harsh or unhelpful.

Did any user tell you that they have the problem you are solving?

I suggest you ask ChatGPT to name 10 CRM systems which support custom objects.

The list didn't include the three mentioned in the comments here (Attio, Twenty, Monday). My strong suggestion is that you look at the current entrants and try to find some differentiation.

Response from ChatGPT:

"CRM systems with the capability to support custom data objects are designed to offer businesses the flexibility to tailor the CRM to their specific needs, such as tracking unique customer data, industry-specific information, or customized business processes. Here are ten CRM systems known for their ability to support custom data objects:

Salesforce: Known for its high degree of customization, Salesforce allows users to create custom objects to store specific business data and relate to other records within the system.

Microsoft Dynamics 365: Offers extensive customization capabilities, including the creation of custom entities (data objects) that can be integrated seamlessly with the rest of the system.

Zoho CRM: Provides the ability to create custom modules that can be designed to capture and manage business-specific information.

HubSpot CRM: Allows the creation of custom objects to store and organize data that doesn’t necessarily fit into the standard objects like contacts or companies.

Oracle NetSuite: Features a flexible platform that includes the ability to create and manage custom records tailored to your business needs.

SAP CRM: Part of the SAP Business Suite, SAP CRM offers the flexibility to extend its core functionalities with custom objects to meet specific business requirements.

Pipedrive: Known for its user-friendly interface, Pipedrive also offers custom fields and, in some plans, the ability to create entirely custom data objects.

SugarCRM: Provides a highly customizable platform where users can create custom modules and fields to adapt the CRM to their business processes.

Insightly: Offers custom fields and records, allowing users to tailor the CRM system to better fit their specific business needs and workflows.

Freshsales (Freshworks CRM): Allows for the customization of the CRM with custom fields and modules, enabling businesses to track unique data points relevant to their operations."

Shame that this is downvoted, I assume for tone - this is the feedback the founders need to hear

I don't have any skin in this game, but I personally think "Your relatively long thoughtful reply is wrong; source: this paragraph a glorified Markov chain threw together" is really offensive. I would have zero interest in engaging with somebody who values my input so little.

In my defence the long thoughtful reply I posted the ChatGPT list to was my own. And I'm fine with it.

Always downvote copy-pasted LLM garbage seems to be a good heuristic. HN is a valuable community exactly because human beings provide their valuable insights here.

In this case the point was that the concept is so common that even ChatGPT can list endless examples.

The low effort required to find endless examples was the point.

So there is this post currently on the front-page, an essay by Paul Graham: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756865

"How to Start Google"

It makes salient points about what is needed to venture forth and create a "startup". It seems pertinent here because your comments about this project seems to not really meet the criteria, and calls into question whether the salients points from the essay apply here. Good topic for discussion.

In one of the YC podcasts Michael says "did you Google the thing you are building". I was reminded of that.

I think what happens is people hit this "here's what you need to do to start a company" and like 40% of all founders see opportunity in those basics and build an email, CRM, survey, project management, etc. tool because it feels bad to pay high prices for something you could build themselves.

The engineering equivalent of this is an issue tracker, JS framework or "we simplified kubernetes".