Hi HN! founder of nat.app here.<p>I've seen so many people building personal CRMs over the past years. Somehow, they all seemed to fail and die a year or two in.<p>The main reason for this in my opinion is that the personal CRM business is a bad business. People <i>sort of</i> want this and will tweet about in from time to time, but only very few people are willing to pay and put in the effort (aka. reaching back out to people), to make it work.<p>Those very few people are our market and because it's a small market, there is no way to sustain such a business unless you're bootstrapped and working on this part time (which we are).<p>Our approach is very specific: We focus on Google users (which is why there is only a Google login) who communicate mainly through email and put every IRL meeting in their calendar.<p>For those people, we are able to capture 80% of their social interactions with Google's APIs. Which means that our <i>if-else rules</i> are accurately able to identify contacts our customers are losing touch with.<p>nat.app then acts as a safety net and displays those contacts to our customers.<p>This product really has been a labor of love over the past 3 years and I'm very happy to be sharing it with you today.
For a "more personal" CRM, I'd suggest Monica: <a href="https://www.monicahq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.monicahq.com/</a><p>Discussion from 5 years ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295</a><p>Discussion from a year ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270001" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270001</a><p>It's open-source and easy to self-host.
I misunderstood your headline. I thought this was for personal social connections - where at least for me - losing touch with some people is a feature not a bug!<p>Anyway - cheers on the project. I agree with other comments that my communication with people is multi-channel and it would be great to track all of it.
I may have missed it, but this needs to be more than email. for many personal connections I need text, whatsapp, signal integration etc. and now you are in the world of accessing encrypted data. but without all the messaging protocols, the data is misleading.<p>I dont manage my network through email.
I'm not in your market, but I commend your decision to focus on a specific market and the confidence in sticking to it.<p>The startup environment today, perhaps "inspired" by "unicorn"s, takes as granted that your product should be infinitely expandable to everyone and everywhere; and too often, that leads to things being watered down and resources spread too thin. Deciding your customers are a specific group makes it much easier to make use of the specifics of the group (eg. Google APIs here) to make a much better and more well-integrated product.
I remember reading a discussion on Reddit[1] where someone was discussing how he uses Salesforce for personal relationships and the reception was less than receptive. In the year 2022 I think this idea actually makes a lot of sense as over the last 2 years it became a lot easier to fall out of touch.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/bfqb26/does_anyone_else_use_salesforce_as_prm_personal/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/bfqb26/does_any...</a><p>(edit: oh my god I think you actually commented on that post! awesome work keeping up with the idea!)
Ha, I was thinking about something like that since my exposure to a traditional CRM. Good luck.<p>However this looks like personal business relationship CRM, right?
Not affiliated at all.<p>Wobaka is another option for a personal CRM. We evaluated it. A great product (and Fredrik the owner-developer was a treat to work with), but we passed on it because it did not fit for our niche use case. At $50 per month, it might be a different fit.<p>wobaka.com
Also posted in Oct 2020[0] with 175 points, 119 comments.. some useful comments, including some privacy fears<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897812" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897812</a>
I was using cloze (www.cloze.com) for years, but it started to feel a bit outdated.<p>Moved to Covve (www.covve.com) recently and it's pretty great. It has an ecosystem of features and apps that help a lot especially if your profession is people oriented.<p>I'll check out yours too.