Elastic (YC W11) launches Close.io, sales software designed by salespeople

Close.io is awesome! How it stacks up to other CRMs I have used:<p>Streak: Great way to store Data in spreadsheet form but very difficult to analyze. It's often sluggish and unreliable. Search is no where near effective. It's more of a Data storage app versus an actual CRM. On days it crashes or does not load, my sales came to a halt!<p>Highrise: This is one big headache. The search feature is seriously lacking and it's difficult to add data, or even analyze it later. I like to see my pipeline at a glance. Highrise provides more individual leads at a glance.<p>Close.io is the perfect combination of a powerful search, intuitive UX and analytical feedback. At a glance, I know exactly what I have to accomplish in a given day or week, and the top leads to pursue. Prioritizing and tasking is dead simple, and the UX extremely responsive. Best feature of all: make calls through the App. I personally am terrible at taking notes after a meeting, especially when I'm swamped, so getting the opportunity to go back and listen to my calls is super helpful! Especially when I'm trying to pinpoint areas that need improvement in my pitch.

I played with close.io a little bit when I was helping Elastic late last year. It was so easy to use, and pretty. Oh so pretty.<p>Afterwards I had to go back to using Salesforce for some other project. Like using a walkman after owning an iPod.

Cant really comment much on the product itself, but can see the value it provides and have already suggested it to a few friends to look into more.<p>Wanted to just give a couple suggestions for changes you could test. First, I think it would be helpful to emphasize both the 14-day free trial and also the 1 free month with annual billing. The trial is barely mentioned and I think it is a huge selling point, especially when everybody who has used the product seems to immediately fall in love with it, so it is important to get as many people to try it [risk free] as you can.<p>Second, as was already shown in the comments, you may want to consider re-recording the video using a windows computer and display that for those who show up with windows. It may seem obvious to you that SaaS will run on any major OS, but it may not be so clear to customers. Further, even if a customer recognizes that they can use it on windows, it still helps to limit any potential "dividing" factors.

Wow, this looks great. I looked at using Salesforce, and it was so painful (I've used it before) that we ended up just using RT (which is great for support issues, but sucks for sales).<p>Going to try this out for sales.<p>Also, yay for using Plivo and good call quality instead of Twilio. This should presumably support native SIP endpoints (and G.722), so I'm a lot more likely to use it.

So, my initial impressions are:<p>- The concept as a whole is rock solid. - The ability to send/receive email <i>and</i> phone calls is killer - The way the software is designed fits perfectly with my bizdev flow - They cleverly handle account support via the app itself as a customer lead that is already in place. Our rep has been very responsive and helpful.<p>Some features are still lacking, but none are deal-breakers at this time. Overall, I expect we'll be using it for the whole organization in short order.

It's been a lot of fun working on <a href="http://close.io" rel="nofollow">http://close.io</a> both technically (Backbone.js, Flask, Mongo) and by working on a product that genuinely makes people happier in their jobs.<p>I'm happy to answer any questions.

On one hand I admire them for pricing it high but on the other I think it's going to make it much more difficult to acquire customers. Salesforce is better than its detractors claim but that doesn't matter as much as the fact that sales people now just expect to use it...it's the easy choice. And it's immensely customizable.<p>I think like the recent Amazon post noted, Salesforce.com's competition is going to come from someone who undercuts them. There's no reason for SaaS software to be priced at $100/head/month (other than the need to fund a sales force).

Looking forward to trying it out! Having seen Salesforce struggle at getting a streamlined CRM product out, I think its a space ripe for some competition.

Not bad at all! I like having all the contact options in one application, and I find it quite useful since I don't have to deal with multiple apps/devices to accomplish a big task.<p>Since I haven't played with it yet, what number does it call people with? Would each user would get a new one, or would it be per plan?

I would love to have my sales guys using it but they don't have Macs =/. Going with ringdna+salesforce for now

A few brief comments: 1. $99/month with only email support. That's tough for me, and I'm sure others who sign the checks, to stomach. 2. We pay $15/month for Salesforce. Even if it's not that great, is Close.io really 6X better?

I wish this would exist all my existing IMAP emails. Then I'd use this.

Congrats guys! Can't wait to get some facetime with the app soon.

Awesome work chaps. I've used it and I love the built in voip

Will be interesting to see how this flies as an app rather than a web site. I'm inclined to think web would be a better call for this. But we shall see.

How do you handle web leads? Is there some form of form creation tool for generating that info?<p>How do the leads get in the system to start?

What are the differences between the Web app and the native apps (I'm on Linux)?

Looks clean, like that calling is in it, how do I get my cell line in it?

The product looks great but the logo left me thinking, 'they ripped-off the Simple logo.' I guess it's just a series of rings in both cases but that's the impression I got, right off the bat.<p>Congrats on the launch though!

The Mac download would ideally be a dmg and not a .zip.

Interesting! Is there a mobile app?

Are you using Twilio?

Congratulations!