Working on an entry-level CRM for people running small businesses: try and stop me.
What's up IndieHackers! Hope y'all are staying safe and making the most of quarantine.
My co-founder and I have been working on an MVP for a few weeks now, part-time. Thanks to COVID, I'm about to be laid off i.e. have a lot more time to work on our startup. I'm excited to dive into the deep end, but especially with the current economic turmoil, I'm in need of a preliminary stress test from this community.
I'll keep the pitch brief:
There's a ton of CRM options out there, but none of them are designed for low-tech solopreneurs or small businesses. Many of them pretend to tailor to entry-level customers, but in reality, those entry-level products are watered-down versions of enterprise suites with complicated onboarding and setup and a limited feature set designed to not-so-subtly persuade the user to upgrade to a more "powerful" tier.
We're building a lightweight, user-friendly CRM that does the basics and stays out of the way. It's a sidebar extension for Chrome, so you can toggle it open on any website and use your CRM side-by-side whatever web page you need. Anybody else's juices start flowing at the prospect of being able to quickly grab contact info or enter notes from Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn etc without tab-jumping or app-switching?!
It'll integrate with your Google account, so contacts, tasks, and calendar events from your CRM stay in sync with your Google contacts, Google tasks, and Google calendar.
We're thinking $9/mo. We're bootstrapping 100% and plan to lean heavily on organic marketing in groups/communities and offering a generous referral rewards program.
Roast me. 😉
FWIW, my partner and I have worked on a previous startup together and have complimentary skill sets and styles of thinking. He's the tech guy, I'm the product guy. I've used many CRMs throughout my career, and even custom-built one using no-code tools for a previous employer.
Wireframes are nearly complete and we'll be launching a pre-release campaign this month.
How would you go about this?
Cheers, friends!
Less of a roast and more of a concern - $9/month ain't great to build a business from. A lot of CRMs charge per user per month, and even $9/user/month isn't much, compared to the popular CRMs. I'd heartily suggest that you do some customer validation around that and higher numbers. You'd probably be surprised at what people are happy to pay to solve thorny problems like this.
Not to mention, when I see companies charging Way Too Little for their services, especially business-critical services, I get concerned about using them. There's a lot of commitment and work involved in adding to your business, even ones positioning themselves as lightweight. And what happens when they go under because the business at the price they positioned themselves is unsustainable? At best, I lose my whole workflow and have to switch to someone else. At worst, I lose data and capabilities and my business drastically changes or falters.
Definitely look at that price.
Should've been more clear: $9/mo per user. Still, appreciate the feedback wholeheartedly.
Ah, so if it is per user, you may want to even look at grouping your prices differently. Maybe a 3-user plan for $25/month kinda thing? If your selling point is simplicity, it means that smaller shops don't have to worry about how to get access for one or two more people without incurring more seat fees, and one-person shops who still see value in what you do probably won't be deterred by the price point yet. Still something to ask your customers, they may be more likely to pay a slightly higher price point for simplicity than try to juggle around a cheaper one.
I think every post in this group should automatically be amended with "try and stop me!" And for what it's worth, I hope no one stops you from pursuing this idea...
Huge validation for this - my LinkedIn and Twitter feeds are full of small brick-and-mortar businesses crying out for help in pivoting to online services - often without websites or any formal B2B/C 'lead generation' experience.
I'd be more than happy to chat about contributing or referrals.
Keep going!
My man! This is what I needed to hear today! I will certainly be circling back through this post once our landing page is published. We will welcome any of your referrals/support with open arms!
Interesting. There's a huge market for the platform. Great thinking
I use CRMs only occasionally, but this sounds neat. In the past I've used Streak CRM as a lightweight CRM in Gmail (https://www.streak.com). It worked well for me, but UI was a bit awkward. Staying in sync w/ Google Contacts and Calendar would be nice.
Streak is certainly on our radar. We wanted something with a similar type of "works alongside the tools you already use" kind of vibe, without being tied to one place on the web — Gmail. I want a CRM that can go with me anywhere on the web. I also have a personal dislike for re-skinning an existing UI. Some people love it, but for my own sanity, I prefer a side-by-side workflow, hence the concept of a CRM sidebar that can be quickly toggled open or closed as you need it.
Why do you think shared excel sheet is not a potential compitator for you when it comes to small business ?
For completely self-sufficient folks, sure, you can build a barebones CRM in Excel/Google Sheets. I've used a combination of Google Keep, Google Tasks, and Google Contacts to function as a quasi-CRM for personal use for some time now. If somebody is satisfied running their business from a spreadsheet or other free tools, they aren't our initial target customer. We'd have to hit them with some very compelling marketing material to change their minds, which will be on the roadmap, but a long way out.
For a low-tech SMB operator, they benefit from the guardrails of an app that offers some direction and best practices built-in. Even though I'm capable of building a version of this in other tools, I'd still rather pay $9/mo for someone else to do the building and maintenance for me so I can spend time running my business rather than engineering more systems.
With Excel it's more complicated to setup things like a sales pipeline, reminders, a dashboard with charts, linking products to customers, etc. It's not impossible, but you have to put in a bunch of work.
I would say that Pipedrive does a great job of this, BUT, my hangup with them is that it's not setup for those that sell to a private individual that isn't going to be associated with a business. My example is from my immigration consultancy where my clients were individuals and families, not other SMB's or enterprises. So I was trying to shoe-horn my clients into something that didn't quite fit. AND I couldn't customize Pipedrive to strip off the company stuff that just wasn't necessary.
I'm totally the target market for your product and look forward to putting it to the test!
Interesting! What types of company-specific properties are getting in your way the most?
We are definitely designing with users like you in mind. There will be a "Company" contact property available for those contacts that need it, but not filling in that property won't have much effect on your experience.
I know a lot of CRMs really force you to associate every record with a company, or the whole thing kinda falls apart. We have no intention of that being the case in our world.
It's been quite a while since I used it, but I remember trying to create products (services) to sell and having a barrier selling it TO THE INDIVIDUAL, not a company.
Understood. We shouldn't have any trouble staying out of your way there. We're building for a lot of businesses that sell direct to consumers, rather than only B2B sales that require buy-in from multiple stakeholders in the same org.
Get it done and then let me license it for my niche!
i loved your ideia it's very interesting and have a todo-list, great for user experience organize your tasks
Your advantage is the price and you need to gain your customer in great user experience, i think hub spot and others can create a google chrome plugin with the exactly same propose as you and you need to think why your product is better tell me in the comments :
Thank you! I have considered the fact that at any point a HubSpot, Salesforce, or even a smaller competitor like Pipedrive could see what we're doing and simply copy the format. My hope is that for the majority of the existing players in this market, the incentive to move down market to a paired down product offering and lower-margin customers just won't be great enough. Even if it is and someone does copy us, it's my belief this market is large enough to support a wide variety of differentiated solutions. I believe we can build a solid following based on our core belief that there is a hugely underserved community of low-tech business owners and operators out there who need a high-quality, low-effort solution to the problem of keeping their work organized and staying productive.
For anyone still following this post, I just published my followup post here.
We now have a landing page for you to check out. It'll likely be a few months before we start charging for it, so I'd love it if you'd sign up to give us feedback along the way. 🙏
simplesidecrm.com
Greetings!
We are now making a module for selecting and providing news on the tag cloud and on leads/clients in the CRM system (in the market of post-Soviet countries, for Bitrix24 CRM system). maybe you would also want such a module for your system?
This comment was deleted 6 years ago.