Show HN: Nat.app, personal CRM that knows who you're losing touch with (nat.app)
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.
The main reason for this in my opinion is that the personal CRM business is a bad business. People sort of 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.
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).
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.
For those people, we are able to capture 80% of their social interactions with Google's APIs. Which means that our if-else rules are accurately able to identify contacts our customers are losing touch with.
nat.app then acts as a safety net and displays those contacts to our customers.
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.
42 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] thread> Stay in touch with the customers that matter to your business
Is this for personal or business?
I'm just confused who the customer is. Would I be paying for this out of my paycheck so I would do my job better? Or would my employer buy this for me to use?
For business, that might be reasonable. For personal use, no way.
If I wanted to be extremely mercenary/selfish, I could make absolutely sure that the people who have something I want are definitely always kept in the list, and try to gradually increase their rank-order to get closer to them socially.
On a tangent, I do think that software businesses undercharge heavily. It works for VC-funded businesses but for bootstrapped companies, we definitely have to charge real prices.
My monthly Blue Bottle budget is probably around $50, I don't see why I wouldn't pay as much if not more for a piece of software :)
I think a lot of people could use something like Reminders with actions like "Call Mom; repeat every 6 days". And again, for me, this isn't $144/yr better than that free solution. If I were doing this as part of my job, sure, I'd happily ask my company to cover the cost. I don't see a scenario where I would pay that much for personal use.
(BTW, I do literally have a Reminders list called "Maintain relationships" with actions like "Buy a birthday card for my niece", "Call Mom on her wedding anniversary", "Text Joe", and such. It keeps me from getting too out of sync with the people I care about. I'd pay a couple of dollars a month if there were something that helped automate setting up and maintaining that list.)
I guess it depends on your needs & use cases. If you feel like you're losing touch with people that matter, you might want to give it a try :)
However this looks like personal business relationship CRM, right?
Good luck with it though.
Discussion from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295
Discussion from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270001
It's open-source and easy to self-host.
It's never been important enough to pay for, so thanks for the Monica link, I'll check it out
I dont manage my network through email.
Many people do though, that's why we exist :)
Are you sure?
> 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.
That describes exactly _zero_ of my friends/acquaintances, and perhaps low single digit percent of my professional connections.
Even at work, where we use Suite and Google Calendar, internally an overwhelming percentage of our communication is via Slack, video calls, and Jira/Trello tickets. Email is mostly a customer comms channel here (most of who are not Google Calendar users)
The site links to an indiehacker article which says they're making $500/mth, so there's at least 40 customers using it
Independent consultants and agency owners for one are niches of people who tend to fit our market very well :)
But your feedback is great and something we've discovered a long time ago. Which is why we don't think this can turn into a big VC-funded business :)
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24897812
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/salesforce/comments/bfqb26/does_any...
(edit: oh my god I think you actually commented on that post! awesome work keeping up with the idea!)
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.
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.
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.
wobaka.com
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.
I'll check out yours too.