Seven years ago, I complained about Salesforce on HN. Somebody said: "one day, someone will do better". That stuck and today we're trying to be that “someone” with my co-founders Thomas (design) and Charles (eng like me). Our company is called Twenty and our repo is here: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty
We want to fix two issues: most CRMs aren't enjoyable to use and they often clash with engineering teams.
YC encouraged us to launch early. What you see now is about two months' worth of feature development. Our tool only does a small part of what big CRM players offer, but we focused on providing a great user experience on the basics, instead of spreading ourselves thin across a vast range of features and delivering them half-heartedly. Plus, we've found that many small companies like the product as it is because they don't need all the complex stuff.
Once we have covered the basics, we’ll soon be working on three big features: - Moving to a robust metadata-driven architecture; - Providing innovating ways to extend the CRM with Typescript; - Making it easy to connect data sources, and fetch data in real-time like in BI tools.
The startup world is littered with ghosts of so-called "Salesforce killers", so we know it sounds naive to pitch ourselves in a similar way. But we think that if someone ends up changing this market, it will most likely be through a community-led effort. And there hasn’t really been any serious attempt to start a great new open source CRM in the last decade.
Twenty is built with Typescript, React, and NestJS with GraphQL, and licensed under AGPL. We plan to make money by offering a hosted version. Our docs are here: https://docs.twenty.com. Try on cloud: https://app.twenty.com.
Dev setup and demo: https://www.loom.com/share/7b20b44d8d5146fea8923183511bb818 (Loom said they couldn’t provide a transcript because they don’t support “language other than english” haha... apologies in advance!)
We’re very eager to get your feedback as we haven’t launched anywhere before this post. What's your CRM story? What should we prioritize next?
by Andrey
Azimov