iFelix

Yes, I also think logging calls/meetings will become a thing of the past with LLMs and good integrations.

Interesting! Hubspot launched a chat interface[1] but it doesn't have that component you describe where it pro-actively asks you for things.

I think logging will eventually become much less painful than it is today with good integrations and LLM, most of it could be done automatically.

[1] https://chatspot.ai/

Nice! Agree this could be great. Is this hosted as an API somewhere?

In terms of UI, Notion has been our main source of inspiration. Targeting the bucket of Salespeople who enjoy the Notion UI is definitely a smaller one than those who know how to use Salesforce, but I feel like it might be a faster-growing one. It's a good point that it will become harder as we move to larger companies with a higher share of experienced sales reps that don't want to change.

Yes agree being open-source is not enough of an argument to win. It will help us build a community, foster innovation and thus making the product better. But at the end of the day, I agree the product needs to be the best for users, not just for developers.

Sorry about that, it's not an intentional dark pattern, just the result of a very short timeline to build this. I've just created an issue to prioritize this soon: https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty/issues/774

We are trying to be conscious about data privacy too (e.g. no tracker or third-party cookie on our website)

Yes there seems to be a trend! Way behind the number of LLM-related startups, but still quite a large group within the current batch

Yes! We've setup the pricing page for this launch to avoid disappointing users later on but we're not enforcing pricing at this point.

The trendsetter here is Notion, not Attio

Thanks for the feedback! All of this is relevant and rather basic stuff I agree. Come back in 2-month and you might be surprised how much of it has been implemented :)

Launching early here was a way to get feedback from developers and thoughtful users like you, and we wanted to do it in the spirit of building together with a community. We didn't open signup on Twenty.com precisely for the reasons you mention.

Haha, if we were able to replicate the notion experience in 2 months that's a great compliment! The difference will come from the fact that we hold structured data. Notion doesn't know that a person is a person and a company is a company. That makes it impossible for them to build robust integrations CRM have. You can build rules to replicate some behavior, but once you have more business logic, it becomes too limited.

Next month we'll be shipping some features around email (log/send) which should help you see the different direction we're taking.

I really like the metadata-driven approach of Iceburg, great work.

I don't have a strong opinion on licensing. We were setup as MIT until last week and ahead of this launch I thought that if for whatever reason we were moving to a more restrictive licence post-launch it could feel like we've been lying to the community. So we decided to adopt a more conservative approach to avoid making promises we couldn't hold later on. If people come to us with projects where this license is a blocker, we'd me happy to discuss and grant exceptions.

Haha, I was waiting for a comment on programming language choice.

It was my first time with JS on the backend and I really enjoy the dev experience with Nest. Sadly, we can't please everyone

Yes good point, going with a multi-tenant infrastructure makes this very challenging as they can't ever leave anyone behind

We initially though pitching "Segment-native" or "Warehouse-native" as one of our key differentiating feature (we haven't build any of that yet). I agree nailing this would make a big difference

Thanks for taking the time to write this up! I'd love to chat more, especially on database design. I will reach out

Yes it will! Not sure if you're going to self-host but we haven't published any click-to-deploy buttons yet so let us know if you'd like to self-host and have issues doing it

If you self-host then that's easy since you can read directly from your own Postgres. We have a GraphQL API but I have to say I we didn't think much about how we could make it easier for people to export data if they don't self host (besides csv export in the app). Is an API enough or you'd expect more sophisticated connectors? You would like integrations with Fivetran, Airbytes, etc.?

Thank you!

Good summary!

And Microsoft through the Productivity apps? (Word, Excel...)

Thanks! 1 - We should have that soon yes 2 - Auto-activate would be based on what kind of trigger? 3 - We'll work on that and creating a strong community 4 - Good to know it's also a customer priority and not just dev obsession! 5 - Good to know 6 - Our current license is AGPL which might not be ideal for this but we are very open to chat and adapt. We'll focus on building strong foundations in the next few months but once we have that, this would be a great use-case. My previous company was in a similar situation (in the property management industry) and I ended up building an in-house CRM for our partners. I probably wouldn't have done it this way if there was a good/extensible/open source solution available. My email is felix [at] twenty.com if you ever want to get in touch

Curious why did you think about building you own? For us the frustration came primarily from the design, the developer experience to extend/customize, and the way data is pulled and fetched. I think that if we nail those 3 points, we would have a solution that is well enough differentiated from what currently exists in the market

You guessed it!

2 competitors which I think are getting things right on the UI front are Attio [1] and Folk [2]. It's not as powerful as Salesforce and the data structure is very loose, but they have done a good job with the user-experience. They are not open source though.

[1] https://attio.com [2] https://www.folk.app

I mentioned it in another comment but Odoo is one of the best example of how open source could help us build that ecosystem. It has allowed them to work with a network of web agencies that customize and implement their solution

Product surface is huge indeed! That's why we're only starting with a small/focused piece.

[1] https://github.com/odoo/odoo

Do you have a specific use-case in mind that this license is blocking?

Good points thank you. Right now we are starting to work with companies in our YC batch which have relatively simple needs, probably like yours (founders doing sales, less than 1000 contacts, etc.). Our goal is to deliver fast enough so that these companies never outgrow us and have to switch. Not saying it will be easy to keep that pace given the breadth of features/integrations that becomes required as you grow, but we'll do our best!

You can go to app.twenty.com ; twenty.com is our marketing website for a general audience so the form there is useless for now (we'll launch soon but our current focus on Github / developer community only)

It isn't easily extensible (we wanted to be able to add images with drag-n-drop). From the moment you need to extend, it felt like it was faster to rebuild things directly with TipTap

There is a ton of great feedback from users in this thread that will help us build a better product, that's enough to justify this launch in my opinion :)

Noted for integrations as a top-priority!