skevvis

Hey there - I'm Zvi, CEO of Contactually. Honestly, if cost is a major factor for you, you can build a spreadsheet tool that can work really well. However, it takes the same discipline that Contactually or any other tool would require - just a bit more time.

If you really love self-hosted, SugarCRM is the main open source CRM out there.

@Graham fair point (BTW I'm the CEO of Contactually). We've made it as simple as possible for now (and our users regularly say that), but we are constantly working to streamline the UI. Any feedback, I'm very easy to reach.

Contactually - Washington DC/Remote Hiring: Frontend Developer, Rails Engineer, UI/UX

https://www.contactually.com/about-us/careers/

Contactually is a relationship marketing platform. We build and host a SaaS CRM that helps professionals stay engaged with the relationships that are important to them. We're revenue generating, venture backed.

We're tackling some hard challenges on both frontend and backend. On the backend, we're dealing with massive amounts of data user and integrations, and making our API-centric infrastructure as performant as possible. On the frontend, building an engaging user interface that people love to use.

Rails/Backbone/Postgres/MongoDB/ElasticSearch/Redis etc...

Great culture, passionate users, dog friendly office.

Interested? Email the CEO (Rails dev) - [email protected]

@quanticle - There's a balance to be had there. Yes, being continually emailed by a service you had no interest in is a terrible idea. But we've found that people drop off for other reasons - technical issues, walked away and forgot, or had unanswered questions. An easily-ignorable one-time e-mail is harmless

Thanks! Yes, a lot of these are "duh" moments - we just wanted to note how big of a difference it makes.

Definitely - when it comes to social communication, there's Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. And that's bleeding across into professional communications as well, with companies regularly monitoring social networks and engaging with customers on there. But e-mail still remains, for professional communication, the dominant platform.

@blueplastic - we do regular security audits and will soon engage with a firm to provide that guarantee as well. In the interim, what would you like to see to alleviate that?

Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution.

With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the foreseeable future, the primary mode of communication. We're not focusing on making the user send and receive more emails - but we push the realization that e-mail is already where you're doing most of your communication. Why shouldn't you have a tool that leverages that?

@sankalpk - I've seen that before, and it's a great post-mortem. I can see why it's hard for a collaboration company that's not solving a strong pain point. We look at the relationships that are live and die via e-mail, and are building a solution for that.

Yes, but they fix them as soon as it's brought to their attention. Thanks!

Hah, we might have over-reached by saying spam. We've used it really to help identify people who might be interested, and reached out to them to learn.

Thanks!

This is awesome! Thanks so much for sending this out!

@deafcheese - Definitely. We're going to have a lot of stuff going on over the summer that's open to any startup intern.

Follow @dctechsummer on twitter to keep updated on what happens.

Super simple, and really useful. I can imagine a few different use cases for this!

good call, I'll add in a TOS. In general, it's "we're not touching your data"

And you receive back a CSV of names/emails