Customer relationship management is at the heart of every business. You should have full control of it, no matter what. Surprisingly, by making it yourself, you can ditch most of your SAAS services. It’s easier than you think.
HubSpot markets themselves as “the single source of truth for your business”. This is an extremely valuable concept in CRM business, but in reality, HubSpot is just another service external to your master database.
Do you push user updates directly to HubSpot? Nope, you make calls to your operational database — the actual source of truth.
Want recurring payment? Sure thing, take Recurly and externalize your billing data. Want a viral invitation system ala Dropbox? No problem, there must be a service for that.
This sort of service mix is a common setup for startups but it is prone to complexity and errors. CRM is all about relationships, but that power is severely weakened in a distributed system. Can you fetch all users with a minimum of five invited friends, and give them a discount coupon? Not trivial.
Developers have a hard time understanding the system, let alone extend it. Marketers have multiple places for leads, users, and customers. They have a hard time sporting the lifecycle marketing expertise they learned at school.
Moreover, all these services introduce a new web interface that you need to master. Who should I contact when something goes wrong? Is it me or is it them?
There are just too many annoyances you must tolerate every day.
We’ve been there.
The power of central data
Imagine if all this CRM functionality would sit neatly in one central place. How would that look?
Pretty damn good. All the mission-critical data, instantly accessible with all the imaginable ways. No syncing problems, no data availability issues, no data inconsistency concerns. Just one database and one admin UI for everything.
This custom CRM has genuinely been a dream for our developers, marketers and the support people.
It’s such a powerful thing to own your core business operations: bugs are easy to find, new features are easy to add, and we don’t have to make any compromises on performance.
This website is also a thing. It’s essentially a content-heavy interface to the CRM. Whenever you post a comment, invite a friend, or join our mailing list the data go straight to our Redis-backed CRM. The experience is exactly as fast as you can expect from this awesome database.
It’s not far fetched to claim that this is the fastest business website you’ve ever seen. At least we try hard to be one.
Ditching the SAAS services
With this Redis-powered utopia in place, we wanted to take the hell out of it. We let the NIH syndrome take over and started replacing the popular services with custom, minimalistic alternatives.
To our big surprise, we were amazed at how easily it all came together.
One thing is certain: SAAS industry has fooled us to believe their products are irreplaceable pieces of software that take years to build. Not true at all. Think Disqus, Intercom or MailChip for a while. Their big feature is compelling on the surface, but if you dig deeper you’ll end up with a small core. It was surprisingly easy for us to replace them with a primitive CRUD + REST combo.
Of course, there are amazing products that are extremely valuable. MailGun, for example, allows us to send and receive emails directly in our CRM. We no longer needed Gmail and MailChip to run our business. Stripe is also valuable: would be total madness to ditch them and start dealing with the absurdness of banking.
However, for many services the added value is marginal. For example, we ditched Recurly with a single line in crontab. Stripe for charging and cron for scheduling. Voila, that’s a recurred billing system right there.
Oh boy how far you can go minimalism and the NIH syndrome.
The moral story is this: by owning your core business functions — the customer relationships management — your technology stack becomes more powerful and you have fewer things to worry about. We think all new startups should seriously consider this option. Especially the ones with strong technological competence. At least we are happy as hell.
Oh, and one more thing: it costs $11.50/mo to run the CRM and this website with all the server costs included ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
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