
Fred Wilson's vision of a family CRM service - dchs
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/the-family-crm-service.html
======
bravura
The most important problem to solve is that when you do a search, or browse by
a tag, that no one slips through the cracks. With a friend organizer, the
worst possible thing it can do is become central to organizing your social
life, but then silently "forget" about certain friends of yours.

I've thought about this very application (I call it "CRM for hypersocial
people") and the most important component is the natural language processing.
In particular, you want good autotagging and query expansion, with an emphasis
on recall.

More specifically, if one of your ballet dancer friends is manually tagged
"ballet" but not "dance", and you search for "dance", you want this friend to
appear in the results.

Additionally, if you are looking for "hackers", it should know that it should
include people who are "hardcore programmers" or maybe those that program
"ruby".

~~~
kalvin
Why did this get downvoted twice? It's completely reasonable, and I happen to
agree that it would be useful (and not just for 'hypersocial crm')

~~~
bravura
I originally offered to share the technology, either free for open source apps
or as a business deal if you're using it to make money. I imagine people found
that offer distasteful, so I removed that last part from my comment.

I personally included it because I think more widespread dissemination of NLP
could improve a lot of technology. But I can understand why people would think
that I made my comment merely to scurry up deals, and not to inform them.

------
andrewparker
Drill down in the comments to find this pic that Fred posted of himself
ROFL'ing in response to one of his commentors... very entertaining:
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredwilson/4887958978/>

~~~
fredwilson
you liked that andrew?

~~~
andrewparker
Likely the best comment you've ever posted... Did you take it or someone else?

------
oneplusone
I have actually been looking for something similar and have considered
building it in the past. My biggest concern was how to monetize it. Not sure I
would pay a monthly fee for it.

My biggest need was for it to sync names + phone numbers to my phone so I
don't run the risk of loosing them when something inevitably happened to my
phone.

~~~
fredwilson
i would pay as much as our firm pays for mailchimp, $10/month

------
jerf
Much as I hate to say it, seems like this ought to be a facebook app. One of
the problems with our family address book is keeping the addresses up to date,
and moving that responsibility out to the people in the book would be a win.
Of course you app would still let you enter in people who aren't on facebook
or aren't in the app, and there is still the private aspect. Tags shouldn't be
public unless you want them to be.

Biggest problem there is that if you're successful, Facebook will probably
preempt you.

~~~
fredwilson
the reason i don't think that works for me is that my family doesn't have a
facebook account. we all have our own with our own contacts. this is about our
family contacts

~~~
messel
could be as simple as a group then. maybe a fan page/community

------
jwinter
The Github founders were working on something like this (famspam) before they
founded github.

------
JangoSteve
So, what exactly are the features that a "family CRM" would need that normal
CRMs don't have (other than integration with Red Stamp and Pingg)? Is it just
the ability to mass email certain filters in your CRM?

Anyway, it's not expressly meant to be a "family CRM", but its simplicity and
design seem perfect to me for this sort of thing. My buddy is building
<http://www.karmacrm.com> which is still in beta.

~~~
notahacker
it's more to do with the features a normal CRM would have that a "family CRM"
wouldn't - you wouldn't be interested in tracking "leads", putting a value
against "proposals" or managing "pipelines" but you would want open ended
relationship groupings

~~~
fredwilson
exactly. less features more elegant

------
dchs
Anyone up for building this?

~~~
rodyancy
Sure. What is your background?

~~~
rudasn
Seems like a good side-project and I want in. I mostly do whatever visitors
see: HTML, CSS, JS, some 'good' UI/design skills (+ hacking python/django most
recently).

~~~
bravura
Count me in, if you are interested in the MVP I propose above
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601840>).

I can contribute leet NLP + ML skillz.

------
sgricci
Wow!

I started building this about a week and a half ago after watching my wife and
my mother-in-law tediously exchanging contacts across the country. And then
spending hours filling out thank you cards for gifts on the recent birth of
our daughter.

I'm still in development of it, but should be in beta in a week or two.

I'd love if all the interested people would sign up to get early access:
<http://kindrd.com/?hn=1>

If you leave the hn=1 in the query string, I will be able to discern the
HN'ers.

------
TrevorBramble
I've been pondering how to solve this too. Bought a domain for it recently but
haven't decided what form it should take.

The CRM angle is one I hadn't thought of, though it's kind of an obvious leap
(in hindsight of course). I've been thinking more of a CMS plus address book.

------
mahmud
Oh boy! Serendipity.

I just wrote about that exact same thing yesterday.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599944>

------
jorangreef
I've been thinking the exact same thing for my family and am busy building
<https://szpil.com>.

------
brianbreslin
ok just want to throw this out there that i bet Fred's family is unlike most
families. most people don't excel their friends and relationships. I think
something like this needs a larger sample size to validate its audience.

------
run4yourlives
Wouldn't Highrise be ideal for this? (sans pretty invite integration, of
course)

------
wslh
I use a wiki for my family.

------
codemechanic
Tonido workspace (<http://www.tonido.com/app_workspace_home.html>) fits Fred's
requirements exactly.

