

Ask HN: Can we make money on CRM? - thisisnotclear

We recently developed a CRM web application for a company. How can we use it to make profit?
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fjabre
I tried and failed at making a CRM.

The problem with developing and marketing CRMs is:

1\. Very crowded space

2\. You need to attract a lot of customers because revenue/customer for SaaS
apps like CRMs are low:
[https://highrisehq.com/signup](https://highrisehq.com/signup) for example.
When most of your customers will be on the free plan or paying you just
$30-$40/month you'll need to attract 1000s in a very crowded space with plenty
of low cost options around.

3\. You can't tightly integrate email without going to a lot of trouble or
resorting to a hack b/c Gmail and other services don't allow you to integrate
their special sauce into your application. And IMAP isn't a viable option
because of the low revenue/customer (IMAP is heavy and will cost you in
bandwidth and storage).

4\. Mission critical. If your CRM goes down even for a few minutes and you
have 1000s of customers you're going to get a lot of angry phone calls. Not to
mention a whole host of other issues that can go wrong like data loss,
security breaches. Don't forget this is sensitive business data you'll be
acting as a gatekeeper for. If something fails it'll be your head.

------
27182818284
If you have no idea where to start, but you'd like to start a startup based
off of the CRM, I'd start with

[http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html)

and

[http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step--
ebook/dp/B...](http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step--
ebook/dp/B009UMTMKS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380233613&sr=1-1&keywords=startup+owners+manual)

and see if that knocks out any ideas. There are several possible ways, but
with CRMs, it is difficult in my opinion because the ones willing to pay good
money for a CRM are the ones already looking at Salesforce CRM, and the other
giants.

~~~
thisisnotclear
Thanks for your reply , we are looking to make some SaaS based web
application. Well a few searches in google about CRM resulted in knowledge of
salesforce dominance in the market and a dishearted me.

