Founder here. Here to answer any questions you might have. The site is not perfect, it's not mobile optimized, there are probably bugs, there is a gazillion features missing, no APIs but it's a labour of love, open-source and I hope it will help people other than me. I want to grow this product but I need to know what you need, people.
Edit: sorry for the bugs I see on my server popping here and there. Didnt expect that much users and traffic.
Disclaimer: I run my own CRM company, so you can either view this comment as genuine praise/advice, or an attempt to subvert a competitor (but I promise it's the former).
First off, this looks awesome. I've heard people complain many times about how they just want a personal CRM for non-business purposes. On the one hand I love the idea because having such a specific use case allows you to make a very simple UI that does exactly what the user needs. On the other hand, I never personally chose to go after it because getting individual consumers to pay for stuff seems hard.
So I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you stick with it. The "Why Monica?" section of your website sounds like it was written specifically for me, and I'm definitely going to try it out because of that copy.
My main piece of advice: be skeptical of most product suggestions. As someone who has been building a simple CRM for the past ~8 years, I can tell you that everyone wants something different, and if you react to every suggestion you get, your product will end up losing the awesome focus it has right now. That doesn't mean you should ignore feedback, it just means you should make sure the feedback is coming from your actual target audience and not some random person who's looking for Monica to be something it isn't. I fell for that too many times in the early days.
My email is in my profile if you ever want to talk shop.
Thanks a lot for the advice. I've been product manager for most of my career so I totally understand what you mean. I will definitely be careful in where I want Monica to go, and definitely I'll reach out to you on your email (but not today, I just received way too much feedback and emails thanks to HN today :-D
Damn it, I broke it. I'll fix it today, or remove it entirely, I still don't know about it. I like the idea of being able to quickly log in, but it's yet another feature to maintain, so...
My personal recommendation is to drop third-party logins and allow users to sign-up via usernames (without emails). That means you need to deal with "lost password with no way to recover" situations and spam but it's still better than third parties controlling the most important aspect of your application.
I got added by someone else to a Facebook group that eventually went on a troll raid. I rarely go on Facebook and didn't even participate in any troll raids. Just from being in the group, my account was disabled. I have been locked out of my apps for three weeks and Facebook hasn't answered any appeal I sent them.
Exactly. Excellent point. Moreover, you can't import any of your Facebook contacts anyway, so it's pretty pointless, and I hate relying on third parties.
I'm a fan of FB login. In practice it's pretty trivial to maintain once it's set up, I don't recall ever having to do any updates to an FB login system once set up.
It's nice that I don't have to create yet-another-password for a new app as well. I use a password manager so it's not a big deal for me, but for other users it could be so they may just use a shared password and having FB login would be a way to have them not do that.
Counterpoint since I only see anti-FB replies below: I absolutely love seeing OAuth login. I don't have to create yet another password, or worry about whether your site has reasonable password security. Even when I choose to create a login instead, just seeing it gives me some confidence that you're competent enough to set it up, and probably gave some thought to the security trade-offs surrounding login in general.
Have you tried using a password manager? There's no need to worry about a site having reasonable password security when every site has its own unique 15-20 character password that you don't need to know.
You don't have to remove it indefinitely, just come back with something that works with more networks, like google, github, gitlab, yahoo etc., something you have to maintain only the integration instead of the logic.
I have mainly python experience with python-social-auth, but I see PHP has a few pretty good social auth libraries, to name one, I came across HybridAuth[1].
Please, please remove it. I actively avoid sites with fb logins, as it appears others in this thread do as well. Your idea can stand on its own without that sort of crutch.
Wherever you see the "login with facebook" button, you have FB tracking you. This is why lots of people avoid sites that have this button. It adds very little and puts a lot of people off. Why keep it around on an OSS project if it's going to do nothing of real value and will put off both users of the CRM and people who would like to host a CRM but don't want the FB affiliation?
I get that you might like it, that's fine, but it's not serving any good purpose here. Google login would be more widespread if you must have a 3rd party button. Yes, Google track as well and yes, that's also going to put people off, but if you feel the need to have one at all, get a more useful one. Or better yet, remove them all, have local user registration and put a hook in place for developers to plugin other buttons using different contrib repos. Then you can have both without polluting the core project with 3rd party deps.
This seems super handy. I am kinda interested in seeing if I can get it to run on Sandstorm.io. Then I don't have to put a lot of effort into managing hosting for it, but it seems like it'd be handy and I'd probably use it if I could host it that way. And if you want to let people use your open source thing without having to manage it as a service, there's some nice perks: https://sandstorm.io/developer
as someone who built a similar product (but for networking), i will reveal a very hard-earned lesson about CRMs that don't target sales & marketing: no one cares.
everyone will tell you what a great idea it is, and how useful it could be, but no one wants to do any work to that end. it just doesn't solve a real pain for enough people to build a business around (given the product you present on the home page).
however, if you're serious about this space, you will automate the crap out of data collection and make the product a super-passive intelligent assistant (for mobile). make users seem more kind and thoughtful than they otherwise are with this app, and people might just pay for it. there's a potentially big privacy hurdle but i found most people to be surprisingly unconcerned about that if you provide tangible value.
Well, who said robinhood wants to build a business around it? For what it's worth, I care about the topic, but I would never want to use a hosted service for something like that. So his decision to build an open source app is the only way to do it.
But as I am using my own Nextcloud and XMPP Server I would like to see a simpler setup/update procedure.
Looks like you're calculating the birth date field's min-date as (today - 50 years)? Which means I can't add a persons birthday if they were born before 1967.
One note, in location the defaults are "Province" and "Postal code" with country at US by default. I haven't tried but if you have any kind of data validation for those inputs it may annoy some of your US users.
I sometimes stumble on some site that only allow five numbers for zip codes and not the six alphanumeric characters we use for postal codes.
I would change "Postal code" to "ZIP" and "Province" to "State" if someone selects US as a country.
Have you considered the ability to "Share" a Contact? For example, if my Wife wants to share the info she collected about our niece?
Or is the entire idea that each person is logging a unique POV or set of information about someone, rather than the system gravitating towards there being a single, cultivated profile about each person that is shared around?
(right now it's kind of the anti social media -- which seems like a refreshing take. Just curious if that's on purpose)
Instead of sharing, I wonder if I should add multi users to an account, so you and your spouse could manage their relationships with their loved ones, for instance.
Thank you so much! I've been looking for something like this (and even contemplated making this myself despite not having any spare time to do so).
My one concern: Can you please make all of your contact information downloadable and backupable. My biggest fear would be putting so much precious data in your app and then having you guys go under... then I would lose everything. Also, I don't want vendor lock-in for something as important as this.
I think the most interesting thing about this is that it's essentially a souped up address book, so it could basically be turned into a vcard with a bunch of extra fields.
Probably a big investment, but my immediate thought is I'd love a mobile app. The mobile site was better than nothing, but if you had a slick mobile app, I would use it constantly. So many times I forget little things that I would love to jot down in exactly this type of product.
e: On birthdays, might be nice to be able to add day/month but no year. I'm working through adding some of my contacts into this and noticing small things as I update/add more.
Carddav support would a huge win. Even some sensible markup to store metadata in the notes field could allow some kind of editing on the go, and synchronization.
I'll be watching your github repo / release notes pretty closely - will try and make a simple people / event entry + reminder only mobile app for my personal use (and for others, if there's interest).
If you prefer to, you can simply clone the repository and set it up yourself on any hosting provider, for free. I'm just asking that you don't try to make money out of it yourself."
So to guarantee the privacy of your data, set it up on your own server (maybe even locally hosted if you're that paranoid) and you're set.
It's not excellent. Nothing about data security, encryption at rest, and a whole load of things that would be covered by GDPR (yes the service is registered in Canada, but GDPR standards should be the benchmark now for what is considered acceptable for anything).
This is an intriguing idea as a concept but feels like it isn't a sufficient focus. The privacy page hasn't been updated in 18 months either, yet the release notes mention encryption at rest (with very little detail) being added in October 16.
If you have users in the EU/EEA then you _will_ have to comply, or risk a fine of up to €20,000,000 or 4% of your _global_ turnover (whichever is larger).
That's a good solution for someone like me, who can roll my own, but not someone like my parents who have no idea how to do that. That does not bode well for privacy. Your suggestion is half-assed.
No ads, ever, I hate them. No reselling of data, that practice is the worst for me.
I plan to provide a paid version with an extremely generous free version. The paid version will contain some great features, and will probably be a couple of dollars per month.
Do you hate any type of ads? I see great potential in having service app options that do not seem to me to be very harmful, but I may be wrong... For example, when I mark that I had dinner with my friend at a Japanese food restaurant that I really liked, I could not have an option to book a table using an app like resy.com. Or yelp to find a different one?
Or when I note that the last time I was with a friend, it was in a movie theater and this week will launch its sequel, a link to redbox.com. Or in the case of a band show we like, link to ticketmaster?
It does not have to be something that makes it difficult to use, an icon at the end of the note could be enough.
I really love the idea of this but it seems incredibly arduous to keep it updated. Everytime I do something, call someone, have a conversation, learn something new, have lunch, etc - it all has to be tracked.
I suppose this is the price to be paid if one wants to track all of those things, but much like many other CRMs there are integration points that could make this far less work for the consumer.
An incrementing index suggests comparison. If you are closer to friend #35 than you are to friend #8, it can feel strange to be exposed to that kind of numbering.
Congrats, this looks really nice, the feedback you're getting here is a good bit of proof that you're on to something people like.
My first reaction to the "CRM to manage friends..." was, what? Why do I need a business tool for my personal life.
I wonder if there is a better terminology than CRM. You bump up against the social network on one end, and a person tool on the other.
I wrote an executive summary for my business last week, and the feedback I got from an advisor was that they loved the idea that there are these two big existing markets, and that their is a middle-ground between them which hasn't been addressed. I think that is what you've got here, it needs to be named. I haven't quite been able to name mine yet either, so I'm not suggesting this is easy.
What do other think? Is the CRM a good label for a personal tool?
1) Does it integrate with my calls from my iOS / emails from gmail? So that I can sort by "least recently connected"? otherwise writing notes each time and looking it up gets tiresome.
2) is there a mobile app?
3) how much will it cost monthly?
4) how are reminder sent?
I love the idea of a personal CRM. However, I hate the idea of duplication of effort. If you can't create interfaces to these other apps, then perhaps make sure you create an interface to IFTTT with enough control that would let me aggregate my data (phone calls, emails, etc.) to folks in Monica without user intervention.
A similar service is Pushover. They have an e-mail gateway that allows you to send e-mails to your custom Pushover e-mail address and have it be converted into Pushover notifications. Each user has a @pomail.net address assigned when their account is created, and additional addresses can be created with custom options for each one such as a default sound.
Highly recommend it.
Awesome work, have been looking for something like this for a while. I would love to see tags for people and a search bar. If I'm trying to organize a casual chess match or pickup soccer game, it would be super convenient to search all my friends with said interest.
Thanks for this.
I was thinking of making something similar but just for personal use as it would have been much more basic. My use case is that I've been to a couple of family events and I always have trouble remembering the names of ppl I might only see once a year like my cousins kids or husband etc. Or sometimes friends of family members who I will only ever see through them very infrequently.
Ultimately the most amazing use would be to have google glass etc and when I see them their name comes up in a bubble.
Noticed a couple of bugs but im pretty sure they have been reported - e.g. not able to link someone like add a child if they already exist. So at present you can only add one parent
I've built a versoin of this app a few years ago before mobile was big and there are features that I've always wanted for my app that I just didn't get to before I had to move on. The big feature that I've really wanted is integration with my calendar, email, phone, IM, fb, etc... Why? So the system would be able to tell me when I need to interact with someone using something better than a timer. You will probably need a mobile app for some of this to work
There are also two people on IndieHackers who built a mobile version of this who you may want to talk to.
I also own the domain muchcloser if you're interested in it. Let me know if you want to talk.
This is exactly what I need - but I signed up, closed the window and now I get an endless redirect loop after clicking on "Login" on the main page. Please fix so I can try it out!
I've been learning Laravel for some time now and use it for a few personal and work projects, I'm also new to the open source world and yet to contribute much - are you looking for contributors, or are you just on GitHub for the transparency?
Both :-D I'm not looking for help necessarily but if it helps create a better product, I'm more than happy about it. I don't think we can create a great thing all alone. The idea to open source it, amongst other thing, is the transparency.
I am sorry but this doesn't make any sense to me:
I can't aggregate information from calendars (Outlook, Facebook, etc.) or any other information source out there. So every info i take, i have to take twice.
A useful feature for me would be to tag people in photos. That's how I cue my memory when I forget someone. The photos also have the time and location, so I can place it on my calendar.
Email is less sexy but free. XMPP support gets you quick/dirty Slack and Hipchat integration. Something like a Hubot extension could be a fun way to interact as well. Or Alexa/Home! Or IFTTT. Ok then, maybe just an open API?
It's too bad all of the metadata around a contact can't be kept with the contact in a portable way, and then Monica could just be an API for pointing at CardDAV and other contact servers, and a UI for interacting with them in unique ways. Personal clouds, etc.
Could be a paid feature, I wouldn't mind paying for advanced features like that. I've been searching for a personal, non-sales oriented "CRM" platform for months now and am currently using Accompany but this feels far more personal.
I don't know Accompany, but no matter what, even if you use Monica for business, my personal view of business relationships evolves around knowing the intimate details of the person and remember the kids name, for instance. Things you won't find in Salesforce :-D
The first thing I looked for was data export and import. I have an export from google contacts I'd like to import to get started quickly. I would also like to know that I can get my data out to use in other applications (a table for the activity logs joined on the relationship's ID, a table for the relationships, etc.).
The "Edit" link under "Personal Information" should also be Blue, like the "Add" links under the other sections. It took me about 40 seconds to figure that out because of the confusion.
Editing reminders would be useful. More flexible reminder timing (things like "end of the month", which could be more or less than 30 days apart, are very useful).
You should be able to select an existing Person entry for the Significant Other field. Also, if you add somebody through the Significant Other field, they should show up as a person.
Separate from non-lock-in reasons, I'd consider using the hosted version if I could export data at a later time so I could go self-hosted in the future (say, if I start writing some code for it and there's no API that does what I want).
Why did you decide to make this a site rather than a desktop app?
This is a private database as I see it, so there is no need for it to be online. And keeping it offline would be good for privacy, and would make it easy for anyone to download and install, rather than the more complex install needed for a web application (or letting someone else host and sacrificing privacy).
Because I just know web technologies. Also, because having a web app will allow me to create an API, which will allow to use a mobile app for this, which totally makes sense.
If you care about the privacy, you can also host this yourself :-D
My uncle died suddenly this year. He was unbelievably caring - and not just to family - but to everyone he ever met. His funeral was jam packed with everyone from homeless people to executives of multi-billion dollar companies.
I always thought that his ability to always have you, and whatever you had last talked about with him, on his mind at any moment was some kind of supernatural gift. I was surprised to find out at his funeral that he actually kept an excel spreadsheet of everyone he met and what they needed and were going through. He reviewed this constantly.
It didn't lessen his genuine love for everyone, just let him be a little more super human.
I feel like him doing that with a spreadsheet is more impressive than having some kind of photographic social memory.
He cared about people enough to make familiarity and kindness a discipline and habit that he lived. Despite many of our apps, life hacks, and "social medias" we miss the simple insight; social kindness is rooted in just giving enough of a damn to have a discipline for it. Any tool is secondary.
Yeah, fb should kill this open source startup! ;p Seriously, though, i think it would really creep people out if fb had a feature to take notes about what you talked with people who aren't even joined up.
would greatly disagree with your statement. It may not be the answer for everyone, but it could be that tool for a large chunk of the world's population.
It's not that I hate Zuckerberg that I find it hard to use Facebook, but that I trust them less than the other super-presences outs there (justified or not), and I dislike how it changes my perceptions of some of my friends. The constant posting of inane shit starts to look less like keeping in touch and more like an addiction to my eyes. I still like those people, and enjoy their company, but being constantly exposed to their posts feels like being in their living room as they crack open that 8 AM beer after waking up. It gets uncomfortable, but it's also not something I'm sure it's my place to butt into, since to this point it appears mostly harmless.
It is the best tool to keep in contact we currently have though, so I do pop in every week or two to check on notifications. The times I go longer I end up missing events friends have put together and not notified in other ways about, so I try to remember to check in fairly regularly.
I only hope they don't swing their attention towards those of us that shun the feed any time soon, and try to find a way to tweak our reward response for that as well (or at least in a more effective way. I'm sure they've put at least some attention to it).
I still sometimes wonder if anyone else has a good name for what Facebook lost somewhere in the switch between the much more ephemeral "Status" system of 2004's TheFacebook to today's "Posts" and their littered, ad-filled home the "News Feed".
Even the "Notes" system in the middle of the transition was more "opt in" than firehose and a bit more rare and curated by the fewer users using it.
There is a spirit to the old systems lost to the new ones that I can't quite name. In the rush to increase communication overall, and build an addictive platform that people feel a need to check often, perhaps too much of the signal has been drowned out in noise. But that doesn't feel a strong description either because the signals become so different, too.
Statuses were great as a brief update of a friend's change in their state of mind. I could follow up as I saw fit, often just keeping it in mind for the next time we met up.
Posts and news is just a steady steam of information... repeated opinions, content that forms their opinion, attempts at converting others, or minor events that would have been interesting to talk about but bland now that I've seen the highlights online... Often in impersonal monologue form, or equally impersonal many-to-many chat.
Those features gutted the middle of the friend spectrum, their UX no longer aligns with natural social patterns. Humans talk more and about different things as we become closer friend's, slowly acclimating to each other. Facebook is optimized for tight social groups. News posts are useful for my inner group, but I had to unfriend most of my more nebulous connections because their updates were basically spam in the context of my life.
Facebook's features no doubt provides better revenue from ads/targeted spam for shareholders, but they've lost what I found useful for networking and developing new relations. If anything, their new features are impediments.
At this point, I've completely dropped Facebook in favor of email and chat (mix of apps)... It's a better experience than Facebook news and posts, obvious data privacy wins, and my friends and I can share higher resolution pictures without coupling to any specific platform. I haven't found a good alternative for networking, aside from LinkedIn (okish) and plain ol' phone calls/sms/in-store meetups. Maybe that's the best there is.
I think this gets close to the meat of it, yes. TheFacebook in 2004 was still something closer to its yearbook metaphor: here's the people I met this year in college and here's what they wrote on my yearbook that year.
I guess the real emblematic touch point of the change over the years is much more from each person's "Wall" being the important push hubs of conversations to the "Wall" being subsumed by the modern "Timeline" and relegated to an annual flurry of birthday well-wishers and not much else.
That opt-in push mentality versus opt-out pull mentality is quite different: I'm going to go post this cool thing on my friend's wall BECAME I'm going to post this cool thing and maybe all of my friends might see it in their news feeds (if the algorithms deem it maybe worthy and my friends haven't muted me).
Maybe that's why "Events" still seems like one of the bright spots in Facebook? "Events" for the most part still retains a lot of an "opt-in push mentality"; for the most part you still create an event and explicitly invite friends to it. Certainly the News Feed has the pull sort of events and the "I'm Interested" interest pull buttons, but the events I really care about still follow that classic push model, and probably always will...
In TheFacebook we delegated responsibility to post things we cared about to our Walls to our friends. In Facebook we find that responsibility to curate the things we care about in our News Feeds has been delegated to algorithms and advertisers somewhat beyond our control.
I think the new equivalent of "I'm going to go post this cool thing on my friend's wall" is "I'm going to send this to my friend on Messenger", although that can be borderline too once you start talking about groups with more than two people.
I agree Events is the highlight of Facebook these days. Although, it has been steadily corroded as well, and FB Messenger's Plans has muddied the waters a fair chunk.
Weird programming analogy that works for me: it went from being a library to being a framework. For your life.
As in, Facebook used to expect you to have to come and poll it. There was information there about the current state of things, and that information was replaced when people updated their status et al. You had to look, and look often, if you wanted to keep up. It was addictive, in both the good and bad senses of that word.
Today's Facebook is active, making your interaction with it passive; it keeps up to date on things for you, and notifies you when it thinks you would be interested in knowing something. You're the delegate module. You don't talk to it; it talks to you. You never actually have to check it or look at it.
Actually, for another analogy: today's Facebook is almost like a secretary. (It'd be one for real if it could guess your intentions well-enough to automatically accept/reject event invitations.) Like a secretary, there's no reason to go bother them. Nothing useful to be gained by polling. Zero addiction potential.
I wonder if you have a slightly over-romanticized view of the old FB. I got on FB sometime in 2007 and for a few years it was overrun with quizzes and games and such spam. It was a different kind of spam from ad-spam but today's FB seems much more streamlined in many senses.
2004 when I first joined was a year or so before a lot of the quizzes and games and such spam. At the time the "spam" was a large collection of "Groups" that had silly in-joke names specific to your College/University. That time "Groups" were more like a list of hobbies than the "Groups" of today. "Photos" also didn't show up until a few months after I first joined.
I'm not saying we should romanticize the incomplete, under-developed TheFacebook of 2004, but only that the things that made it viral on college campuses in 2004 are very different from those that made it viral among the masses in 2014. I'm not sure which one is better or worse, it's definitely complicated. But there's definitely that feeling that Facebook is not TheFacebook any more. Not just branding, but in... spirit, maybe? Like I said there's word missing that I'm curious to find.
It's hard for me to think of it as "addictive". Every time I use it, I end up scrolling briefly through about 20 different 10 QUICK TIPS, YOU WONT BELIEVE WHAT THIS DOLPHIN DID, and RECIPES MADE TO LOOK QUICKER THAN THEY ARE before I leave.
Facebook was much more engaging when I actually saw words and images coming out of people who I know or once knew.
Yeah, I don't get that. I see some people who like to reflect their interests online but I don't consider it inane or addiction. You have a hobby, why not share it online?
It becomes a problem when you've got people who are incredibly single-minded about something.
I don't mind my coworker's weekly posts about car stuff at all, even though I have no interest whatsoever. And when he posts some progress on some car repair he's doing, I'm glad to see he's doing something he loves.
But when my SJW friend posts yet another ridiculous over-the-top post about how all X are X, and somehow thinks this means they aren't be prejudiced themselves, it's hard to handle. You can't tell them anything, either, because there's something different about you that makes them think you're unable to empathize with them, or understand what they're going through.
Some of them are so incredibly obviously wrong, too. Like: All cops are corrupt.
This is a person who is pretty fun to be around and hosts parties that are fun. In person, they aren't so overbearing about this stuff. But online? They're a monster who can't be corrected or even debated with. If you do, you're X and can't understand.
In short, I think you're fortunate not to have anyone single-minded like this on your Facebook friends list. The only real solution is to just unfollow them, which is horrible because you then miss the posts from them that you actually want to see.
I have a slowly-brewing notion that it will eventually be a matter of etiquette, to ensure that any content your produce is properly tagged such that people can treat you as a subset of yourself. Eventually—hopefully—it will be seen as incredibly uncouth to intermingle personal, political, and pastime content into one feed with no ability to re-separate them.
But that time is, sadly, not today. Until then, building feed-readers with topic-analysis auto-tagging might help.
One thing I've been noticing about Mastodon[0] is that it is incredibly easy to segregate your personal, political, and pastime posts, trivially by having multiple sites in multiple browser tabs, but even better with a client that supports multiple accounts. You can tie your different identities together through your profile, and import/export your subscription lists between instances. And everyone who follows you can follow only those of your identities that they are interested in.
I don't think there's anything wrong with people posting about their hobbies, or what's up in their lives, even multiple times a day.
I have people that post multiple times every hour. Sometimes 8-10 times an hour for short periods. Generally it looks like reposting everything they read. They become a one person news aggregator, if by "news" we mean Facebook posts tailored for meme propagation (which means a good portion of them range from misleading to blatantly false).
I don't really use my feed, so I'm not bothered by the posts being in my feed for my own sake. I'm just a bit worried that they've become obsessed with Facebook attention to an unhealthy degree.
That's what you think you'd LIKE to use FB for. But remember, the medium is the message. You can't escape the interactive narrow mindedness of FB because it is inherent to the design of the overall product.
In reality, you use FB to have your data packaged up and sold to advertisers, brands, and government agencies. You're the product, not the customer.
Yeah, but if you have 10 or more friends your 'wall' gets littered with all kinds of useless information. Unless you unfollow and explicitly tell to not to show any of their likes and other random information.
I do exactly this and have no problem with FB. I only friend people I actually know and care to have interactions with, and I kick anyone who's posts are overall more worth my time than not off my feed. This means my feed is actually worth scrolling through (and takes maybe 10 minutes every couple days to get through) and if I want to see what's going on with some particular person who isn't on my feed, I can go to their page and skim through.
I don't get all the hate on FB. Sure, the default is mess, but that's what most people want, and if it's not what you want, there are means to control it and still have a powerful communication tool. A tool is what you make of it, and it's really not hard to make use of FB in a sane way.
If you want to become a generous person such as him, when do you know when you've reached a limit in compassion? Would someone like your uncle ever think, for someone who is excessively rude, uncaring, disagreeable, unfriendly: "he is not worth my time, I should move on?"
Actually, the last time I saw my uncle, I asked how he could be generous, and yet not be taken advantage of or stuck with horrible people.
He said that what he'd learned to do was to condition whatever help he was offering on the person taking some tiny step first. Often, it was as simple as "make up a budget for you and your wife to go on a three day getaway, send it to me, and I'll write you a check." He said that almost everyone who was just in it for the handouts couldn't be bothered.
My uncle also mixed a lot of his giving with encouraging young people's talents. He'd hire students who were excited in X, to do X for him in some way. He hired students to take photos, make music, decorate houses, build apps, archive things, paint, and who knows what else. He even hired a student to make memes. This way the students not only got money, but grew in their skills and were excited that someone wanted their work.
There were, of course, some rude and uncaring people in his life. But those people didn't want to spend time with him so there was never really a conflict there.
This is great stuff. My aunt would pay us to read books. We had to provide a hand-written summary/review to her to collect. I can't remember the exact amount - somewhere between $8 and $18 each.
One of the reasons why I think your uncle's gestures made such a big impact is that he made gestures that rewarded good things AND he wasn't a relative to many of the people he interacted with.
When I was about 10 yrs old one of my dad's best friends asked me about my grades and I was proud to say I got straight A's. He reached into his pocket and gave me a $5 bill which was a lot back then for a kid and I knew he didn't have a lot of money too. It was fun spending it at the arcade and also bragging a bit to other friends. :) I'll actually never forget that moment because it was the first one I can recall where a non-family member / non-teacher praised my grades.
The only other moment I can recall was from grade school when an older student used to hand out fireworks to those that showed their report card with straight As. You can imagine how all the top students rushed out of school ready to redeem their report card for some fireworks their parents would probably never buy except for maybe July 4th. Possibly dangerous but absolutely brilliant. A cheap fun reward that literally celebrates the accomplishment.
Most of us get told how special and amazing we are by our parents and family all the time growing up. Often times the praise isn't really deserved since we're special snowflakes. When a stranger, family friend or anyone not related gives praise or reward it can be extremely impactful and reinforce that we're on the right path and that it really does matter. Those moments get seared into our memories.
I'm working on figuring out how to do some sort of unannounced cash or gift reward to those with straight As with one of the local public schools.
Your short retelling of your uncle's kindness has rather inspired me to be more diligent in my approach to being kind to others. Thank you for sharing!
Been thinking about this at the same time I've been trying to find a use for Airtable. It seems like a great product but I've never had an obvious use case until now. Seems like it could be a great fit.
Whenever someone gets a new app idea in our office my one colleague always asks "Can it be solved with a spreadsheet or an instant messenger?". Well I guess this comment answers that question.
Idea: A web site / app where you write what you and your friends have/need, then via social-graph and match-making, you are introduced to other people via friends of friends, and on a set date you do the exchange, so you receive the apples from person A and send your oranges to person B. I used goods in this example, but it should be all but goods or money, it should be like favors, jobs, dates, fishing friend, etc.
Dale Carnegie wrote about doing just this in How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is very common among successful people, and shows an astonishing level of caring imo.
I built one of these for myself in 1995 and have been happily using it ever since. Here's the source code:
0 0 19 7 * /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: john T. birthday" me@mydomain.com
0 0 1 8 * /usr/bin/mail -s "REMINDER: MAKE xmas hotel reservations NOW for good pricing..." me@mydomain.com
This is why I like HN, and why it continues to be a much-higher-quality place to visit on the web than many other forums: there were no snarky replies, no "I can't believe you don't know cron" - just multiple friendly, helpful replies explaining exactly what this format is.
Agreed, though my first reaction was definitely: "I can't believe you don't know cron". I had to step back a little and remember who the audience is. Then I wrote my comment (at the same time as everyone else here did).
Actually my first thought was - that guy was a smart-ass showing off. Of course many people wouldn't know a crontab line - Windows (and I guess Mac - never had one) don't have such magical tools.
The file is a "cron schedule" [1]. Paste the series of numbers (and the *) into the box on the site below and you'll see it means "midnight on July 19th every year". The commenter will probably have this in their personal "crontab" file. They're emailing themselves every year on that date.
IMHO: You want to pivot this product, now, to compete with ourfamilywizard.com. OFW is a great concept but the site runs slow, its search and reporting is erratic and basic, and the UI can be difficult. It is, however, the only game in town for managing divorced families and its about $200 per year. It also features:
- Timestamped and hashed communications and records.
- Lower price point than OFW.
- More intuitive reporting.
This will NOT have widespread appeal under its current use, and will be tough to make money from.
Nope. Unless you are a psychopath you have always managed friends/family even if was managed informally in your head. You used to have a Rolodex of phone numbers and addresses. You may have even kept additional information about the person in your Rolodex, perhaps their birthday or anniversary. Important dates and social obligations used to be written on a wall or desk calendar so you didn't forget. You make notes (written or mental) of people's needs and preferences in order to accommodate them. (ie "I better have a vegetarian meal for Susan.", "John works nights so I better not call him until 6." "Sarah likes red wine.", "Joe doesn't like clubing.") You store in your mind what is happening in friend's lives to talk to them about it next time you see them. You made a paper list of people to send out event invitations, thank you notes, or Christmas cards so you don't forget anyone.
It's all social management, even if informal. But it's so natural you might not have thought about it as "management."
Nothing wrong with formalizing it and taking it all digital, if anything it can foster closer relationships if it's easy to use and consolidated. Someone can only remember so much at once and its great they care enough to store that information for easy retrieval in the future. We have never, as a society, faulted people for writing things down, (Rolodex is a generic trademark, for crying out loud), we are all only human. We don't think twice about setting a reminder to take medication or water the plants.
I believe you're missing the GP's point, which is the unwelcome connotations of power relations that attach in the words 'management' and 'customer' (from CRM). Generally a manager exerts authority over those managed, although it's true that managers in the showbiz world are the employees of performers rather than the other way around.
It's kinda weird, but it's way better than facebook. This is a digital social journal & planner. If it helps me cultivate healthier relationships, I could get into that. We need tools like this to combat the parasitic overlords' tools.
I know :-/ Sorry about this, I'm trying to find the best way to explain what it does, without using a boring video that sucks, or poetic terms that say nothing. If you have any idea, please, please let me know :-D
"Your social memory" works much better than "manage your friends and family". So take this as a complaint about the HN headline, not about the site itself.
Lots of people use planners and datebooks to remember important dates (like your high school best friend's upcoming wedding!) And lots of people use journals or diaries to take notes or keep memories.
These things are less about "managing" and more about cultivating relationships and memories. "Organizing" is a word with less controlling vibes. Maybe start there and take a journey through the thesaurus? http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/organizing?s=t
The word "manage" has to go, but it's a tough one. Any word having to do with augmentation is too robot/AI sounding. I like the idea of "cultivating," as in the Dale Carnegie approach or the another commenter's awesome uncle with the spreadsheet. But it's a balance of memory and cultivation.
I think you could convey this pretty well if you changed the first screen shot on your page a little.
Cut out the actual browser window part, and paste that on to an image of an address book/planner with the same information about Jim Halpert. That way it's an instant visual association with an existing non-computer idea.
The product is super cool and useful, although I hope you won't limit it to being a single-user thing because it could actually evolve into an amazing social tool. But I would really lose the word 'manage', it kind of suggests that personal relations are just another kind of task which is apt to make the people being related to feel devalued because they're not important enough to be given space in someone's day-to-day consciousness.
poetic terms that say nothing
?!
If poetic terms say nothing then why is poetry (both literary and lyrical, as in songs) so popular? Social relations are not purely functional or transactional, although they often have those aims or characteristics. Friendship and warm familial relations are based on feelings. I often say that hackers need to develop better emotional intelligence and this is a good example.
Would you take someone on a date and say 'statistics indicate that we have a high degree of socioeconomic compatibility and synergistic aesthetic appeal, suggesting that we should pursue a merger strategy so as to maximize our mutual future advantage?' Most people would prefer to hear something along the lines of 'I love you and want to marry you.'
I understand that your product is aimed at busy people who are invested in their work and want to handle their social relations at least as well as their business ones. But you need to be cognizant of their motivations for doing that; because they like, love and generally care about the people in their lives that lie outside their career. It is that drive which might move someone to start using your product, and you must appeal to that drive, which is an emotional one, in emotional terms.
Incidentally, calling it Monica carries connotations of having an assistant called Monica that helps you remember those little personal obligations and although I'm sure you didn't intend this it gives me a sort of sexist vibe because historically such tasks have often been delegated to stereotypically female subordinates by busy executives (think Pepper Potts in the Iron Man story franchise).
Even though both men and women seem to prefer female identities for things like GPS and virtual assistants, a gendered brand identity like this is likely to limit your appeal to one half of the population straight out of the gate. The brand values you wish to attach to your product are reliability, loyalty, and patience, so it would be worth your while to dig through mythology and fiction in search of characters who are associated with those qualities and then develop variations from any particularly inspiring name stems you encounter so as to leverage those psychic associations.
You know what I meant. I didn't imply poetry meant nothing. Of course not. But I see SAAS more and more describing their product in ways that are too marketing to me. I prefer to go straight to the point.
Regarding the gender, I don't know what to think about this. It's not by any mean a way to degrade women. I will definitely consider choosing another name because I understand how some people could be offended by that, which is not at all my intention, ever.
For what it's worth, I don't see what all the fuss is about the name. In fact, I like it. Do these same people complain about other software named after people, like Cassandra, Linux, MySQL, Haskell etc...
Of course I know what you meant, but I'm trying to give you some free branding advice that would substantially increase the likely uptake for your tool.I am not a marketing oriented person either, but successful businesses often spend about the same money/effort on marketing as they do on product development. That's certainly the magic formula in the film industry - 50% on the production and 50% on the ad campaign.
I agree and thanks a lot for your comment. I know I should be much better at marketing, it's nearly the most important criteria for a software to succeed.
> personal relations are just another kind of task which is apt to make the people being related to feel devalued because they're not important enough to be given space in someone's day-to-day consciousness.
You seem to indicate that this devaluation is a sort of false accusation to which we should not make ourselves vulnerable.
Yet, that subordinate clause rings true to me as an independent statement.
Why should I let just any person (particularly family; none of mine know CS) occupy any nontrivial amount of space in my day-to-day consciousness; when such space could instead be used by something useful?
No. My wife and I foster, so keeping track of hearings, therapies, medications, milestones, visitations, continuing education, etc. is quite a chore. This looks intriguing, but we are already restricted from posting to any social media, so as a family we decided to not host any data externally, if we can help it. If this were self hosted I'd be taking a much closer look.
I know how you feel, it's my first thought as well. But then I realise that I'm doing this anyway - I put appointments in my diary to call my grandparents, I have todo lists for things to do with my wife, and I record promises I've made to friends so I don't forget. Having it all in one place sounds like a nice idea.
I did, but I sort of talked myself out of it. I keep a lot of PIM-level info on people in my address book already (which is on my computer and syncs to my phone, etc), so it's not like I don't keep some of this, but I don't go to the level of tracking when I do stuff with people other than placing reminders on my calendar. I think calling it a CRM is what's weird - it's making your friend group something different, when really it's just a fancy rolodex. The trick is for them to never, ever get hacked, should you keep some unsavory stuff in there - I think it feels like a better offline thing to me, not because I like to keep a shit list on people, but because my friends are worth more to me than most of the stuff I do online.
"Is anyone else getting a dystopian vibe from the idea of "managing" friends and family?"
First thing I thought. Although, it is accurate in a sense given that there's a lot to track, filter, setup and so on. It's why the same activities are called "management" in CRM. It's just socially unacceptable to say the truth sometimes. In this case, the author should change the wording so it doesn't say CRM or "manage." Instead, some propaganda along lines of "family reminder app" so you "don't miss an opportunity" might sound nicer. Actually, the opening paragraph seems fine.
I see it more like keeping track of things. Of, course we might get into the territory you are referring to once you see that you have all this data and you start manipulating your and other's behaviour based on this data.
However, the need for recording and documentation is as old as scribbles on a cave wall and some also really do need to document things to remember.
I must agree, though, with the wording. It is unfortunate but it probably does attract those who have an itch for efficiency.
For example: if, unbeknownst to you, two of your friends were involved in some kind of criminal conspiracy and you had spoken/met with both of them near the time it was known that they had met, an enterprising prosecutor could use your record of having met with them to accuse you of having taken part.
You can encrypt data on your side and only decrypt it when your users sign in. This is the approach SimpleTax uses in Canada.
Send me an email and I'll be happy to go into more detail. (I'm on a plane which is hopefully taking off soon, so I don't have time to write more right now.)
- "No knowledge" (e.g. decrypted on the client) data storage. Very very difficult to do well.
- Make it easy for people to host data independently of you. Either by running your app on thier server (related to discussion above about for Heroku/Sandstorm, but a regular VPS is probably preferable), or using your client to read data stored in some generic format, e.g. an existing CardDav server, or even just Dropbox, with the web UI running locally, or as an extension.
The most important features for self hosting are probably maturity and stability, and signed releases via an up-to-date PPA.
For using some generic back-end you'd need to support it.
I can't think of any good, practical way to do it.
Theoretically, running the software on a server in Sealand or something like that would put the physical hardware beyond the reach of a subpoena but then, they could lock you up for contempt if you don't give your password to it.
Not really. If it's on your server and not protected by something like the DMCA, you have to turn it over if legally ordered to. Check with a lawyer though.
I get the exact same feeling mixed with some pity for people who need to be reminded to meet a friend. Moreover, hell, if you don't know the names of your brothers children, there is something wrong with you and this app won't change that.
It does feel gross, even if we all implicitly do it. Some things aren't meant to be consciously commodified, I think. It's like the thought experiment of asking a friend (or your mom) how much you owe them if they make you dinner.
You can't export for now, but this is something I have in mind. You should be able to be in total control of your data, for sure. So I'll do that. Probably in CSV.
CardDav exists for pretty much this purpose. It's how contact lists are exported from Google, LinkedIn, iOS, mail clients, etc., and has fields for arbitrary metadata.
Call me cynical, but I find the term CRM pretty wrong. Yes, I understand what it does, people have been keeping track of this stuff (if I read the intro page correctly) for ages, and still I find this borderline creepy and overengineered.
Disclaimer: I am using e.g. Facebook's "On this day" feature to reminisce about old stuff with friends, I also keep birthdays in a calendar. Maybe just the professional spin puts me off :)
I understand what you mean. I don't like it either, but I've yet to find another way of explaining quickly what it does. A CRM for friends is very explanatory. But I dislike the creepiness of it.
The problem is it explains to the wrong audience -- the overlap in the Venn diagram of "people who know what CRM means" and "people looking for a lightweight, open-source personal tracking application" feels like it'd be pretty small.
Since the app has a person's name anyway, I'd suggest abandoning acronyms entirely and making up something that sounds like a job title: e.g. "Monica, your Personal Assistant." (Which is an actual job title, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_assistant)
Just as a datapoint, my girlfriend drew a blank today when I brought it up. Also because I used to have a file for people, including her, as a test to see if I could keep track of people that I care about better; so this was right up my alley :-)
Also maybe it's a not-a-native-speaker thing, but your use of "Manage significant others" gave me a good chuckle because all I could think of at first how it can help to hide your affair from your spouse. :)
Something self hosted, but with integrations with gmail would be very useful for me (and something I would donate too). Push/pull from google calendar, push/pull emails from a contact, grouping people, sending unique emails to each member of a group. That kind of thing.
Yup - looking through the brochure website just made me think "Private-instance of Facebook" - and the reminders and notifications seem like something Apple's Siri will eventually do when they progress further on their "Proactive" functionality.
What's frustrating is that Outlook (you know... the big, old Enterprise-y PIM system) already supports a lot of the functionality present in Monica, such as keeping track of birthdays, anniversaries, personal notes, related calendar events, and so on - you can also arbitrary link different contacts together to define relationships (not the same thing as "linking contact cards" to aggregate a single contact's data).
Many things about Outlook frustrate me - in this case it's how Contacts management is now frozen in time - but it's also heartbreaking that Outlook was a genuinely innovative (and performant!) PIM system in its early days, but there hasn't been any innovation in Outlook's PIM functionality in the past 10 years (seriously - the feature-set for Contacts, Tasks and Notes is literally unchanged since Outlook 2007 - and even then the only significant change was adding contact photos). It wouldn't take much, besides some courage, to update Outlook's Contacts experience to be more up-to-date with the functionality provided by modern social-media platforms - it's just so close. But because it's now so entrenched it's very unlikely we'll see any significant change until someone pulls a Slack on Outlook (a-la Slack vs Lync) to prompt Microsoft into trying to compete - assuming we're not doomed to yet another Electron app. shudder
If anyone in the Desktop Outlook team is reading this - especially if you work on Contacts, please fix my biggest gripes with Contacts:
1. Make Outlook fast again. It shouldn't take 2-4 seconds to switch between Mail, Contacts and Calendars.
2. Don't make new recurring Calendar Events for Contact Birthdays and Anniversarys - why can't you have 'virtual' events in their own special calendar layer like all other systems do (even Windows 10 Calendar does) - so I don't get multiple event reminders for someone's birthday (from the 'real' calendar events that Desktop Outlook creates combined with the 'virtual' events from Windows 10 Calendar).
3. Give me more control over Contact Photos - show me the file-size, let me crop them. I don't like having to switch to my phone to edit contact photos.
4. I have contacts with more than 3 email addresses, more than 2 mailing addresses, and more than 1 mobile phone number - why is this limitation still a thing?
5. Retain a history of all Contact fields over time instead of requiring me to maintain "backup" contacts that contain older details.
Quick note to the founders: You need to add more genders. A lot of early adopters in the Bay Area have friends who are non-binary or are non-binary themselves. I don't want to be forced to mis-gender people who don't identify as male or female.
What you did, where you went, that thing they said they have coming up, the names of their kids, big things in their kids future, birthdays, bands they said they liked, places they said you should visit, where they live, where they have lived, institutions they've worked at, why their granddad is notable, minor celebrities they're related to, areas of science they're interested in, games they said they'd like to play.
Stuff that was part of the conversation that you might want to recall next time you're speaking to them, or that might make you contact them.
Why not? What if you have children and get invited to their birthday party? You would want to choose appropriate presents and greeting cards.
It's a tool to help you keeping track of information you don't want to keep track of in your head. My coworkers children are the perfect example for that. Something I do not really care for but something that would make a huge difference.
Definitely. My bad. The kind of stuff you don't think about when you are your only user. I'll add that, as well as the possibility to not indicate gender at all.
I think he/she should leave the gender there but add an additional field "identified as gender" or something like this. I mean it should still be possible for me to categorize people by their physical gender/sex.
For example it can be important to know whether an individual can get pregnant or not.
>For example it can be important to know whether an individual can get pregnant or not.
Out of curiosity, can you explain why you would want something like that?
You would then need a sub-item for the medical history, one can well be of the "right" gender (female) to become pregnant but be infertile nonetheless, whether from birth, due to some accident or due to the effects of another medical condition doesn't really matter.
And that would probably be the kind of information that you shouldn't be allowed to know, record and store online.
The distinction that's often used is "Sex" vs "Gender" to distinguish between the two different usages. Sex is biological Male/Female whereas Gender is the social roles a person is performing.
I find this way of asking being inclusive and in the same time simple to handle from a data/filtering standpoint.
Gender identification nowadays (vs. biological sex) can be used as a very creative and highly individual expression. And while that's is totally fine, it's not what I'd be interested in in the context of a CRM.
Thanks for making this open-source. It seems to use Homestead for deployments and Homestead apparently needs a VM. Is there a way to make this work without a VM or have a docker file maybe?
Well, I use Homestead because it's much more convenient. But you can use anything that you want, as long as you have PHP and mySQL. MAMP, for instance, XAMP, or really whatever. Have you heard of Valet (https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/valet) ?
No I'm very alien to the PHP ecosystem. Valet seems to be Mac-only. I'm a happy Windows user who has some Linux servers to play around. It would be very nice to have a step-by-step manual installation guide, then who knows, maybe you would get a pull-request with a Dockerfile! :)
This is where I need the community. I'm just a small Laravel amateur developer who doesn't know much about Docker I love simple solutions and Laravel seemed to me the easiest way to build something simple, and more importantly, easily maintainable, which is the most important for me.
That's what I meant, I would contribute a dockerfile, which people may use to run the application with one command. Would standard Laravel instructions to deploy an app[1] help me here or do you need additional steps?
Just tried setting it up, pretty simple assuming you're comfortable with Linux.
You need MySQL/MariaDB, PHP >= 5.5.9 (see composer.json, require section for version requirements - worked with 7.1.x for me), node/npm, and composer (typically installed from getcomposer.org)
Replace APP_KEY=SomeRandomString with a valid key, like this random one I found on the internet: APP_KEY=base64:i7QndWbN33zY1x013Yw2cju9KQsxpT/1nnf8/3ziZ+U=
Then run php artisan key:generate to get a new one.
(Set DB credentials in .env as well)
Finally, php artisan serve to fire up the dev server (uses php's builtin server)
Could you include in the instruction a way to set it up on a standalone apache or nginx machine without homestead, docker and all that firlefanz. I would like to just run it on my rusty cabinet server.
---
It would definitely help to follow the standard Laravel instructions.
Wow I didn't expect there would be a demand for this. Interesting. I'd need to move out some of the code as well from the app (at the moment GA and Intercom are part of the codebase, I need to remove them).
I would like a minimal CRM for super-connectors. People like investors, promoters, etc. who traffic in relationships, and develop social capital from making introductions.
When trying to make an introduction, it's exceedingly hard to search your extensive network under certain criteria. Particularly if you want "fuzzy" matching, i.e. not just restricted to a specific geography or tag (e.g. "entrepreneur"), but looking for nearby geographies and tags.
[edit: Facebook has recently disabled Graph search features and it is exceedingly difficult even to figure out which of your friends is in a particular city.]
This (monica) is so manual that I signed up and got put off. I don't feel the tool giving me a leverage. It increases my effort. I want more value for same effort that I already put in (or better, for lesser effort).
Case in point, 1) offer to import my contacts from my phone, email, FB, linkedin, etc. I'm not typing that sh*t in.
2) Pull call logs from my phone, I'm not manually entering that either. Are you crazy?
3) Birthdays from FB
4) activities from other apps. Like movie together from bookmyshow (a popular app where I live), etc
I like this idea. :) We could even collaborate if interested. For the very same purposes, plus to organize everything else I want to, I wrote and use OneModel (AGPL), creating inside it a calendar with ticklers, lists of gift ideas or other ideas for activities, etc, all sorted by when I want to see them or how I can most easily find them in a hierarchy. I have created a sort of structure for things I might to remember about each person (journal of past interactions, contact info, etc etc) that I also use for my dealings with some businesses so I can revisit who said what when, if needed. And it can auto-provide the structure in for future persons or organizations I add to my contact list, but only when wanted. Same with anything else I want to track.
And it creates a soft of personal journal for me as a side-effect, by exporting everything created (or archived) for date ranges, so my odd random notes fit in also. It lets you optionally mark things as public or private, export things as .txt outlines or an .html mini-web site, and (hopefully) soon exchange info with others if desired. Self- or my-hosted.
Unfortunately, OM also lacks a nice video and installation is still manual (some postgres config instructions then "java -jar...") until interest warrants a real installer. I use it for everything (no mobile support yet) and it is extremely efficient for a touch typist, and easy to learn as everything is on the screen in menus generated context-sensitively on the fly.
If we did collaborate, your strength would probably include UI & web work. OneModel's might include its powerful and flexible internal structure and REST api that I am finishing (on the github "wip" branch). Just some thoughts, as I don't know your's internals at all of course.... Forgive me if I'm being presumptuous.
onemodel looks good. I'd love it as a knowledge graph editor that focuses on information from a personal standpoint. Would be interesting to map the data model to RDF.
If it had RDF export would that make you a user? I need feedback (eg, users) now (along with some prettifying and installers). I invite you to join the discussion list and continue this.
Thanks for the comments.
I'd be interested in why RDF is important (ideally, on the OM discussion list :). To me, OM is better than the semantic web (on which I am not an expert), for reasons I try to explain in OM's FAQs.
While I don't know what tag teaming is, I would need to develop an API first and foremost to let you actually do that. I'm planning to create an API in the coming weeks.
This looks superb, thank you for building a great product with a non-hostile privacy policy.
Before trusting my data/time with something, I generally like to understand the motivations of the creators.
Do you intend to run this as a profit making business, or just as an open source project? Do you have thoughts/opinions on monetization? How do you intend to continue to develop it in the medium/long term?
I intend to run this as a profit making business on the long run. How, I don't know yet. I don't like the idea of restricting the number of contacts you can have. Probably a paid plan for advanced features. I'm on this application for the long run - and this is also one of the reasons I've open sourced it: if I lose interest, the community will be in charge of developing it further. The current license permits it.
Feature requests and ideas are obviously not scarce today - I too have some ideas after playing with it for a bit:
- It would be great if there would be a place to set up a new activity that includes multiple people. So entering a birthday party with 15 people is a bit more practical than it is now.
I first thought that's what the journal is about, but it doesn't seem have this feature (yet?). Like it is now, the journal seems not very useful at all to be honest.
- I'd love to set up relationships (SO, children, and more) between existing/full contacts, rather than the child and SO field setting up an "elaborate note".
- Do the notifications reach me in any way? Would be awesome to check a box if I want a reminder via email or browser notification
Even without those features I can see myself using this. Thanks!
I love all your ideas you've mentioned there. I've created an issue about it: https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/118 . About the notifications, they all come by email at the moment. I'd love to have a Telegram integration too.
Love this idea, the things that would really make it a no-brainer for me would be ability to upload multiple photos for a contact (or in a note) and a native/hybrid app. I could probably deal with the webapp on my phone but an app with push notifications would be ideal IMHO.
Great idea, but I would've much preferred a mobile app for this, which could sync my contacts automatically, log my calls to each contact and let me enter notes. The desktop app seems good but seems like a lot of work for the user.
The biggest problem I have with any productivity, life improvement tools, todo lists, etc is not the tools themselves but getting past the apathy and lethargy of not using said tools.
That is I just can't create good habits or care enough to use them even though I know I could really improve my life if I did.
I would imagine its sort of like exercising (albeit I actually do do that).
Some never do it, some do it no matter what but the mass majority get on and off the wagon. We do it for a short post New Years'-eve-like period and then just eventually stop.
I need some way to force good habits like a drug (and yes I know about James Clear who blogs about this).
Because I just know web stuff. I did some .net like 15 years ago, but now I just know PHP and HTML, basically. Moreover, I'd love to create an app too, which would require an API, which requires to be available online.
Well I'm glad this isn't .NET, or almost as bad, Electron. I think web is a fine choice, provided it's open source and self-hostable for those who care.
this is a strange question. most users of a tool like this would expect it to be available from different computers and devices, like virtually any other website they need to create an account for. and you'd certainly want this data backed up.
Thank you so much for this! It's something that's been kicking around in the back of my head for ages, but it was never a big enough priority for me to tackle. I'll definitely be checking it out!
I think this product is Fantastic. One of the main jobs I hire FB for is Birthdays, looking forward to using this:
Few tiny feature requests:
- Make the <title> of the page the person you are looking at, really helps with multiple tabs.
- Filters for Gender & more options for non-binary Gender would be great.
- Just been adding a bunch of contacts, a tiny help would be when pasting a name into first name, to split on space and put the second name in.
Hope you can find a way to add Paid features you keep this going over the long term.
Excellent idea about the <title> tab. I've created an issue about it (https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/45). For the other stuff, it was already on the pipeline. Thanks :-D
Tangent: anybody have recommendations for a "CRM" for tracking your activity when you are job hunting? What stage you are at, people you've talked to at company, what version of resume they have, etc. Typically I've just duct taped one together with folders, spreadsheet, and Evernote. Always at the back of my mind that there could be something better perhaps. Normal CRMs seem to general and complicated from my limited perusing. Someone should make this. I'd pay for it!
Nice project. Keep in mind I'm just a tire-kicker on HN, but it would be neat to have dynamic periodic reminders similar to spaced repetition learning algorithms except you rate the strength of the relationship after each session. Strong ratings mean you can see them a little less frequently; weak means you should see them (a little) more frequently.
Ideally this would let you maximize the number of maintainable acquaintances. Unfortunately (for some), it would also prevent any from getting too close. :)
Yes, I'm imagining 1-5 stars with text descriptions to help ratings be consistent, similar to how software like http://mnemosyne-proj.org/features handles ratings.
Other CRM tools I've used will allow you to create groups/categories of contacts and set the recurrence to contact people in that group. You could similarly rate the group instead of individuals. Then the user could re-evaluate based on the group (friends, colleague, family, etc)
Love this! Definitely gonna be using it from now on!
Adding a way to import contacts would be super cool, though I like the idea of slowly going through all my contacts and making sure data is current, etc (something I haven't done ever, since I first got my phone 10 years ago).
Only thing I just noticed is that when I try to add a gift idea, it conks out, with a: "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." message.
But I really like this and will be messing around with it!
About the name, well, to be honest, I just didn't think about it for long. I do realize now how it might affect some people, and I do regret this choice.
Thanks! Indeed, that's a bug, but I don't want to fix production now because so many people are using the app right now. I'll fix it tomorrow when HN won't care anymore :-D
Make me feel safe when adding very personal information about people I meet.
(Btw. I've been considering building something like this myself, I meet so many people that I want to recognize and remember what they told me about themselves. Memory fails me almost every time unless I really put the effort in. Right now I just make a note after every interaction using Simplenote, better than nothing.)
The security aspect is also very important to me. I'm trying to do my best to make it secure by following best practices, and this is also one of the reasons I've open sourced it actually, so the community can help make it better and check that I don't do nasty stuff with it.
I've been thinking about this. First step would be an API. Second step would be to either me learn Cocoa, ObjC or .NET to do this on the phones/desktops apps, etc..., or let the community do it.
Tools like React Native and Electron are pretty popular these days to build cross-platform apps and such. Since you know web stuff and I'm assuming JS, those might be a good option to explore so you could maintain them without having to learn the entire toolchain of building for various platforms
I think I'll focus my energy on creating an API first, then I'll be able to do this. I understand how important being on mobile as a native app is. I'll do it
Localization is important - I might need to change date format depending on the language you select. Currently Monica supports both French and English.
My question is, is this really free? If so, how and why? It seems like it was a ton of work to build and presumably you could monetize it somehow - is that just something you're planning to do later on? If it gets a lot of users, how will you pay the (albeit small) server costs? I'm curious.
It's free for now. I wanted first to see if there is an interest. The product is open source, so it'll be free forever anyway. I like the GitLab approach - free for everyone, but perhaps put some way to monetize this. I just have NO idea how. I honestly didn't think about it, because I wanted to have a side project that would be useful for people, and I don't know if people need this.
I think some may fear it for one of the natural monetization routes for a product like this, selling the personal info to marketers, intel-companies, credit agencies, etc.
It seems to me like the kind of thing where a 30 day free trial followed by a small monthly fee ($5? I don't know, something in that ballpark perhaps) might work - if people enjoy using it and become dependent on it during the trial, at least a portion of them will be okay with paying afterwards.
“You know all those birthdays you forget? And when you last called your grandmother? When you last had coffee with that ex-colleague? Who did you lend that book to again?”
I solve all these (first-world) problems easily with Remember The Milk [ https://www.rememberthemilk.com/ ] — an underestimated tool, IMHO, to which I am loyal.
The four examples above are one-liners in RTM:
Congratulate Alice on her birthday ^23 Nov *yearly #birthday
Call grandma ^tom *monthly
Coffee w/ Bob? ^1 Jul *monthly #colleague #coffee
Get “War and Peace” back from Charlie ^in a month
Accounts are free; “pro” gives you just a few non-essential goodies (colours, Outlook sync, reminders on your phone, etc).
I see that you have changed the tagline to "your social memory" due to feedback from users. However, the language is really unclear and grammatically incorrect - it's a sentence fragment. Some possible solutions:
* Introduce a verb "Build your social memory"
* Introduce Monica "Your social memory, now handled by your digital assistant Monica"
* Some combo of the above "Build your social memory through your digital assistant Monica"
I'd also recommend separate each question on separate line and left align them for readability. I'd iterate on this language as it's the most important content on your page since it's the first thing user's see. You might also want to pull some of the content that is below the fold to this section.
It was recently pointed out by a prominent member of the community that developers should stop naming personal assistants after women, because it's not a woman's job to help you out.
Does the same apply to this? Should the author change it to a more neutral name?
Interesting to note that a scheduling assistant I've been testing (X.ai) offers both an Amy and an Andrew assistant. I've definitely made a conscious decision to use Andrew because of potential negative reactions to using Amy.
It does make me wonder about the choice of Apple and Amazon to use female names.
This makes me so incredibly happy. I've wanted something like this for a long time but it was never important enough to make happen beyond some janky spreadsheets. I'll definitely keep using it and contributing. Nice work!
* Imports from Facebook or CardDav, one at a time is horrendous.
* Relate contact to Social Facebook/LinkedIn/Meetup?
* Add activity from LinkedIn/Facebook other social sites to contacts
* Native App
Here's a main feature I was looking for. I think I can solve it via "Notes" on a person but I'd love it has a main feature. I think it's similar to the SO and Children boxes.
It would be great to be able to add friends of a contact... so people that you've met once or twice (at your friend Steve's birthday party, for example), you don't know them enough to add as contact but you want to remember their name and where they work, etc. And it's essential that they are somehow connected to the person you know so you can look them up easily next time you go to Steve's party.
I find it interesting that people use the need for a CRM like this to make two opposing arguments:
1) If you need something like this to better communicate with friends/family, you must not genuinely care about them
2) If you use something like this to better communicate with friends/family, it shows that you actually do genuinely care about them
The former assumes if you care enough you should be able to do it on your own without assistance from a CRM/app, the latter does not make that assumption and gives you kudos for using the tools available to make you better at caring for others
Holy dependencies, Batman. I started to try and set this up, and spent five minutes letting composer, npm, and bower install things. Gave up when it errored out because Ubuntu 16.04's nodejs was too old.
Thanks for noticing, and, indeed. I broke this last week - sorry about the inconvenience. Can't fix it today anyway, way too many people trying out the site, I don't want to touch production right now :-D
Just reporting - I understand how things go when you're one person. Interesting idea, but I would benefit so much from auto import. I don't think I've missed it..
This seems like something I may use. I have terrible memory, so I never remember birthdays, anniversaries or even my own doc appointments.
Tangentially related: I wonder what the fallout is for the average person who may get discovered using this. I could see someone catching flack for having software send them reminders of things that "should be important enough to remember". Then again, what's wrong with using technology to help me enrich my relationship with others?
That's something I've struggled with while building the v1. I wondered if it was moral to use technology to help me have better relationships. I'm the kind of guy who hates Facebook and all the bad things the technology has brought into our lives. And yet, ironically, I do something like this. But the motivation behind is genuinely pure: I really want to be better at remembering things about the ones that I love.
An app might be asking a lot, but a responsive design to allow mobile usage would be a big help. Or at least something that could hook into IFTTT or something so I can easily add info on the go via email, twitter, or something.
For example, let's say I'm at a party and meet some people I want to log. Mobile input is really key there because I may have been drinking and won't remember that info in the next 15 minutes.
You spoke about how to monetize Monica. Based on the number of comments requesting a mobile app, perhaps that's the launch point. I would use Monica's browser interface for bulk data entry, but I would use Monica on a mobile for push reminders since that's how I get my reminders/appointments now via Google Calendar. So, keep the browser interface free, but charge for the mobile app.
I would expect charging for storage. Let the user try whatever he wants for free -- both the mobile app and the website, but after some point, say one month of average usage, one faces a limited storage problem, solvable with an account upgrade.
I saw this the other day and it looks like something I need! But I have been periodically checking it since to see if a crucial (for me) feature is added. Which is: Do you have plans to add the ability to put "real" people as SOs or children? I recently found your roadmap on Github and didn't see it there.
In any case this is super cool, thanks for building it and sharing it :)
This is amazing! I've been looking for a CRM that is "people management without a sales focus" for a while. Mostly I want a tool to keep track of people I meet at events and the skills they have as well as problems they are facing. Then later on I can connect people who are able to solve each others problems.
Looks like this fits the bill, and being open source is great. Thanks for creating this.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned friends https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends a command line tool that does a lot of what Monica aims to do. A Ruby gem that will be "friendly" only to laptop users, but with a wide community and continued development.
Cool product. I've used calendars in the past to maintain this kind of thing but a product has many more features than a calendar so I'm into it.
A mobile app would definitely be nice for this kind of product at some point. Push notifications for reminders / an easy entry system, integration with contacts, calendar, etc.
Either way. Thanks for this cool product, and OSS-ing it.
Thanks. Definitely. I also love the idea of OSS-ing a product. At least people will be able to contribute, or read the code and see that I have no plans in doing nasty stuff with their data at all.
Great idea. Good luck. I did notice a few grammatical and spelling errors on the homepage. Easily corrected. And, the content reads like a non-English speaker wrote it. Also easily remedied. The initial page needs to reflect the creativity of the idea and the professional nature of the developers. I could help, as could many others...
Indeed :-D Non native speaker here, hence the errors probably. Good thing: it's all open source, and all on GitHub, so... :-D https://github.com/monicahq
Need to get that privacy policy link working. Love the idea of the project and it's definitely something I struggle with (especially when I get wrapped up in thinking about project problems) but when you have a "Try" link to enter a lot of personal information your Privacy Policy link needs to be explicitly clear.
I understand. The fix is ready, but I don't want to push it to production as I have a lot of users logged in right now thanks to HN. I'll do it as soon as the traffic drops.
This could also be named "Gary", like Gary Walsh (character) from the TV series Veep. Though it also has to carry tampons and tissues ;)
Not that Monica's not a good name, obvious throwback to a certain character on TV from the late 90's. (or maybe I'm watching too much TV and experiencing hammer-nail syndrome...)
This is fantastic (and I'm not just saying that because it's based out of Montreal).
I don't realistically see myself ever using an instance of this that isn't self-hosted on a server I physically own, but there is obviously quite a bit of fair-will expressed in the no-non-sense Privacy Policy which I greatly respect.
FWIW, right now I just use a combination of Evernote and a Trello board to keep track of personal tasks and projects; I could see a "PRM" tool like this supplanting or complementing those other tools.
I hope you keep building. Feel free to reach out if you want some user feedback in a few weeks.
I will definitely keep building, especially since I see how much interest there is for a tool like this. Feel free to signup to the newsletter (that I actually never sent), I'll post updates on it regularly.
Isnt this what facebook does? Except facebook is actually way more fun to use. Sure - they take all my information and sell it to the highest bidder. But I get cool "personalized videos" in return, for example. And all my friends are already on there - so they can do most of the CRM data input for me.
This is exactly what I don't want this product to become: Facebook. Facebook is social. Monica is NOT social. It's only for you. It's like your personal diary, except online. It's made to store things that shouldn't be seen by anyone. It's to manage YOUR personal relationships. It has nothing to do with a social community.
At first glance this looks awesome. I'll set it up tomorrow on my personal server.
I saw in the github repo you've asked people not to try and make money using the code. If you really intend to build a sustainable business off this, I suggest you change the license to something stricter than MIT.
I like the idea, it's supped buggy tho.
I've been trying this for less then 30 minutes and I already landed to different error page.
Right in this moment I'm stuck into the "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." page while trying to access /dashboard
You store your data on their server. It has logins and passwords to control whether someone talking to their server over the internet should have access to your data. So yeah, massively insecure.
Great work! I had a similar idea and built https://socialite.ooo. It's been a bit neglected as I was finishing up grad school. It has a heavy focus on events and locations to tie everything together.
Really great idea. So, the first thing I did was add my wife, because that just seemed like the right place to start. But then I got into this situation where I was adding myself as the significant other. Is this intended? Is there any concept of "me"?
I half-assume, without looking at the application beyond the front page (I'm still going to), that you're kind of expected to know what your wife has been up to. It might not be a common use-case to select "Me" in the significant other field.
Looks great and useful! One small UX issue I've just hit - I missed the "edit" button in the "Personal Information" box when viewing a contact for a few moments. Kept trying to click the "Birthdate is not set" etc text.
I really like this and we actually thinking about trying a CRM earlier today. Hopefully, I can find sometime to contribute. The ability to import contacts would be super useful. I might be able to get to it this weekend who knows...
Yeah I'll fix the link as soon as I can push to prod without interrupting the traffic thanks to being 2nd on HN today.
None of this. You don't pay for a user, and I don't sell data to anyone. I'll introduce paying features later this year, but I have no idea which ones, and it WONT be about limiting the number of contacts.
Also, I'm like all people on HN, I hate the notion of selling data WITH A PASSION.
Love it. This seems to be the answer to a question that Facebook forgot completely. To help you improve your social life with the people you really care about. Not just distract you with irrelevant information. Keep it up!
Looks interesting. Definitely something that could be useful. Issue I have is getting my data in to the system. Would be good to be able to pull contacts from a CSV / Google account / Facebook account.
It would be great if you could add city as a form field and allow searching by city. I'd love to pay for this/contribute as well. I was just about to build something similar (but less pretty)
Is there a way to mark someone as being related to me (e.g. Significant Other == me)? Also, related, could Significant Others be set as "People" as well?
Thanks for this, I see myself using it quite a lot.
Oh! Well... good point. There is no such things at the moment. What you want seems to be relationships between you and the contact, or between contacts?
It would be nice to have an option to set relationship (wife, son, daughter, friends etc) so in the future maybe I can even watch my genealogical tree or just select to see my family or friends
Interesting. Would it make sense to integrate this to various social media, so that you could see your contacts profiles or recent activity, or maybe even integrate messaging?
Yeah, one of my idea would be to have a Chrome extension where you would see the private notes about the contact you are currently seeing on Facebook, for instance.
It looks like you're using monotonically increasing numbers for people, I couldn't exploit it straight away, looks like users have added around 900 people so far.
Thank you for building this. I have been wanting to build something like this for myself for some time. I'll check it out and see what I like for sure!
Yep. So sorry about that, but a fix is ready to be shipped for that, but I don't want to interrupt the prod right now, way too much traffic from HN :-D
Thanks. Well, I built this website because I didn't have a spouse at that time, and I suffered socially from this, not being able to remember important things about my friends (call it selective memory or what not). My partner used to be the one who always reminded me these kind of things. It's an hommage to her.
Wiki = most web apps = interface to a database. So in a sense, it's all the same, just another way to look at it. So,no, it's not really different. Except perhaps that a wiki doesn't send you emails for reminders?
If you do find yourself in a position where you do need to do specific things related to Rpi in order to make this work, feel free to submit a pull request with instructions, so others can also install it as well. https://github.com/monicahq/monica
Of course. In order to open source the product, I had to separate the marketing app from the code of the main app, and I forgot to update the link. Doh. Thanks for noticing, here is the link: https://monicahq.com/privacy.html
Sorry to be that guy, but isn't there a huge legal issue? In France, the CNIL requires a declaration of any file, especially if you keep information about people in it, whether it's a spreadsheet or in good old punch cards. Such files can only be maintained for specific purpose; notably keeping tabs on what people want or their secrets can be used for bribes and leverage. An Excel file on your computer won't get you arrested because of leniency, but if we start issuing such software, the defense is less solid than for Torrent software.
> If you prefer to, you can simply clone the repository and set it up yourself on any hosting provider, for free. I'm just asking that you don't try to make money out of it yourself.
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