[nh2]

A combination of customer support chat (Intercom), customer relationship management / sales (Streak, NetHunt), and customer payments tracking.

So basically, the stack that is needed to handle B2B customers as a startup.

Currently these tools are very isolated, and where integrations exist, they are poor. We have to manage customers in 3 different systems that don't know about each other. When making sales progress on Intercom, it doesn't reflect as conversations in NetHunt.

Open-source would be excellent because Intercom is currently problematic with GDPR and high-security systems that don't like to embed third-party Javascript. The ability to self-host solves that. Most people will still use the hosted service you can offer if reasonably priced.

I hope that https://www.chatwoot.com will do this, but they are currently focused on only the Intercom part.

The services also don't necessarily have to be fully vertically integrated in 1 product as long as they interact well. For example, and add-on to Chatwoot that does the equivalent of Streak/Nethunt, something with good API integration, might also do the trick.

[boleary-gl]

I agree - it’s shocking to me how immature any open source CRM out there is. Chatwoot is fantastic but only solves half of the equation. Chatwoot + a lightweight CRM would be a killer product for small B2B startups.

[ayewo]

No affiliation, but have you looked at https://papercups.io/ ? They are also OSS: https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

[nh2]

I hadn't heard of Papercups until now. It looks quite relevant.

But it seems it's now in maintanence mode (I checked out their blog and posted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30313260

[ayewo]

I wasn't aware of this, so thanks for the heads up.