I built IceburgCRM (available in Django or Laravel). You can create a specialized crm with only a few words. For example: "create a stamp collecting crm". Modules, Fields, Relationships, Subpanels, default data and even a image for your homepage is created.
Data can be imported/exported into 6 different formats. Supports unlimited many to many relationships, 26 different themes, etc.
If you're modeling one workflow for one team at one organization, it's always been trivial. Same as making an issue tracker.
The complexity arrives when you need to support complex and branching workflows, teams that model things subtly differently, organizations that model things radically differently, strongly opinionated stakeholders at key teams/clients, endless demands to integrate with external systems, etc
Right - for most companies, they are one org. The complexity of "product CRMs" as opposed to "roll your own CRM" seems to come from trying to satisfy mulitple orgs. A CRM that can satisfy two orgs seems about 10x more complex than a CRM that can satisfy one.
LLMs might tip the calculation of buy v build enough that "roll your own" becomes the standard for most business apps.
Major mistake, unless your company is building and selling CRM software. Focus engineering resources on core competencies and buy everything else off the shelf.
Sure, but I mean something that can actually fit in with the rest of the systems running a decent sized org. On the surface a CRM seems trivial to make, a pretty simple db schema with a pretty simple UI. But, I haven't done it.
Excel and Access are (/were) relatively interoperable with other things, which is why they were historically popular for these tasks.
But the more you want to integrate with, the more complicated it becomes. The big advantage to off the shelf CRMs is that they often have many integration options readily available.
What i wonder about with roll your own, is the more you roll your own, the more you can build a single system around a single db with a coherent schema for the entire/most of the business.
DIY an ERP? It's possible... but it would take a very special kind of organization to pull that off successfully. It would need to be an organization with a particularly high ratio of engineering talent to business complexity.
It typically takes over a year and more than 1 million dollars just to implement a commercial ERP system for a large organization. Starting from scratch would be quite the endeavor.
ERP + everything else that would would call "business application software". Like, you wouldn't recreate twilio, or stripe, or build you own database or data warehouse or anything.
Seems like it could be done if it were done from the start.
Seems like a lot of the issues are understanding a good db schema. Screw that up and you are in all kinds of trouble.
I built IceburgCRM (available in Django or Laravel). You can create a specialized crm with only a few words. For example: "create a stamp collecting crm". Modules, Fields, Relationships, Subpanels, default data and even a image for your homepage is created.
Data can be imported/exported into 6 different formats. Supports unlimited many to many relationships, 26 different themes, etc.
This is what the default crm looks like: https://demo.iceburg.ca/
Here are some samples I generated:
Gourmet Coffee Enthusiasts CRM
https://coffee.iceburg.ca
Bee Keeping CRM https://beekeeping.iceburg.ca
You can also manage an existing database as a CRM.
Here is a default wordpress database crm.
https://wordpress.iceburg.ca
Live wordpress site: https://wordpresssite.iceburg.ca/
Open Source. Check it out. https://github.com/iceburgcrm