Ed: This is a great idea, just one less thing for a small development team to worry about

Ed: Made me laugh, will probably sell a million, also to those who haven’t experienced the pain of building hardware possibly have no appreciation for how hard this would have been to build.

Ed: This is a higher touch sales process than a lot of e-commerce sites might want but you have to think this is going to massively increase conversion rates.

Ed: This looks very interesting but the pitch was a little different to the website when I visited it. I couldn’t quite work out if the app was meant for an employer to use or a jobseeker.

I got the impression from the pitch that this would find me jobs based on an AI powered backend which in theory sounds great but when you register it just seems to be a sophisticated landing site.

After going through the signup process (which was powered by another startup called typeform.com) it now occurs to me that I was just part of someones user validation test.

Hypothesis was can you get someone to signup to your form on the pretext of signing into an application. And doing so on the cheap without building a product just to see if anyone would signup.

New Y Combinator company by the look of it.

Not sure how I feel now, a little used and cheap….

Ed: I implemented my first CRM about 15 years ago, at the time ACT was a very popular single contact manager (that’s what we called it before CRM was a thing).

As the business grew we needed to network the CRM so moved to a Goldmine network license.

There is probably a good case study about what happened to Goldmine, how they didn’t become Salesforce, Goldmine owned the CRM market 15 years ago, looking at their website my guess is that they have stayed with the old school office server based software licensing model and are being swamped by rabid cloud based competitors, but at least they are still in business 15 years later which is an unusual feat.

We outgrew Goldmine after a few years and we implemented the open source VTiger which we modified to integrated with our support and billing system.

Since then I have worked with numerous CRM systems, Batchbook, Salesforce, Streak, Highrise and looked at a dozen others and frankly I don’t love any of them. Highrise was my favourite but I think it is too expensive.

The reason I tell you all this is to illustrate that the CRM market has been around for a long time and is pretty crowded.

Typically as markets mature, the Gorilla owns all the profits and everyone else is left to fight over the scraps, the profit disappears, competed away.

Most CRM’s have terrible interfaces and workflows, they mostly look like someone has taken an old greenscreen terminal app and put a stylesheet on it, the market Gorilla Salesforce is a case in point very user unfriendly.

Few CRMs capture customer email communications well, it’s usually up to the sales person or customer service person to enter relevant email details/actions which many never do, so there is a large portion of your customer communication which is never captured, something which sends shivers down the spines of business owners.

So despite entering a crowded market late STACK CRM gets a thumbs up on two key points, it is a nice looking app with a new workflow which is very Agile/Lean in its approach and makes a lot of sense to see and manage your prospects visually vs the traditional method of funnel management where you change the stage on the record and then somehow find a report buried to get a funnel report. Makes a lot of sense to me.The other thing that Stack promises but I was unable to test is that they intercept all your inbound and outbound customer email and record this for each customer.

Ed: Back when I was a young naive newbie entrepreneur who had no clue about Trademarks and IP I was trying to launch a company that happened to sell Google Enterprise products.

So I purchased a bunch of domain names that had Google in them. ie GoogleMini.com.au.

Funnily enough Google didn’t make a fuss about it locally, but I suspect they would have if their US attorneys ever found out, in the end I decided to give them away to Google as I figured it was more effort than it was worth.

If AppleSocial get even a small amount of traction the Apple lizards will be on them in a flash tearing them limb from limb.

Building a social network (which is so 2000s) based on the value proposition of being full of Apple Fan boys is a bad idea.

Guys if you have put any effort into this might be time to see if you can do a pivot to something useful.

I am fairly certain no one cares about a social network for Apple people, if it was a really good idea Apple would do it, they are sitting on $100 billion in cash , they could buy a country if they wanted.

The biggest problem aside from nobody caring is that you would have to develop software that was better than anything Apple would be likely to launch and almost no one has the resources for that and your app while it looks decent really appears to be one of the WordPress social apps like Buddypress.

Maybe time for a rethink.