On May 15th, 2011 was the day I first wrote down in Evernote (where I collect all my product ideas) an idea for a Proactive CRM
The failure in CRMs is that YOU have to actively decide to put a contact into the system. Lame.
Google Apps hook-in
It monitors your email, then when you reply to an email from someone, or send someone an email, it then knows that it’s someone who should be added to the CRM.
It then will see if it knows of this contact.If it doesn’t, it’ll send you an email, saying “how do you know this person?”
you reply to that email, with a few different things about them.
that response is then ‘turked into machine readable data.
then it will be added into it’s own CRM system, and can optionally get added to highrise/salesforce/whatever
But of course the inception of the idea is nothing but a sentimental datapoint. In fact, the product idea that I had is very different than the product we have thousands of users engaging with every day.
What has really mattered is the ability to successfully verify market demand, execute on the product vision, ruthlessly iterate, and rally a conglomerate of co-founders, employees, investors, advisors, supporters, and thousands of passionate users around our product and mission.
