In an effort to enhance accountability/transparency, we’re trying out public investor updates.
Progress
- Twenty now has more than 5,000 Github stars and over 100 contributors. In less than 6 months, we’ve become the #1 Open Source CRM for businesses by that (vanity) metric. I’m convinced this will be a multi-B$ category so we’ll make sure to keep that spot.
- We’re almost done rewriting the backend. Charles told me this was the most complex engineering task he ever had to lead. We’ll continue to invest a lot on foundations in the next 3 months. This remains mostly invisible for now but should become a major competitive advantage moving forward. Next year this will allow us to build features for our users that aren’t possible with any existing CRM (hello remote objects 👋).
- We’ve made some great hires. Being open source makes us one of the most attractive employers for software engineers in Paris.
Challenges
CRM is an established category with a huge product surface. Being late to the game allows us to move faster than anyone, but we are still very far from feature parity with established players.
While I’m convinced that it’s a very bad idea for most startups to solve a class of problems instead of a very specific problem, I’m also convinced we should stick to our vision of building a great generalist open-source CRM first, before we start tackling specific verticals.
So don’t expect a revenue hockey stick short-term. But expect us to work hard, spend money wisely, and dedicate the next 10+ years of our lives to build a product that will be better than anything on the market, with a strong community behind it.
How you can help
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Thomas is working on a website rebranding and would like to embed tweets. Feel free to do one, linking our repo or X account.
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We’re going to hire a Product Designer to support Thomas. Let us know if you have anyone to recommend!
Other
- The format of these updates will evolve to reflect our current focus. Expect mostly product updates for the next few months, and a stronger focus on business KPIs and Sales later on.
- As some of you know, I became a dad of boy-girl twins in August. They were born very prematurely and spent the first 2 months of their life in the hospital. Although the beginnings were tough – born at 2.5 pounds, under respiratory support, and going through heart surgery - I’m glad that they are now back home and living a completely normal life!