skevvis

Hey there - I'm Zvi, CEO of Contactually. Honestly, if cost is a major factor for you, you can build a spreadsheet tool that can work really well. However, it takes the same discipline that Contactually or any other tool would require - just a bit more time.

If you really love self-hosted, SugarCRM is the main open source CRM out there.

@Graham fair point (BTW I'm the CEO of Contactually). We've made it as simple as possible for now (and our users regularly say that), but we are constantly working to streamline the UI. Any feedback, I'm very easy to reach.

Contactually - Washington DC/Remote Hiring: Frontend Developer, Rails Engineer, UI/UX

https://www.contactually.com/about-us/careers/

Contactually is a relationship marketing platform. We build and host a SaaS CRM that helps professionals stay engaged with the relationships that are important to them. We're revenue generating, venture backed.

We're tackling some hard challenges on both frontend and backend. On the backend, we're dealing with massive amounts of data user and integrations, and making our API-centric infrastructure as performant as possible. On the frontend, building an engaging user interface that people love to use.

Rails/Backbone/Postgres/MongoDB/ElasticSearch/Redis etc...

Great culture, passionate users, dog friendly office.

Interested? Email the CEO (Rails dev) - zvi@contactually.com

@quanticle - There's a balance to be had there. Yes, being continually emailed by a service you had no interest in is a terrible idea. But we've found that people drop off for other reasons - technical issues, walked away and forgot, or had unanswered questions. An easily-ignorable one-time e-mail is harmless

Thanks! Yes, a lot of these are "duh" moments - we just wanted to note how big of a difference it makes.

Definitely - when it comes to social communication, there's Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. And that's bleeding across into professional communications as well, with companies regularly monitoring social networks and engaging with customers on there. But e-mail still remains, for professional communication, the dominant platform.

@blueplastic - we do regular security audits and will soon engage with a firm to provide that guarantee as well. In the interim, what would you like to see to alleviate that?

Completely agree with you that email will either die or get better. The timeline is the question. We haven't seen any strong competitors to the current incarnation of "e-mail" come and really threaten the core architecture. E-mail is too open, too standardized, too widely implemented to be quickly overtaken by any other solution.

With Contactually, we started with that theory - e-mail is still, and will be for the foreseeable future, the primary mode of communication. We're not focusing on making the user send and receive more emails - but we push the realization that e-mail is already where you're doing most of your communication. Why shouldn't you have a tool that leverages that?

@sankalpk - I've seen that before, and it's a great post-mortem. I can see why it's hard for a collaboration company that's not solving a strong pain point. We look at the relationships that are live and die via e-mail, and are building a solution for that.

Yes, but they fix them as soon as it's brought to their attention. Thanks!

Hah, we might have over-reached by saying spam. We've used it really to help identify people who might be interested, and reached out to them to learn.

Thanks!

This is awesome! Thanks so much for sending this out!

@deafcheese - Definitely. We're going to have a lot of stuff going on over the summer that's open to any startup intern.

Follow @dctechsummer on twitter to keep updated on what happens.

Super simple, and really useful. I can imagine a few different use cases for this!

good call, I'll add in a TOS. In general, it's "we're not touching your data"

And you receive back a CSV of names/emails

We didn't know they were DC based until post launch. They've submitted their information and we'll be adding them soon.

working on it!

Pillsbury is a good start, they are awesome. Email us at the main contact address (ambassadors@proudlymadeindc.com) and we'll refer you to some poeple

we'll have you back :-)

Hey man - if you're interested, drop us a note at ambassadors@proudlymadeindc.com and we'll get you connected!

Hey man - drop us an email, we've got a place for you!

ambassadors AT proudlymadeindc.com

Hey Kevin! Definitely reach out to us... ambassadors AT proudlymadeindc.com

Definitely do this. Rusty had put together an awesome group.

I've presented at TechCocktail before. It's a great experience. Here are a few tips:

1) It's in a bar environment, so you have to stand out. I had a big retractable banner (8 ft high) which stood out, so when you walked into the room people saw it 2) 20" monitor hooked up to a computer playing a slideshow is also great 3) They have to walk away with something. Stickers? Something fun? 4) Talk to anyone and everyone who walks up, regardless of their background + interest. It may not be for them, but they may know someone who is.

cant wait!

mdolon - I completely understand where you are coming from - having been in that situation myself many times. Being a developer, I am planning to have this completely open - download your data at any time, either via REST APIs or a full export.

rguzman - I appreciate your response! Send me a message at dominate@struc.to and I'll happily refer you to my partner who did the design!

Thank you, I appreciate it!

This is a cloud service, so a developer would have to be comfortable relying on external services, including data storage. As this is becoming a trend among developers, there is more comfort with having your infrastructure external.

Thanks, I appreciate that feedback!