A Twitter CRM - would you use it or is my idea a dead fish? 💀🐟
I started building a Twitter CRM as a side project because I wanted to take my Twitter DM/relationship game more seriously.
It can be hard to remember who is building what, links they shared, what we talked about etc. so I made a place to hold it all (www.hallo.so)
I currently have 10 alpha users in the system, and another 26 on a wait list even though I haven't even announced it yet so there is some smoke but I'm trying to figure out if this is a bad idea/market to get into.
Google searches turn up twitter integrations but I'm not seeing any competitive products which worries me.
Does this idea stink or what?
What is the customer persona that you're targeting?
I'm thinking it won't be social media managers as they already have Hootsuite. They maintain social accounts to mass engage users and aren't trying to maintain a relationship with specific users.
It might be salespeople but they already have a CRM. There might already be add-ons that provide Hubspot-Twitter or Salesforce-Twitter 2-way syncs.
So is there a persona that lives entirely on twitter? 🤔 Maybe a social-selling salesperson?
The original persona was/is community builders /twitter power users - they use DM's a ton, have lots of followers that they communicate with, they sell courses/newsletters/apps/etc. and they are frustrated by the lack of organization options/ability to search/keep notes about conversations. They probably purchase twitter tools like hypefury, ilo, brandbird, and spend most of their time on twitter audience building. Basically a subset of social selling, a small segment but seemingly growing exponentially as the power of twitter is starting to be seen as a replacement for Linkedin by many.
It may ultimately be too small of a market, so I'm starting to think about expanding this, maybe in the recruiting space or something like that.
Technical recruiting could be an interesting space to get into. You can't message people on github but many github profiles/projects would have links to the maintainer's social account
This looks great, but a bit unfocused. I would go all in on the CRM part (like Flock) and drop the analytics. Make it easy to find people in your Twitter network, smartly tag them by location or job title.
Thanks these are great points. Right now i think the power of the built-in search is a big selling point - can search user descriptions/locations/urls, also working on adding search to the direct messages, but I'm not highlighting it strongly. I'll work on pushing up the CRM components and see where it gets me.
Hey Jarrett,
I feel like I can speak to this because I currently own/run a personal crm myself! For context I created mogulnetworking.com (privacy focused personal crm). I've been working on it and been in the personal space for almost 5 years.
I've actually had a few people ask me if I planned on making a Twitter integration for Mogul (I won't be doing so for a few reasons) so I think there could be something here, but I will warn you that the Personal CRM space is pretty hard. Most players in the space either die (bc the market is so small and niche) or pivot to sales (because that's where the real money is).
The Personal CRM space is pretty tough, so the Twitter Personal CRM space might be even more tough due to the limitation that you need to be actively on Twitter to find value from it.
I don't say this to discourage you because you are making a competitor to my product, but to give you some real insight into the market.
I think there is probably a $10K MRR business here at best, but if you want to build a real company the market is just too small. This is the conclusion I've come to and why I decided not to pursue Mogul as anything more than a side project. If you are cool with doing the same, I say go for it!
Feel free to hit me up if you want to chat about the space, and I'll be sending people your way if they need a Twitter specific CRM :)
Thanks for the thoughtful response Chris - checked out Mogul and it looks really well made! I think this is a terrific execution for a personal CRM, awesome job.
You make good points about the market, and I agree while I think there is a need there the market size may ultimately be too small.
I may play around with a few other use cases that I've received from some early adopters but this may just be a project that isn't going to go too far.