Hello again.
I just watched the excellent Coda’s CRM, terrific work once again guys - kudos to the presenters @maria and @John_Scrugham. John I’ve watched your other YouTube videos on OKR’s, Recruiting, and the others with particular interest since my focus in Coda is team management, in particular a smaller software start-up. Really thought it was eye-opening to see a more sophisticated implementation of a very important use case in Coda. Most of the templates here in the library, while useful, are much more simplistic.
At one point John you talked about how some of the more robust tools in the market will integrate CRM with Marketing Automation. Marketing Automation is not something I have thought about yet much in Coda. But unquestionably it can be done, and with a good deal of complexity.
Since I discovered Coda last March, I have thought that it is the one tool that can actually do what all these can do. In fact after a month, I posted in April about some of my efforts to to this:
This is quick a list I copied out of another post I made of re: tools we can replace with Coda: And it’s incomplete, but you get the idea…
- Task Management (Wrike, Asana, Clickup, etc.)
- Repo mgmt (Github, GitLab, Bitbucket)
- CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.)
- Dev Mgmt (Jira, TargetProcess, PivotalTracker, Rally, etc.)
- Wiki (Confluence, Quip…)
- Product Planning (Aha!, ProductBoard, ProdPad, etc.)
- Support (Intercom, ZenDesk, etc.)
- Outsourcing Mgmt (Hubstaff)
- Diagraming (LucidChart, Miro, etc.)
- Chat (Slack, Twist, Discord, etc.) - with structured use of comments and assignees, I think this can be done, too
My motivation for pushing this subject here is to provide more argument to the Product Team to consider this use of Coda and possibly prioritize around that. I know there is a mission deep within the Coda vision to let a Maker create an app of all sorts. But intended or not, Coda is really the only thing out there that
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includes enough functionality - things like rows behaving like “cards,” automation, lookups, @mentions, comments, notifications, Sections & Folders, and others, and
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includes enough flexibility, with the ability to customize subtable columns, create layouts showing only desired columns, and so on and so on
to the point that most of what I get stuck on in these other tools, I feel like I can accomplish in Coda. So I have the huge win of managing my whole team in one app! Cannot understate how much I’d like to do that.
There is a new app called Fibery that is attempting to offer teams the ability to adapt to their needs. I have experimented with it a lot the last few months. In fact these experimentations have helped me figure out my ultimate approach to Coda, which I could not nail for about 9 months prior! I like Fibery’s philosophy, but it falls down pretty quickly compared to Coda. True, I could set up some basic stuff more easily, but the real “meat and potatoes” missing in the apps in that list above can’t be done in Fibery. And once again this highlights the strengths of Coda as an ultimate solution.
So my point is that if you are a small enough team, not already having say 50 + of your team invested in the Salesforces’s or Hubspot’s or Jira’s, what benefit would you have not getting started in Coda? Otherwise you’ll look at, I don’t know, 10+ varied apps, to do what you can do in Coda, with the benefit of then linking all your data, which is a huge help. Maybe with the caveat of needing a developer to help. But you wind up seeing your customers in the context of projects you run for them. Plan your releases across not just development, but related marketing, content, even rote tasks like for the managers to “set up the HootSuite account so we can post to it.” And on and on…I could see in a year or so this market segment dominated by Coda. Why wouldn’t an entire “batch” of Y-cominbinator newly-funded teams turn to anything but Coda?
The proliferation of apps is growing, and is a big problem for team management these days.
Good companies solve problems. So here we have a great role for Coda, a great problem that it can solve. A problem that is growing, and the need to solve I think is pretty desperate.
And @Bill_French, can I hire you to build my Marketing Automation app?
Sorry for the length of this but I feel strongly about this, and you guys do encourage use of the community for posts like this, I think…
Talk to everybody shortly!