Wow. I’m a little in shock that this day has finally arrived. It feels like months and months and months in the making. (Probably because it has been). And I couldn’t be happier with the result. What I want to share with you today is the result of untold nights and weekends. Long days and quite literally thousands of hours of time. I’ve talked about it before, but time is our most valuable asset. We can’t buy, beg, borrow, or steal more of it. As a result there’s nothing that costs more than time. With that thought in mind, what I am about to share with you is a gift. A gift of my time. It will cost you nothing. I give it to you completely for free. But wait, before you think that’s the end of the story. Let me stop you and share with you something I believe is even greater than a free CRM. This gift I’m giving you, the one comprised of my countless hours of time I will never get back - this gift is more than just free. It’s open.
This is now completely and totally available for you, for me, for everyone to continue to improve upon. This creation now lives freely available and completely open in front of you and the rest of the world. No one has seen anything quite like it before. Every line of code is available for you to review and improve upon.
As with any software this project starts its life as a beta. Now I believe you will be hard-pressed to find other beta software with the feature richness and depth that you’ll find in this one, but I am sure you will find bugs. Please remember, this is beta software.
I would be remiss if I didn’t specifically mention one very important individual who has joined me for this ridiculously challenging journey. From the beginning there has been one person that deserves special recognition for his willingness to tackle any problem, to identify the best solutions, and to build anything he was asked to build. I’d like to thank Don Gilbert for his tremendous contribution and his dedication to this project, without him I would not be announcing what I'm announcing today. Thank you Don.
I am sure by now everyone knows what I am about to share with you. I’m sure you’ve read the previous posts, heard me speak, or gotten some other insider scoop into what I want to share with you today, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less exciting or any less monumental of a moment. Today, I am pleased to announce that Saelos, Open Source CRM, is officially available for download.
The Saelos repository links will be shared at the end and the website will also be immediately available as of today to give you the download.
But let me first tell you a little bit about this amazing software which I’m sure you’re dying to know more about.
An Open CRM
Saelos is customer relationship management re-imagined. It almost pains me to call it a CRM. It’s more a beautiful blend of sales enablement, customer relations, and incredible intelligent relationship management. I knew when I started thinking about this system I wanted to solve a problem. A problem I faced. It seemed every time I wanted to find out something about someone I was stuck logging in, clicking through what felt like a million links, staring at a hideously ugly screen, and ultimately being presented with some table layout of information that was disjointed, outdated, and difficult to search through.
What I wanted was a way to see the people that mattered to me, to easily see (and update) their information, to be told what things they were related to, and to be able to instantly connect with them. All I wanted was intuitive, beautiful, fast, access to the people I cared about. I believed I should be able to have this. I believed the relationships in my life mattered and I shouldn’t have to waste my time trying to maintain them.
This meant designing modern software capable of solving this problem. This meant rethinking everything I knew about existing systems, taking the pieces, and creating something new. The trick always lies in attempting to create something new and yet familiar. I believed whatever I built had to feel comfortable. I wanted you to sit down, log in and feel at home. You just know where things are, you know how they should work...and they do, beautifully.
So, what can you do with Saelos? I’m glad you asked, let me show you a few features I think you’re really going to like.
Contacts
The first and most obvious area in Saelos are the contacts, you’ll notice I’m using terms you’re probably familiar with, and immediately you know what I’m talking about. The contacts gives you a blazingly fast list of your contacts, and wow, is it ever beautiful. You’ll probably want to know how it’s so fast and what the software is behind this platform. I’ll tell you more about that in a bit, but first, let’s just look around the contacts to see what all we can do.
Overview
In the middle of the screen you’ll find all the details about the person you’re looking at. You see their address, and other important information right at the top, and then convenient groupings of other fields below. These fields are customizable and easy to create in the config section.
History
Sometimes my memory fails me for a second and I need a reminder about what’s happened with someone in the past. It’s embarrassing to ask and it’s time-consuming to hunt through old messages to try and figure it out. In Saelos you simply click the arrow at the top of the right panel and you’ll instantly see everything that’s happened with this person. Every field update, every interaction, every status change, everything.
Activity & Conversations
I mentioned interactions a second ago, and you’ll probably notice I slipped right over the top row of icons. Let’s look at those real quick. Sometimes you want to give someone a quick call, it’s as easy as clicking a button - one button. And you’re connected via your phone. But that’s not all, with a simple config setting every call can be recorded and attached. And it‘s not just phone calls, you can send text messages (and receive them) as well as send email. And you can do all of these tasks without ever leaving the page.
If we look underneath the person you’ll find a record of each conversation (phone call, email, text) instantly and easy to review, Saelos CRM makes your conversation tracking effortless.
I love how everything is logically laid out and easy to find. Everything working together at the speed of my thought. This is revolutionary.
Companies
Beyond just contacts, it’s important to keep track of the accounts and companies where your relationships work (and worked in the past). Keeping track of all this information as well as any opportunities, tasks, and notes associated with each account can be overwhelming at times, but Saelos helps you manage them all by placing them directly on the page along with the company information. You’ll never have to go far to see these details. Which brings me to the next area to explore: the details.
Details
The panel on the right is full of valuable information you can use to easily jump from one thing to another. Your mind works incredibly fast, you process relationships and connections almost instantly, and now you can get information delivered to you at that same speed. Companies, opportunities, tasks, and notes are all conveniently located right next to your person. You can see and manage the status of the relationship instantly as well in Saelos CRM. (Need to add more statuses, again, an easy config option)
Opportunities
But managing my people involves more than just their personal details. I also want to know what opportunities (another familiar term) I had with various contacts. I wanted to know what stage those opportunities are in and what next step is best to take. Just like with the contacts we can easily scroll through our opportunities to find the one we’re looking for (or use the advanced search filtering to quickly narrow the list). More custom fields can be added here and I can easily see all the related information here as well. Creating and managing these opportunities has never been easier.
Tagging
The last thing I want to draw special attention to involves beautiful, incredibly functional tags. Tagging in Saelos lets you quickly link items that might not be linked anywhere else. You can pick a name, pick a color, and even add an emoji. Then, you can easily see people, companies, opportunities, and tasks associated with that tag. It’s ridiculously simple and yet surprisingly powerful.
There really is so much greatness captured in this system it’s hard to highlight only a few of them, but it wouldn’t be any fun if I didn’t let you discover some of them for yourself. That’s the beauty of a system like Saelos where everything is so intuitive, it really is like a fun opportunity to discover something new and exciting.
Here’s a few hints for things you should definitely check out:
I hope by now that you’re sufficiently prepared for what you are about to find. But before I let you go and use Saelos for yourself I want to share some of the incredible tech that supports this system.
Saelos is built in 2 parts. A robust API powers every single function and control within the CRM platform and provides a system by which you can interact with the database. It is completely decoupled from the front-end interface making it perfectly capable of interacting with any other front-end you desire. Although, I seriously doubt you’ll find another front-end as beautiful, as powerful, and as perfectly configured as you’ll find with the one built for Saelos. This front end uses cutting edge JavaScript technology to serve pages at lightning speed right from your computer. Saelos was created with the goal of loading and rendering pages in 300ms or under. This was created because I wanted the pages to load faster than I can blink. The result is a beautiful seamless combination of two systems to create a tool that functions faster than the blink of an eye, literally.
Finally I mentioned earlier that this is beta software and that you will undoubtedly find bugs. I also mentioned that this was started as a gift made available to you, free and open source. But this is not the end, it doesn’t stop with an a gift given. No, this is the beginning. Now you have an opportunity. An opportunity to make the gift better, to continue the act of generosity and improve this software for yourself, but more importantly for others. Be patient as you implement but hold Saelos to a high standard at the same time. Gather issues and report them. Take the next step and fix them. Become a part of this community that is now forming and take an active role in forming the foundation for this open source project.
Now, with all that information shared, and without any future awaiting. I am proud to give you immediate access to Saelos Beta. Here are your download links:
Full Package Download: https://github.com/saelos/saelos/releases/tag/1.0-beta
Code Repository: https://github.com/saelos/saelos
Please be sure to star this repo and share it with others! If you have questions, drop me an email. I’ll be sharing even more documentation in the coming days. For now, the repository has step-by-step setup if you’re building your own. The download package you simply unzip into your web folder.
What are you waiting for? Start exploring Saelos CRM! Tell others, tweet about it, facebook post about it, share on LinkedIn; just please help me spread the word! Let’s change the way we think about relationships in business!
Interested in the slide deck? Download the PDF here.
