Finding a good personal CRM always seems to be a perpetual problem. I've tried my fair share - AirTable, Streak, HubSpot, Affinity, and a simple notebook. They all work great in the beginning, until they become too much work to maintain.
A few weeks ago, I started using Evernote to keep track of knowledge related to work. It's one of the simplest tools to implement into your daily workflow. Whenever you have a call, just create a new note titled that person or company's name. Then tag it with as many topics that come to mind - city, stage, industry, founder, interests, etc. One of the best parts about Everyone is you can search by tag, making it easy to pull up filtered content later on. For example, say I wanted to look up every early stage investor in Austin that I have chatted with, Evernote makes that easy. You can do something similar with google docs, but this is a much smoother method. We'll see how it goes, but for now I like the simplicity of using Evernote.
That being said, what most software mentioned above fails to do well is integrate with email, which is really the ultimate CRM. In venture, email is king. We rarely use Slack or any other messaging apps. Investors, lawyers, institutions, and advisors all prefer email. It's how deals get done.
So maybe instead of building a tool that can integrate seamlessly with email, email needs to be upgraded to better track all of your conversations with people and companies. I'm surprised Google hasn't put more effort into this. They already own email, why can't they own contact management too?
A few weeks ago, I started using Evernote to keep track of knowledge related to work. It's one of the simplest tools to implement into your daily workflow. Whenever you have a call, just create a new note titled that person or company's name. Then tag it with as many topics that come to mind - city, stage, industry, founder, interests, etc. One of the best parts about Everyone is you can search by tag, making it easy to pull up filtered content later on. For example, say I wanted to look up every early stage investor in Austin that I have chatted with, Evernote makes that easy. You can do something similar with google docs, but this is a much smoother method. We'll see how it goes, but for now I like the simplicity of using Evernote.
That being said, what most software mentioned above fails to do well is integrate with email, which is really the ultimate CRM. In venture, email is king. We rarely use Slack or any other messaging apps. Investors, lawyers, institutions, and advisors all prefer email. It's how deals get done.
So maybe instead of building a tool that can integrate seamlessly with email, email needs to be upgraded to better track all of your conversations with people and companies. I'm surprised Google hasn't put more effort into this. They already own email, why can't they own contact management too?