Customer relationship management has started to earn recognition as a
way to streamline customer programs, but quite often it doesn't come
cheap. San Francisco-based Free CRM believes in
changing that statement. CEO Eric Stone chats about surviving the boom,
the future of CRM, and why his product is free of charge.
How did FreeCRM.com get started?
Before and during the dot-com boom, I owned and operated a very
successful e-services San Francisco. In early 2000, I launched two
startups--a wireless company and a portal. Needless to say, the timing
of my ventures could not have been worse, I had to cut back staff
tremendously. My former technical lead headed for greener pastures, and
I continued to fan the embers of my dying startups.
Sometime in 2001, my former technical lead began working on a call
automation project, which fell through, and he contacted me having all
this code to himself and no idea what to do with it all. CRM was just
beginning to heat up, and the core of what he had developed was a unique
set of functionality that itself was not CRM, but could be made an
integral part of a CRM application. We began work.
What are the main features of FreeCRM?
The main features of FreeCRM.com are those that are found in most all of
the applications in this space--contact and lead management, sales force
automation, groupware/team-ware functionality such as shared calendars
and communications, task tracking, call automation, support tracking,
document sharing, email marketing and reporting.
We have so many features that it is really hard to describe them all,
and we do go beyond the standard functions in these applications and
deliver features that real people can use everyday. Functionality is
absolutely the focus of our system--at the end of the day, I wanted the
sales people, support staff and managers to all think that they were
very productive and effective by using my tool, and on a daily basis,
that's the feedback that we get from our users--easy to use, easy to
learn, and something that is now an integral part of their work
operations--we get lots of thanks and kudos.
Why do you feel there's a need for what you provide?
SMBs worldwide have been aching for this technology--but the pain has
always been the price and therefore there has been a huge obstacle for
these companies to automate their businesses with CRM tools.
There are 200-300 million small businesses worldwide that can benefit
from this technology, and if the barrier to access is low, they will
adopt like crazy. I've seen it over the past year, in this respect, I
have nailed the market and the need, and others have been following us
quickly, specifically on the front of open-source CRM technology. We all
understand the need on a global basis.
How are you able to offer your tools for free?
Everyone asks us how we do it for free, and I can say that given the
maturity of open-source technology today, we could not have done this 4
or 5 years ago. It's the architecture that I have developed and the
years of experience that I have. I have learned a few tricks, and these
tricks mean incredible savings while maintaining a hugely scalable
horizontal infrastructure.
If we have any secret sauce, it's in our infrastructure and approach to
scalability, which translates into extremely low per-user costs and the
ability for us to offer equivalent services for 90 to 95 percent less
than the competition, or free.
do you know a Bay Area company we should cover? Let us know about it.
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