What is a Personal CRM?
I’ve never been a big fan of acronyms. When used correctly, they can save repetition of long jargon in the context of those in know. More often than not though, acronyms are abused and used to create a sense of authority among audiences that don’t have any background on the topic. Lawyers, accountants and academics are among some of the worst offenders, but I’ve encountered my fair share of acronym overuse among developers and marketers too.
In the marketing world “CRM” gets thrown around a lot. Customer Relationship Management is obviously a bit of a mouthful, but there’s no argument that it’s clearer than the acronym alone.
Customer Relationship Management tools are used to keep track of customers from potential leads to actively engaged. There are hundreds if not thousands of tools available, and the feature set varies between products, but you can think of CRM tools as loosely “a diary for key events and information related to people I’m interested in”.
From this description, we don’t have to stray too far before we can see how this could be applied outside the context of customers and business… Why can’t I use the same idea for people in my personal life?
Why am I relying on my memory or scattered notes, calendar events and reminders to keep track of my friends birthdays, key life events and important news?
Enter the Personal CRM. A quick google will surface reddit posts of people asking others what they are currently using to manage all of this data. And there are already a lot of Personal CRM‘s out there. Dex, Covve, Clay, Monica… the list goes on…
However, many of these products (e.g. Dex) put focus on professional relationships. So they’re not really “personal”. In some ways this is fitting, because Personal CRM feels a bit unnatural in the context of friends and family - is your Aunt really a Personal Customer?
I created SoonCall, because a saw a gap. Not in the CRM space, and not really even in the personal CRM space, but in the friends and family space. I asked “what tools are there for long distance friendship?” and struggled to find an answer. So I created SoonCall to be an app for long distance friendship. I wanted something that is actually personal. You could call it a personal CRM, but we should probably drop the “customer”. A tool for Personal Relationship Management. It’s an app for nurturing relationships with friends and family.
