Folk, a next-generation CRM developed by eFounders, a European startup company, is now online. If you’ve been following TechCrunch, you’ll know that I’ve previously written about Folk. Since then, the product has undergone several changes and is now ready for use. “CRM is the most popular SaaS [software-as-a-service] category. Salesforce has the highest valuation in the SaaS business, according to co-founder and COO Simo Lemhandez. “However, there is a category with goods that are all regarded obsolete,” he noted.
For example, Lemhandez believes it is too difficult to tailor a big CRM software to your specific requirements. “Even though we’re all acclimated to the self-serve paradigm, we’ve all heard of Salesforce’s integration teams,” he added. Folk, like many current SaaS applications, takes inspiration from well-known solutions that are both versatile and powerful. Notion, Airtable, Figma, and Shopify are just a few examples.
Folk has been iterating on its beta product for the past 18 months. There are 10,000 individuals waiting to test it out on the company’s queue. I witnessed a demo of the product, and it appears that you may get started without the assistance of an integration team. You’ll be prompted to create a workspace and invite your peers when you initially join up. Users may import contacts, emails, and calendars into the application thanks to a Google Workspace interface. Folk immediately begins merging duplicates, indexing all fields, and enhancing contact data in your contact database.
Folk users may search their contact database with a single keyboard shortcut. You can look up a person’s name, a company’s name, and so on. You can start exploiting your network once you’ve laid this foundation. Folk allows you to arrange your connections by creating groups. Each group might represent a project or a group of individuals. For example, you might build a group for public relations, another for existing investors, still another for new clients, and so on.
You may browse through your contacts, import new contacts from a file, or use different interfaces with third-party services to add contacts to groups. Integrations with Calendly, Webflow, Zapier, and other services are possible. Extensions for Zoom and a browser plugin that connects with LinkedIn and Gmail are also on the way. Some of the integrations are still in the works. Each group has a lot of flexibility. Columns may be added, contacts can be filtered and ordered, and some fields can have logic applied to them. You may, for example, sort your contacts by their most recent interactions. You may also switch to a pipeline view at any moment to examine the progress of your projects more simply.
Folk allows you to send bulk messages using variables like first and last names. Members of a team may also make remarks to a contact to ensure that everyone is on the same page. There’s also a function that serves as a reminder. Folk competes against traditional CRM programs such as Salesforce and HubSpot, as well as database and spreadsheet applications like as Notion, Airtable, Coda, and Excel. A new generation of CRM software is already on the market, such as Attio, a firm I featured last year. However, it is a massive sector, and some businesses do not utilize CRM at all. There will be enough area in the facility for more than one startup. Folk has secured $4.5 million from 50 different angel investors, including Accel.
