Two years ago, I decided I had enough. I was not going to lose touch with people for the wrong reasons anymore.
I had a system to manage my work, I had a system to manage my health, but I still did not have a system to manage my network and contacts.
Today, we’re two years later and things have changed a lot. I now have a system for all three of these important aspects of my life.
In this post, I want to share the philosophy that has driven us to build what we believe to be the best Personal CRM on the market.
Here are the 8 reasons why nat.app is the best personal relationship management solution.
1. Deep integration with communication apps
Our relationship manager integrates with three major apps: Calendar, Email & Contacts (Google only).
For many professionals like myself, this represents a big enough chunk of daily communications that it makes nat.app work without any manual data entry.
This contrasts strongly with most alternatives that just become useless if you don’t maintain them and keep your data up to date. You could go on holidays for months and when you come back, you will still be shown valuable contacts you indeed meant to reach back out to.
This makes our app a stress free personal relationship manager. If for any reason, you’re just busy and don’t check back into the app for weeks, you’ll be alright. Your account will keep cleaning and maintaining itself in order to provide you with valuable insights when you return.
If you’re instead communicating mainly through other channels, then our app simply is not right for you. I can recommend you take a look at this ranking I made in early 2021 to find an alternative.
2. We are here for the next 40 years of your life
We’re fortunate that tools to help manage contacts and relationships have a very different timespan than most apps. Indeed, friendships are measured over decades, not days.
One feature in particular, our note taking solution inside Gmail is meant to help you save bits and pieces of information about people that you will love to see resurface when you meet them next, be it in a month of ten years.
We want our app to be your companion as you grow and go through your life and career. While this might sound extremely generous, remember that we need the app ourselves to manage our own contacts and relationships! We have primarily built this tool for ourselves and even if no-one else wants to use it, we will keep running it simply because we need it.
3. Hassle-free relationship manager
When you sign up for nat.app, you will be surprised by how simple and easy the onboarding process is. Most CRMs will ask you to fill in a lot of fields and ask you to invite contacts to the service.
Instead, we went with a very simple and non-intrusive onboarding. Instead of asking you to fill in a form, we just ask you to connect your Google account.
We take that to mean that our users trust us with their information. We take that responsibility seriously.
4. We recognise that a personal relationship manager is useless unless it integrates with everything else
We live a life where we use lots of apps. We use our email client, our calendar, our group chat, our note taking app, our CRM, our social networks. We need all of these to integrate and work together, and it is our mission to make sure that you can integrate your nat.app account with as many apps as possible.
Because some apps simply won’t let us integrate, we don’t recommend our product to people who use mainly WhatsApp or iMessage. Instead, we focus on serving customers who spend their day in email and calendar.
5. We are not interested in selling your data
We don’t ask for your birth date when you sign up. We don’t ask for your gender. We don’t ask for your zip code. We don’t ask for your previous work experience. We don’t ask for your college.
We don’t need to ask you for this information and we don’t want to make a decision if we should keep it private or not. We make money because we charge our customers and we love it that way and will keep it as is.
6. We want you to own your data
Our vision is to build an app that keeps you free. If you choose to stop using our app at some point, you should be able to do so without any pain or problem.
We want you to be able to export your data easily and start using any relationship manager that you want.
This is why we let you export your data in a way that makes it easy to import the data back into Google Contacts.
In addition to that, we’ve built our whole app in a two way sync with your contact data. To add a contact to nat.app, simply add it to your contact book.
7. Bootstrapped and paid-only
The market we’ve evolving in is small, despite this, a few companies managed to raise money from investors. This is a very scary for potential customers as the risk is high that those companies will go out of business.
The fact is that in the past 10 years, only one company has managed to stay in business up to today, and they open-sourced the software in addition to being bootstrapped.
Incentives are unfortunately misaligned for companies that raise money from venture capitalists. They have to hire teams and move fast to raise their next round and if they don’t, they have to close shop.
Being bootstrapped means that we did not raise any money from external investors. Instead, we own the whole company and can decide to grow it as we please. In particular, we can choose to not aim for a billion dollar valuation and just keep it as a small sustainable business. History says that this is the only way to keep such a business afloat.
In addition to not having raised any money, we charge our customers, which means that as long as we keep you happy, we can stay in business.
8. Awesome support and closeness between team and customers
One thing that I’ve really enjoyed since the beginning of our journey is talking to our customers and staying in touch with them (pun intended!).
One of the benefits of offering a premium product is that the total number of customers is low, which allows us to offer a premium experience to everyone. Our customers join us on our internal team Slack, meet the team and share feedback when they feel like it.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article and if I convinced you to give us a try, just sign up!