Something actually worth building.

There's an assumption running through most of the tech sector that the best products are built by the best engineers, and I want to push back on it, because what I've seen consistently is that the best products are built by people who understand, at a granular and often personally costly level, the problem they're actually trying to solve.

GoodCRM is female-led and disabled-led. We don't have the classic tech startup backstory: no VC funding rounds, no language about disrupting the space, no roadmap that ends in an acquisition. What we have is decades of combined experience working in and alongside the very sector we're building for. I came to technology through fundraising and charity management, as did our CEO - everything is rooted in our lived and professional experience in the charity sector.

This week I got two REALLY nice pieces of feedback from potenital clients:

The first came after a demo: "I really like this system I must admit. I am meeting with a couple of other CRM providers, however this is the first one that I've looked at and gone oh my goodness, that does everything that we want it to do. And also just talking to somebody who understands the way the sector works makes a huge difference."

The second was a response to a proposal: "This is a staggeringly good document! I am grateful for the time you have taken to pre-empt so many queries, and to address the particular points we have raised in each discussion. I might add that other possible suppliers definitely have not taken this trouble."

“Other suppliers haven't taken this trouble” - now there’s a sentence that really fucking reveals how the charity tech market tends to work: clients are accustomed to being sold at rather than listened to, to generic demos and proposal templates that could apply to any organisation in any sector.

But when you come from the sector, you can't do that, because you know too much. I know that the person in the demo isn't looking for a generic CRM; they're managing complex relationships with individual donors, trusts, Arts Council reporting, community participation data, box office crossover, and they are just one person trying to do five jobs while all of it is happening. I know what it feels like to be mid-Gift Aid audit at 11pm and discover that your data is a hot fucking mess. I don't have to manufacture empathy for that - I already have it, because I’ve been there.

There's (as always LOL) a matrescence dimension to this for me as well, which I find harder to articulate without it sounding like a pivot to #lifestyle content. Becoming a mother has done something clarifying to my sense of what's actually worth building, and the thing it clarified is that the exit isn't the goal. Making sure that the person running communications at a small theatre in Sheffield has a system that genuinely works for them, in the way that their work actually works: that's a goal. There's no IPO at the end of that story, and I’m cool with that.

We're building GoodCRM so that good people have the tools they need to do work that matters. That might be a not very exciting mission statement until you've sat with a charity fundraiser who's been let down by the last three systems they tried, or until you've been a new mother, exhausted and newly clear-eyed, trying to work out what kind of work is worth the finite attention you have left.

The feedback, for me, matters more than the funding round. That's not a consolation prize… it's the actual point.