Ask HN: How to manage professional connections?

14 points by ashishb 6 years ago

How do people manage their professional connections? LinkedIn works to find and make new one but not to stay in touch.

I am looking for the ability to

1. Tag existing connections 2. See my connections by location (eg. If I am visiting New York,I can reach out to some of my connections there) 3. Track when I last connected with someone (through my calendar appointments)

Bucephalus355 6 years ago

Salesforce. You can get the Developer Edition for free which has all features enabled. Or you can just pay $300 for a 1 year license.

Within a day of using Salesforce, even though I hadn’t fully set it up yet, I had a wave of relief wash over me. Just seeing names, data, events, etc put in the system took out a lot of unconscious anxiety I had in my mind about managing my relationships.

Yes it’s not perfect, yes it’s a little bit of enterprise overkill, but it works and I know it’s going to be around.

  • eindiran 6 years ago

    Can you expand on this a little bit? I'm not sure if I have the right impression but I thought Salesforce was intended as a sales and accounting tool for businesses. Is this an intended use case, or is this a creative repurposing of the tool?

    • Bucephalus355 6 years ago

      It’s meant to track Contacts as one of it’s primary features. I then use “Accounts” as buckets / groups to put people in. Pretty straight forward use of the product.

      MonicaHQ has better features I think (don’t think it has a mobile app though since it’s written in PHP), but how you manage your contacts is a huge life spanning project. I hate to play the typical “enterprise software” card here, but you really want to make sure it’s going to be around a long time, not to mention secure.

privong 6 years ago

This is a bit more oriented towards social relationships, but it might also work for your use case: https://www.monicahq.com/

  • toomuchtodo 6 years ago

    Second Monicahq. I use it for all of my personal and business relationships; it works very well and the development roadmap is featurefull.

    Disclaimer: No association other than happy paying user

farmerinthecity 6 years ago

I’ve found the iOS app ntwrk to be good for this.

  • m3tr0s 6 years ago

    Seems to be a great idea!