
<Image
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  alt="You are far more influential than you think"
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Tiny Improvements recently [passed the 400 reader milestone](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/building-in-public-growth-report-400-readers) - _thank you so much_ to each and every one of you for letting me into your inbox each week. It's a privilege I don't take lightly. Seriously, thank you.

As you might imagine, this has caused me to do a bit of reflecting -- I've been thinking about why I enjoy writing like this, and the things I find rewarding about being a part of the developer and creator community.

## On supporting others

I love the idea of building a community that I want to be a part of, and having the opportunity to support other people in building their dreams. There's something really special about being able to connect with people who are doing interesting things, and I'm grateful to be able to do that.

When I think about the people who I follow and really connect with, a few patterns stand out:

- some have done exceptional things or worked on exceptional projects
- some loudly support exceptional causes
- some just seem like they're incredible people

I have many reasons for being a fan of my friends and colleagues. One thing that has stood out to me lately, too, is how easy it is to amplify someone else's work -- and just how amazing that can make someone feel.

I've been writing for a bunch of years now, and I can remember a good handful of instances where someone shared my work unexpectedly. For example: we recently relaunched [apisyouwonthate.com](https://apisyouwonthate.com), and quietly added a feature that lets subscribers there pay for a membership. Right now, there's little difference between a paid and free membership, apart from "you're supporting us financially, and we love you." Within days of the feature launch, we had our first paying member, who skipped the $1/mo supporter tier and went straight for $5/mo.

I was floored.

<Image
  publicId="newsletters/you-are-far-more-influential-than-you-think/paid-subscriber"
  alt="Our first paid subscriber confirmation email"
  caption="This person will always hold a special place in my heart, and I'm so grateful for their support."
/>

## A call to arms: support your friends

I'm not writing this to ask for money, or to ask you to buy anything from me - if you're reading this, I'm already feeling the love. I'm writing this to ask you to support your friends.

Think about your friends who are working hard to build something. Maybe they're building a product, or a service, or a community. Maybe they're working on a side project, or a personal project, or a passion project.

Whatever it is, take 30 seconds out of your day, and share their _thing_ with your network. Let them know that you're a fan. It's small, it's free to do, and I can't tell you how much it means to the people you're supporting.

Small gestures of support can have enormous butterfly effects, too - I've made a good number of serendipitous connections in the past as a result of someone sharing my work with their network, or from times when I've shared and supported someone else's work.

Go, support your friends! You'll be glad you did, and they'll love you for it.

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## Some friends whose work I admire

- [**Phil Sturgeon**](https://phil.tech) is the tree-planting madman who I work with on [APIs You Won't Hate](https://apisyouwonthate.com/). He's an exceptionally knowledgeable API developer, and has spent the past few years building his charity, [Protect Earth](https://www.protect.earth/). His organization has cleared land and planted tens of thousands of trees all over the UK - an astonishing accomplishment, and he's just getting started. Go follow Phil, he's a wonderful person.
- [**Rizèl Scarlett**](https://twitter.com/blackgirlbytes) is a developer advocate at GitHub. She's been all over the tech conference circuit for the past few years, where I've been lucky to bump into her from time to time. Rizèl is an amazing people connector - I've met and followed so many wonderful people as a result of her work.
- [**Colby Fayock**](https://twitter.com/colbyfayock) works as Director of DevX Engineering at Cloudinary, and is a really talented designer and developer. He's published countless articles, videos, and tech tutorials on his site, [SpaceJelly.dev](https://spacejelly.dev). Colby is genuinely one of the nicest people I've met, and does a great job of elevating the people around him. I'm always impressed by the work he's doing.
- [**Lazar Nikolov**](https://twitter.com/NikolovLazar) is a developer advocate at Sentry, and has started publishing a great newsletter called [Lazar's Tech Musings](https://nikolovlazar.substack.com/) that I've been enjoying. I stumbled across Lazar's work recently, and I'm really glad I did - our work has a ton in common!

## On building a following

📚 [Fanocracy: Turning Fans into Customers and Customers into Fans](https://amzn.to/3GSxOdO) is a book that is always high on my list of recommendations. I come back to my notes on it regularly, and I think it's a great read for anyone, whether you're actively building a following or not.

I've written a bit about nurturing your network before, and I think it's a topic that is worth occasional revisiting. If you're looking for more reading on the topic, you might enjoy these:

- [Imperfection is part of the brand](https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter/today-is-your-day-to-start), and people will love you for it.
- [Today is your day to start](https://mikebifulco.com/newsletter/today-is-your-day-to-start) building and marketing your product, even if you don't have the faintest idea what that is.

## Some of my recent work

- [Building in public growth report: 400 readers](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/building-in-public-growth-report-400-readers) - As I mentioned above, I recently passed the 400 reader milestone. I'm really grateful for the support and I wanted to share some of the things I've learned along the way.
- [Add custom fonts to Next.js sites with Tailwind using next/font](https://mikebifulco.com/posts/custom-fonts-with-next-font-and-tailwind) is a quick tutorial inspired by a post on Reddit. I've been trying to be helpful on /r/nextjs and /r/reactjs lately -- this post is adapted from a response to a question that I thought was worth sharing more widely.
- 🎙️ An interview I did recently for APIs You Won't Hate (the podcast): [Learnin' about webhooks, with Tom Haconen from Svix](https://apisyouwonthate.com/podcast/learning-about-webhooks-with-tom-haconen-from-svix/). If you're building with webhooks, this is a great episode to check out.


You are far more influential than you think


## You’re building relationships with all of your customers…

…whether you know it or not. Winning your prospects’ hard-earned money is hard. Founders spend hundreds and thousands of hours building products to solve a problem, pouring blood, sweat, tears, and money into product development. Building a product is only part of the equation: you have to earn the trust of your customers by creating a brand and voice that they trust. Landing sales, and keeping happy customers takes time and compassion. Thankfully, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software exists to help you and your team do a great job of maintaining great relationships with your customers.

**CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management”,** and CRM software helps you do just that: it provides tooling to track of your interactions and commitments to prospects, customers, and visitors to your app, service, or site. Often this comes in the form of integrations that automate part of the process - keeping track of contact information, logging important events and milestones in the customer journey, and reminding you to follow-up on leads before they go cold.

## What Types of CRMs are there?

Like most things, no CRM is a perfect solution for everyone. They vary in complexity, price, and usability - and perhaps most importantly, each CRM you encounter will have its own ethos, or underlying strategy. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide which type of CRM fits your product best. As I see it, most CRMs fall into a few basic categories.

### Sales-based CRMs

**Examples: [Close.io](https://close.io), [Salesforce](https://salesforce.com), [Hubspot](https://hubspot.com)**

These are generally best for products whose success is based on a traditional sales process. If you have salespeople who contact prospective customers and manage relationships with them throughout the sales process, these CRMs may be a good fit. They tend to center around closing a sale, guiding you to craft messaging and contact strategies (via email, SMS, or phone call) that rely on high-touch salespeople doing their thing.

### Conversational Marketing CRMs

**Examples: [Intercom](https://intercom.com), [Drift](https://drift.com), [Front](https://front.com)**

You’ve probably bumped into some flavor of conversational Marketing CRM, as they have been wildly popular for the last several years. These usually look like a chat widget living in the bottom corner of a web page or mobile app. They’re highly configurable, and allow you to automate conversational messages to users as they browse your site or app. They can be used to highlight functionality, press visitors to sign up for trials, and complete sales. They rely on your team building conversational messaging that fits your brand, and guiding customers to make decisions. Many also offer real-time chat functionality, where members of your team can message and reply to website visitors through the embedded chat widget.

### Inbox based CRMs

**Examples: [Streak](https://www.streak.com/), [Copper](https://copper.com)**

If your customer support or sales process relies heavily on communication through email, these may be the CRM for you. They use the contents of your inbox to catalog customer relationships, allow your team to keep track of these relationships across inboxes. This typically means that email threads with customers get back-channeled notes and chat functionality. An important caveat with these tools is that they tend to be strongly-tied to the email service your team uses - your options for inbox CRMs will be limited based on whether you use G Suite or Microsoft 365

### Self-maintained CRMs

**Examples: [Monday](https://monday.com), [Airtable CRM templates](https://www.streak.com/), Notion CRM templates ([personal](https://www.notion.so/templates/personal-crm), [sales](https://www.notion.so/templates/sales-crm)), [Roam Research](https://roambrain.com/personal-crm/)**

These tools rely on you doing some of the work. They usually look like miniature table-based databases, and are used to leave notes on customer conversations, track potential and realized revenue, and other relevant metadata about your customer conversations. Some options offer simple automation out of the box, allowing you to plug in to tools like n8n and Zapier to add or update records.

### …something else?

No doubt there are other types of CRMs I’ve missed. **What’s your tool of choice for managing customer relationships? Do you have any tips or tricks to share with other founders and product teams? Did I miss something important, or get something wrong?** Share your thoughts with me on twitter [@irreverentmike](https://twitter.com/irreverentmike).

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_Note: cover photo by [Andrew Neel](https://unsplash.com/@andrewtneel?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com)_

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How do you choose the right CRM for your product?

#marketing: 3 posts tagged

You are far more influential than you think

How do you choose the right CRM for your product?

Hey, influencers: be careful with ChatGPT