Hey!
Adrian, founder of Groundhogg here! I’m happy you found us, and hopefully we can help you with your CRM woes.
If you’re curious about why I started Groundhogg and what we’re all about, this is the right page to be reading.
Before Groundhogg, early 2018…
In the dark ages of self-hosted CRM, there was only SaaS (Software as a Service).
These big SaaS CRM companies, funded by venture capitalists and private equity, would take advantage of well-meaning small businesses and non-profits, extracting every last possible cent from their bank accounts without adding additional value to their service offering.
I was once a victim of a SaaS CRM, *cough* Confusionsoft *cough*, having spent 10,000s over the years and 1000s of hours trying to extract an ROI for myself and my clients.
Every year they would raise the price of our plan despite ignoring our pleas to solve crucial issues or innovate on obsolete features.
Today is not so much different. Big SaaS is still greedy, and they still ignore their customers.
The big issue with SaaS CRMs is threefold.
1️⃣ SaaS can raise your price for any reason at any time, pricing you out.
SaaS CRMs have been known not only to increase the price of their plans for customers as their list grows (the success-tax) but they also raise the base price of their plans arbitrarily.
2️⃣ SaaS can close your account without warning for any reason.
While rare, popular SaaS companies have virtually crippled businesses by closing their CRM accounts without warning fora variety of reasons. I’ve heard of customers getting their accounts terminated because of…
- Censorship (more common than you think)
- Breach of terms and conditions (including changes to their terms that might impact you)
- By accident (again, happens too often)
3️⃣ SaaS in principle owns all the content you produce, exposing your business.
Your emails might say copyright on them, but ultimately if you don’t pay your SaaS bill, you get evicted and all your contacts, emails, tags, notes, and whatever other data you store in your CRM evaporates.
Another concern is that your contact data is hosted on someone else’s server, meaning they have access to it for any purposes such as machine learning or larger surveys. If you have privacy concerns or must be in compliance with GDPR that’s a big no-no.
In 2018 I was working in a marketing agency using a SaaS CRM every single day, and I was fed up! I looked for a viable alternative that promised reasonable pricing that could scale, that allowed me to own my data, that was private and secure, and integrated meaningfully with WordPress.
To the surprise, nothing remotely capable existed. So I made one.
Creating a better alternative…
Creating a CRM that solves those key problems is easier said than done. A true solution would have to meet the following requirements.
It must integrate meaningfully with WordPress, and other WordPress plugins.
It must be self-hosted and open-source so that users can own their data.
It must have approachable fixed pricing.
I figured the best way to solve all three problems was by creating the first complete CRM and Marketing Automation WordPress plugin.
By early 2019 we had a production ready product, and for the last seven years we’ve been continuously improving our core product, adding integrations and add-ons, and producing education about why self-hosting your CRM is important.
About the founder…
I’m super passionate (borderline obsessed) with CRM and Marketing Automation. I live and breathe it every day.
Unlike many of our competitors’ CEOs, I’m in Groundhogg everyday as a user, as a product designer, and as a developer. The product decisions I make are based on my real-world usage and needs.
I speak with customers daily, collecting feedback from them about how to improve our services so that our tools meet the demanding needs of small business and nonprofits worldwide.
When you work with us, you’re not just a customer. You’re something more. You’re a stakeholder in our mission to make CRM and Marketing Automation more accessible.
~Adrian Tobey, Founder
Our Core Values
Add value to people’s lives.
A company that does not add value to peoples’ lives is not a company, it is a vanity project. And I’ve seen a great number of vanity projects in the last few years, especially in the marketing space. Every day when I wake up I’m thinking, “how are we going to help people today.” Because if you help enough people get what they want, you can have what you want.
Obsess about the customer experience.
If a customer is not successful with our products, it’s on us. Everything we do should make the experience of using our tools easier, not more difficult. We have recently started working with a UI/UX designer for the express purpose of bringing this core value to life.
Sweat the details.
Something I personally struggle with every day. I’m usually a “good enough,” kind of guy, but that’s not always good enough. When thousands are relying on us, we can’t afford to drop the ball. We must tear everything apart and put it back together to make sure that the products we ship are the best versions of those products. This also extends beyond code, it encapsulates replying to messages, meeting deadlines, writing documentation, following up with customers, and more.
Honor our commitments.
If we make a commitment internally to meet a deadline or to help a client with a problem, you can be sure that we’re going to go to the mat to honor that commitment. If life gets in the way, which sometimes it does, then an equal if not superior alternative will be honored in its place.
Elevate others.
Sometimes our ego gets in the way of an opportunity to help someone become better. Competition is an inherent human trait, and when we see someone who is not as developed as ourselves in a certain way we can often choose to let them know we are superior, rather than bring them up to our own level. We must strive to always choose to bring them up to our own level rather than make ourselves feel superior.
Take responsibility & make no excuses.
Taking responsibility means owning your own projects, and seeing them through to completion. It means accepting risk and doubling down when the going gets tough. We must all be a part of the collective force that drives innovation and change. And when things work out we must own what we need to improve, what we learned, and what we’ll do differently next time rather than assign blame and stay the same.