Hey! Adrian here — founder of Groundhogg.
If you’re wondering why I built a CRM instead of just buying one, this is the page for you.
Before Groundhogg, early 2018…
Back then, self-hosted CRM barely existed. If you wanted marketing automation, you rented it — from a big SaaS company funded by venture capital and private equity, built to extract every last cent from small businesses and non-profits without adding much in return.
I was one of their victims. Tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours on a SaaS CRM — *cough* Confusionsoft *cough* — just trying to make it pay for itself.
Every year the price went up. Every year our requests to fix the broken parts got ignored. That hasn’t changed much: big SaaS is still greedy, and it still isn’t listening.
Three problems with renting your CRM
01
They can raise your price whenever they like
Plans climb as your list grows — the success tax — and base prices get raised arbitrarily. You get no say and no way out except leaving.
02
They can close your account without warning
It’s rare, but it happens: censorship, a terms change you never agreed to, or plain accident. Businesses have been crippled overnight.
03
They own what you produce
Stop paying and your contacts, emails, tags and notes evaporate. Your data also lives on their servers — a problem if you care about privacy or GDPR.
Creating a better alternative…
In 2018 I was using a SaaS CRM every single day at a marketing agency, and I was fed up. I went looking for something that priced fairly, let me own my data, and integrated properly with WordPress. To my surprise, nothing capable existed. So I built it.
A real solution had to meet three requirements:
Integrate meaningfully with WordPress
And with the plugins you already run, not just a token connection.
Be self-hosted and open source
So the data is genuinely yours, on hardware you control.
Have approachable fixed pricing
No success tax for growing your list.
The best way to solve all three was to build the first complete CRM and marketing automation WordPress plugin. We shipped a production-ready product in early 2019, and we’ve been improving it ever since — adding integrations and add-ons, and making the case for why self-hosting your CRM matters.
About the founder…
I’m borderline obsessed with CRM and marketing automation — I live in this product every day.
Unlike most CEOs in this space, I’m in Groundhogg daily as a user, a product designer and a developer. The product decisions I make come out of real work, not a roadmap meeting. I talk to customers every day and their feedback is what shapes where we go next.
When you work with us you’re not just a customer. You’re a stakeholder in our mission to make CRM and marketing automation genuinely accessible.
~Adrian Tobey, Founder
Our Core Values
Add value to people’s lives.
A company that doesn’t add value to people’s lives isn’t a company, it’s a vanity project. Every morning the question is the same: how do we help someone today?
Obsess about the customer experience.
If a customer isn’t successful with our products, that’s on us. Everything we ship should make the work easier, not harder.
Sweat the details.
“Good enough” usually isn’t. When thousands of businesses rely on us, we take things apart and rebuild them until they’re right.
Honor our commitments.
If we commit to a deadline or to solving your problem, we go to the mat for it. If life gets in the way, we make it right another way.
Elevate others.
When we meet someone less far along, the instinct is to prove we’re ahead. The better choice is to bring them up to our level.
Take responsibility & make no excuses.
Own the project, accept the risk, see it through. When it doesn’t work out, name what we learned instead of assigning blame.
Own your CRM.
Self-hosted, open source, fixed pricing. Start today, or take it for a spin first.