people crm

gooooood morning

its 1:04 am on 4/16/2025. perfect time to get started

this is supposed to be the first post on arnavchauhan.com; thanks for being here from the start :)

before i start the timer, i want to thank farza for making freewrite (freewrite.io), where I’m currently writing this. sitting and braindumping over the past few days has been very valuable.

now, time to get started: welcome to arnav chauhan’s version of a people crm.

3 2 1 go

i’ve been going to (read: sneaking into. i haven’t gotten kicked out of one yet tho) a ton of networking events recently. it’s been incredibly rewarding, insightful, and fun.

meeting so many cool people (10-15+) in such a short amount of time (2-3 hours) means that it’s impossible to keep track of who you met, where you met them, and when you met them. i sit and scroll through my messages afterwards and see random phone numbers with no recollection of who it is. incredibly frustrating.

therein lies the problem.

keeping track of everyone you meet should not be hard.

imagine a one shot solution where you can keep track of everything. i’ve been thinking recently and i think the key areas to start with are

who you met
what event you met them at
what organization they’re a part of
the specific interaction you had with them

so far i’ve been using a page in my notes app for myself. do not recommend this solution at all.

over the weekend i finally made a solution in airtable. tons of custom linking and custom fields to make it easy to use. it’s very clunky but still miles better than the notes app.

future? i think first step at this point is go out to people and ask them if they would use it. worst case scenario: everyone hates it and i spend a week or two working on something i care about best case scenario: everyone loves it and….. vc? who knows. idrc

eventually need to convert it to an actual app or website or something. airtable api might be all I need.

dream is that i log everyone i have met for lunch, dinner, coffee, in passing, whatever. then, 10 years down the line, I’m like “oh, ill be in DC this weekend. Who should I catch up with?” then, with the power of ai and b2b saas and whatever’s popular then, I get a response saying “cool! here’s [x person], you met them for dinner in sf 2 years ago and you talked about [y topics]. their linkedin and ig posts from 6 months ago say they’re in dc now. here’s their phone number. ”

boom. an old friend who i may not be in touch with anymore is suddenly at the forefront of my mind.

whats the end goal? forming new relationships is important, keeping them is even more important. yes there are competitors in the space but oh well, more fun for me ig.

its now 1:27 am. i have a stats test tomorrow so i’ll be heading to bed now. thanks for entertaining my braindump :)