What's the vision for FluentCRM (so I know what to expect)?
I see FluentCRM as the most robust (and flexible) email marketing and automation offering for Wordpress. So much potential, but I also fear it (and the entire Fluent suite) becoming another Zoho-ish product.
Zoho offers infinity products and none of them really are polished (not trying to downplay Zoho just speaking freely and factually). If you go to the support forums you'll see a ton of basic functionality being requested and ignored for years.
But this basic functionality is often the difference between developer's capabilities and end user's needs. There is almost always misalignment between the two with SaaS products.
FluentCRM seems like a good product that was on its way to be great but then focus shifted elsewhere and now it's just being maintained as good.
Through more recent conversations with support I have the feeling that the Fluent team may not understand some of the basic, most prevalent, use cases for a lot of their products. For instance, I asked if custom fields could be created via API for folks migrating to FluentCRM from platforms like ActiveCampaign and the rep didn't understand why that would be important. Which made me wonder...are you even expecting people to migrate to your platform?
I could list more but the point is that there is definitely a disconnect between common market use cases and developers responsible for making it happen.
All of this to ask, what should I expect for FluentCRM?
I see FluentCommunity and FluentCart as large undertakings. Prior to both of these being launched FluentCRM hasn't really gotten an update visually or functionally (not dismissing the releases more so talking about more meaningful product updates that improve the experience visually and functionally). And it looks less likely for any major update now.
To be fair, if the vision is to have a presence in the Wordpress ecosystem but not dominate that informs how I approach FCRM. If it's to be the best, cost-effective software with the most power; that's extremely interesting and appealing to me. But it also gives me different expectations.
Anybody else have similar (or differing) feelings?
A lot of times I wonder if I'm expecting greatness that they don't desire to achieve. As of right now, there aren't a lot of Wordpress competitors but that can easily change (I would actually welcome it, as it may light a fire under them to be great).
BTW...I use FCRM (migrated from GetResponse) for one of my brands and it outperforms GR in every way. Which is really the source of me wanting this software to be great(er).
Hi Chris Davis, welcome to the community. FluentCRM is our fastest-growing product and we have the biggest team working on this. If you have been using FluentCRM for a while, you can see it's a super well-mainatined product. For example, just this year, we have released 7 updates and for the last several months, the team working super hard to release version 3 with new UI, SMS marketing, more powerful Automation builder.
FluentCRM is a very complex product and we made it super easy for end users. We use it for all of our brands.
You can say, FluentCRM is the center piece of our whole eco-system.
Just a sidenote, We have 120 people on our teams and each team works on the dedicated product. A specific developer belongs to a product, and they don't work on multiple products. Hope it will change your understanding that, new products do not affect existing products.
We are heavily investing all of our resources and money into the existing products as well as new products.
WPManageNinja is a bootstrap company, and we don't have to pay investors, nor do we overspend on unnecessary things.
Shahjahan Jewel great to know and great to hear from you. I have no doubt the team is working hard. After reading your response I guess my concern is prioritization and focus.
Just to stay consistent with my original post, the fact that via the API I can create a tag but not a custom field feels like a huge oversight with such a large dev team. Just as you have done with FluentCommunity and created a BuddyBoss importer, it seems that you would provide the means to do the same for FCRM to make switching easier.
Is the documentation here going to be for FCRM 3.0? If so, it would make up for a ton of functionality I'm looking for: https://developers.fluentcrm.com/rest-api/
Overall, I just want to be fair to your team and product and make sure I'm not expecting more than I should be.
Shahjahan Jewel So many of these types of questions (I have many) would not need to be asked in the community if there was more transparency and consistency from WPManageNinja with roadmaps with feature requests for every product, (instead of just two) and if those roadmaps were updated at least weekly. It has been quite frustrating for me and many others who don't know what is coming and what the timeline is. It's difficult to make business decisions, like purchasing more fluent products to integrate into FCRM, when we don't know what is going on. For instance, your response to Chris Davis was all news to me. I had no idea about any of those plans.
I really wish that you saw this as a real problem with such a simple solution, as I am suggesting. It also demonstrates to us how to make the most of Fluent products.
I love Fluent products and am desperately needing each one to be well integrated with each other, instead of needing additional software to glue and duct tape fluent products to each other. I am super hesitant to use any of those glue and duct tape products because I am afraid they will blow up when you build those connections into future updates, not to mention the additional complexity that they represent to developing my website.
Shahjahan Jewel This is very useful information. Do please write more about how the company teams are structured. If the information is currently not available on your web site it would be useful and beneficial for customers to also know about this.
There was an update about the plan for FluentCRM last week from the FluentCRM email newsletter and on the FluentCRM blog.
I agree with the sentiment that info about development plans is a good thing, but I think WpManageNinja has more info available about this stuff than people are giving them credit for.
For whatever it's worth, the most recent FluentCRM update added tag- and list-wise growth reporting which I personally find incredibly useful and think is a signifcant feature addition that didn't get the praise it deserves in the shadow of the Fluent Cart release 🌟
Jesse Benjamin agreed