Etacts, which just presented earlier today at Y Combinator’s Demo Day, is an attempt to bring advanced customer relationship management to your personal contacts list via a few simple features and a slick Gmail integration.
Let’s all just agree: Contact management is a pain in the butt. You want to keep in touch with your friends, business contacts and others, but solutions such as Google Contacts don’t offer advanced customer relationship management (CRM) features like what you see in Salesforce — even though a lot of us could use it. That’s a need Etacts seeks to meet.
Signing up for Etacts essentially occurs in one step: You connect to Etacts via Gmail Oauth. Once that’s done, it automatically imports your Google Contacts into its database and provides you with great information, such as how many e-mail conversations you’ve had with someone, when you first contacted someone, the amount of days since last contact and more. The usefulness of this data becomes immediately apparent as soon as you see it.
The usefulness ramps up to another level when you start using the system to remind you to reconnect with friends and business contacts. You can tell Etacts to remind you to contact your professor once every year or your friend in VC every month. It will e-mail you these reminders.
The killer feature is Gmail integration. Within your Gmail, Etacts will integrate with your e-mail and remind you if someone hasn’t followed up with you, display social media contact information, and provide a general overview of your contacts.
The website is simple and still sparse, but with a bit of effort, Etacts could become a central hub for contact management. The company believes that people will eventually spend “hours a day” within Etacts, because it will be your gateway to your friends.
What are your thoughts on Etacts? What contact tools do you use, and what features are they missing? Let us know in the comments.
Reviews: Gmail
Tags: Etacts, gmail, y combinator
