Show HN: BetterFriend – a CRM just to be a better friend

For me, I enjoy having friends and interacting with them, but keeping in touch is still hard. Doesn't come naturally to me. This is basically kinda like a reminder.

If anything, I'd like it to go further - (privacy aside) integrating with email and communicators to automatically remind me of birthdays, friends I didn't message for a while, their kids names etc.

I used to have this same opinion, but I realized I was wrong. It's arguably sad that we're in this current moment, but anyway we are — so these problems caused by too much tech (if they really are caused by that) are nevertheless, real problems, so...

...tech help solving them is welcome!

Sounds like effective altruism:

"Make as much money as possible regardless of ethical or moral issues" will some how allow you to "strategically investing helping the most people as possible"

> ... a database is overkill... I have a reminder in my todoist app ...

So you have a database, it's just someone else's and it's called todoist.

A spreadsheet is simply a graphical view of a database.

First thing that came to mind. The vercel domain here is also off-putting, makes it feel like a weekend project that could be turned off any second.

Feel like a yearly cadence doesn't match some goals sometimes, but I could toss that in there too.

Super cool -- have had a list in a journal for a few years now, felt it could use a refresh, so will always keep betterfriend live and, as far as I can, free.

Literally -- I've had friends use attio for their personal life, and I needed it to not be a commercial crm

yeah. It was the whole advantage of centralising social media on one platform: all your friends were there and they used it to share things. At the very start, it spread through universities because it was how you got invited to parties (events was the killer app they never really developed)

They burned it all for short term clicks and now if I look at my feed I get content mills and only a handful of people who still do updates, and the notifications it sends to me "someone whose profile you haven't looked at in years has some comments on it" feel more and more desperate.

Wasn’t OG facebook about stalking women on your own campus? Did The Social Network lie to us? /s

I find it irritating that you can toggle to dark mode, but in dark mode the toggle switch is invisible, because it doesn't have a dark mode. You can click where you know the toggle to be, but that doesn't seem optimal.

nixing that -- will remain free.

That’s short-sighted… I need a reminder to call my mom, doesn’t mean I don’t care about her.

I’d be honored to be important enough for someone that they thought about adding me in such a tool to not forget me.

It was surreal how many of my extended family stopped wishing me a happy birthday once I left Facebook. Automatic reminders are amazingly useful.

Yeah, sure, sorry about that. But I'm able to forget my own birthday so this could be useful.

“I've moved around a lot - and I realized I'm losing track of friends across a lot of apps, locations, and time-zones.”

From the first sentence, sounds like this isn’t an option. I can relate.

This is a pretty shallow take.

Not everyone's brain works the same way. For people with ADHD (and other neurodivergent conditions), executive dysfunction can make it really hard to remember to reach out -- even to people they care about deeply. It's not about not valuing the friendship; it's about how memory and motivation work differently.

Instead of disparaging people for using tools that help them maintain relationships, maybe try having a little empathy -- or at the very least, an open mind. Not everyone connects the way you do, and that doesn't make their friendships any less real.

-- Yup. Small tool, will be a live project, and removed all mention of free trials. Will be free as hosted.