Interview with Fulvio Catalano, Mokapen CEO, the free CRM dedicated to small companies.
It can be very difficult for a company to achieve the goal of an organized and optimized workflow in all sectors. Technology, as always, is a valuable tool to help entrepreneurs focus entirely on their business, entrusting procedures and bureaucracy to the so-called CRM. A CRM, an acronym that stands for Customer Relationship Management, is software that can digitally optimize the work steps thanks to a series of functions that allow you to oversee activities and resources.
Among the most effective and intuitive CRMs ever is the one designed and developed by Mokapen, an innovative startup from Milan born with the goal of facilitating the work of small businesses. This is not a simple mission, considering the fact that the Mokapen CRM, in its current version, is totally free of charge for all companies.
Let’s take a closer look at Mokapen!
Mokapen: all the functions
Mokapen can manage different phases of the workflow, thanks to clear and intuitive sections. Let’s take a look at them:
Project and Task management
Tabs
Through this tool, it is possible to assign and organize work tasks, monitor progress, and deadlines through filters for each team or for each individual member.
Kanban
Small “post-it” that do not detach! This view allows you to interactively see all tasks within projects.
Calendar
With this feature, it will be easier to plan your activities by day, week, or month. Integrable with Google Calendar.
Contact management
Contacts & Companies
In this section, you can upload your contacts and easily find who you are looking for. You can link activities to customers, leads, suppliers, partners.
Sales management
Sales Pipeline
In this section, you can create sales opportunities on saved contacts by defining the amount and all the steps of the deal. A useful tool to follow the deal flow and the follow-up.
Customer Support Management
User Tickets
Through this section, you can manage product bugs and support requests by creating tickets dedicated to the team in charge of solving them.
External Tickets
“External” section through which customers can open support tickets
Of course, the list of Mokapen functions does not end here! To know all the other functions, read the interview with Fulvio Catalano, CEO and founder of this innovative reality.
Hello Germana, nice to meet you, and thank you for finding in Mokapen a possible “real” solution to small realities. In fact, Mokapen evolves continuously into a roadmap (you can also find it here) already full of features dedicated to a single purpose: to save time managing your data. Obviously, from this, other very important advantages such as business growth (especially profits!), improving the digital culture of your team, and automatically linking existing connections in your network. I have taken so long to answer the question, let’s answer your question.
Besides the main features you mentioned we also have:
- Report: for each of the areas mentioned above, an interactive dashboard is already available with automatic reports that graphically show the health status of your organization.
- Connect to Gmail or your e-mail account: we are completing final tests to allow you to connect your e-mail or Gmail account to Mokapen. Automatically all contacts present will have a tab that shows the traffic of e-mail communications. In addition, it will be possible to send emails to one or more contacts. In this way, the company can keep track of the history behind a contract, as well as of course all the tasks, projects, tickets, and opportunities connected to it.
- Advanced features to manage contacts: we have integrated a system that automatically takes data from a website (logo, description, social contacts) if present. When I create a company contact by entering its website (eg.: mokapen.com) I will get other data that I do not have to enter by hand automatically. Then you can also merge duplicate contacts quickly.
We have many other features already active that allow you to automate processes and data collection, but I leave the discovery to users :).
How and when did the idea of Mokapen was born?
Mokapen was digitally born on December 24, 2019, but its idea dates back about 12 months before. For a long time, I have been involved in creating business strategies based on data, which, as in many realities, are messy, “dirty”, broken up in different databases, or in even worse files! Since creating business strategies required me to process monthly changes to existing files and Exchange many emails, and having realized that the most important currency of our day is time, one day I decided to put everything in cloud storage. So I started to collide against the missing processes, the different needs, and the difficulty of many users in knowing how to manage complex existing online tools, with too many buttons and often not available in Italian.
So I found the answer in the Italian digital system: the development of an online platform in Italian (Mokapen is also in English obviously and already prepared for other foreign languages), which was modular and from the really “spontaneous” UI. Since I launched it, I have spoken to many Italian companies and business realities who have given me confirmation of the present need for a way of saving time, managing their e-business data in a simple way.
What is the Mokapen Network?
I am happy about this question because users are particularly fond of the Mokapen Network. It is the Mokapen marketplace organizations that want to have more visibility, for free. Here you can see the organizations that are already digitalized (because they use a CRM online) grouped by category, and inserted in a ranking based on how much they use Mokapen: an organization that creates tasks, projects, contacts, and use the tool every day is more digitalized also in the processes and in the way of working Agile, so it should be better promoted. Anyone who lands in the Mokapen Network can then be found by potential customers or find both partners and business opportunities.
Mokapen is free, why this choice? How is the market responding?
Generally I have seen that in Italy there are no Italian online CRMs that have a free version without limits. In Italy, we have the problem of the learning barrier of such tools as CRMs. Furthermore, If we make them free of charge from the start, we will only push away those who are already hesitant about this change of mentality. That’s why I launched it for free. Another reason is that it allowed me to be able to test the product online without too much pretense. Of course, Mokapen will also have premium packages, which we will launch in the upcoming weeks, but everything that the free version offers will be forever free. Another upgrade of the premium version: most CRMs charge per user. I consider this strategy advantageous only for those who sell the CRM, but not for the organization because if I have to pay 15 euro/month per user and I have 50 users my monthly expense grows exponentially! I aim to utility, first of all, for this, the premium version costs of Mokapen will be applied to organizations so if for example I pay 99 euro/month for 100 users then all 100 users will have the active premium features.
What about future features?
As anticipated we have a rich development roadmap and many users make us requests that we accept with pleasure. Here are some previews of upcoming releases:
- Landing page and online forms: one of the main problems of our users is to be able to catalog the contacts generated by online forms (e.g., “contact us”) of their sites. This is very important because most of the contacts of potential customers remain in the inbox unless someone manually uploads them to a portal. We will launch by the end of the year the possibility of creating landing pages or forms to be integrated into your website thanks to Mokapen. All the customer’s data will be saved directly in Mokapen and it will also be possible to create automatisms, for example: “when I receive a contact email through my site create a task with the title Web contact and assign it to Germana”. In this way, the traffic from the site passes directly on Mokapen.
- Documents and wikis: do you have processes, specification documents, or instructions to share with the whole team? Well, in this new area you can create text documents that you can link to any other data on Mokapen.
- Offers and invoicing: After the sales opportunities area will be completed we will integrate offers and invoicing, to connect the entire flow of opportunities → offer → contract → invoicing. Here, too, the goal is to provide businesses with everything they need to work within a single app.
- Third parties integrations: This step is really long but we are working hard. We plan integrations with apps like Mailerlite, Mailchimp, Outlook, Alexa, Calendly, and many other brands that have the same purpose: organize people’s data and time.
Mobile app: we are already working on a mobile app (both Android and iOS) that will allow you to have your own business in your pocket!
How did you launch your project?
This is the second startup that I launched. While for the first we followed to the letter the guide of the good Italian startupper who wants to emulate the American one (with all the consequent disappointment from raw reality), creating tens of elevator pitches, marketing campaigns, meetings with investors, business plan version 23.00, with Mokapen I immediately aimed to create the product. We are a small team and I deal with both development and marketing strategy, but the focus is on the quality and well-done realization of the product to really create a value then will eventually attract users. And that’s what’s happening. So I first aimed to create the online CRM with a minimum level of functionality and quality, then I carried out both the strategic part that communication and marketing directly to users. As soon as the premiums are online we will see what economic gains we will have.
Do you also use Mokapen to organize your work?
Certainly! When I started developing Mokapen I needed a place to keep track of activities, contacts, and everything! In my team, we then created within Mokapen app the “Mokapen” organization in order to manage the development tasks of the team to develop the same CRM :). This is also a great benefit for Mokapen itself because in this way every feature is constantly monitored by the development team. On the other hand, how could I promote it to other users if I was not the first to test the quality of my product and validate its value and benefits generated !?
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