Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw
73 points - today at 2:55 PM
Hi everyone, I am Kumar, co-founder of Dench (https://denchclaw.com). We were part of YC S24, an agentic workflow company that previously worked with sales floors automating niche enterprise tasks such as outbound calling, legal intake, etc.
Building consumer / power-user software always gave me more joy than FDEing into an enterprise. It did not give me joy to manually add AI tools to a cloud harness for every small new thing, at least not as much as completely local software that is open source and has all the powers of OpenClaw (I can now talk to my CRM on Telegram!).
A week ago, we launched Ironclaw, an Open Source OpenClaw CRM Framework (https://x.com/garrytan/status/2023518514120937672?s=20) but people confused us with NearAI’s Ironclaw, so we changed our name to DenchClaw (https://denchclaw.com).
OpenClaw today feels like early React: the primitive is incredibly powerful, but the patterns are still forming, and everyone is piecing together their own way to actually use it. What made React explode was the emergence of frameworks like Gatsby and Next.js that turned raw capability into something opinionated, repeatable, and easy to adopt.
That is how we think about DenchClaw. We are trying to make it one of the clearest, most practical, and most complete ways to use OpenClaw in the real world.
Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfACTbc3Bh4#t=43
npx denchclaw
I use DenchClaw daily for almost everything I do. It also works as a coding agent like Cursor - DenchClaw built DenchClaw. I am addicted now that I can ask it, “hey in the companies table only show me the ones who have more than 5 employees” and it updates it live than me having to manually add a filter.On Dench, everything sits in a file system, the table filters, views, column toggles, calendar/gantt views, etc, so OpenClaw can directly work with it using Dench’s CRM skill.
The CRM is built on top of DuckDB, the smallest, most performant and at the same time also feature rich database we could find. Thank you DuckDB team!
It creates a new OpenClaw profile called “dench”, and opens a new OpenClaw Gateway… that means you can run all your usual openclaw commands by just prefixing every command with `openclaw --profile dench` . It will start your gateway on port 19001 range. You will be able to access the DenchClaw frontend at localhost:3100. Once you open it on Safari, just add it to your Dock to use it as a PWA.
Think of it as Cursor for your Mac (also works on Linux and Windows) which is based on OpenClaw. DenchClaw has a file tree view for you to use it as an elevated finder tool to do anything on your mac. I use it to create slides, do linkedin outreach using MY browser.
DenchClaw finds your Chrome Profile and copies it fully into its own, so you won’t have to log in into all your websites again. DenchClaw sees what you see, does what you do. It’s an everything app, that sits locally on your mac.
Just ask it “hey import my notion”, “hey import everything from my hubspot”, and it will literally go into your browser, export all objects and documents and put it in its own workspace that you can use.
We would love you all to break it, stress test its CRM capabilities, how it streams subagents for lead enrichment, hook it into your Apollo, Gmail, Notion and everything there is. Looking forward to comments/feedback!
Comments
I really don't want to yuck anybody's yums or step on dev work that I had nothing to do with, because I've been there and I know it sucks, but OpenClaw is barely secure enough to even play with in a sandbox. Giving it private information about your real business and real business contacts feels like an absolutely insane thing to do.
At best OpenClaw is like a toy... if the toy was a gun and it shot real bullets. This feels like playing Russian roulette with your livelihood.
I think a better solution would be to bring in one of the many Openclaw alternatives like NullClaw, ZeroClaw, etc. The magic of Openclaw is the heartbeat and cron modules so bringing in that piece should not be too difficult? I'll fork and hack away at it as well but the less dependent you are on other projects, the longer the longevity.
And the design principals are already pretty well established (accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, custom object model, stages, etc.). It just needs to be turned into a database boilerplate with a bunch of agent tools. Excited to try this out.
Responding to some HN comments, I understand the focus on Sales Automation and Outreach can be worrysome.
But for me personally, this is where I do all knowledge work. For me it acts like Cursor, Happenstance, News Aggregator, Fun games creator like Pacman (it has an App Store), I can import Notion into editable MD files, create reports and presentations, etc.
I mean, ultimately why would you even need a CRM if not to sell something? And if you are going to sell something ultimately you want to get that done without any additional layers of abstraction. So the interface is the definition of the goal and the output is measured in results.
"Hey claw, I want to sell my product. Go figure it out!"
You don't need a UI for that.
[1]: https://xcancel.com/kumareth/status/2023534527113818625
[1] https://www.ssp.sh/brain/managing-my-business-with-obsidian/
It sees everything you do, really? What's it gonna do with that data? You don't know.
Put all your customer data in there, all your customer relationships. It's fine, it couldn't leak all that information, it couldn't screw up any sensitive business details I'm sure. This is gonna go great.
Sorry AFK everybody I'm gonna go get myself a VibeMBA.
Anyway, good luck, I'm really looking forward to the user stories in a few weeks! I'm sure this won't go badly at all.
So basic automation and forcing the web to be "open"...
No one is talking about how AI is going to destroy business models that are dependent on dark patterns, on walled gardens, on poorly designed one size fits all implementations (so many things wedged sideways into sales force).
Fight fire with fire.
Sigh.
Fuck me, it's going to get worse before it gets better, isn't it?