Interview with Oleksii Avramenko, Co-Founder of EspoCRM

Oleksii Avramenko is a web developer, CEO and Co-founder of open-source CRM software EspoCRM. 

Founded in 2011, EspoCRM was the winner of the CRM category in the 2025 FOSS awards, and Oleksii was kind enough to speak with us about how he got started, the future of the industry and much more. 

Hi Oleksii, congratulations on being named best CRM & Support Software in the 2025 FOSS awards. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, can you start by introducing yourself? 

I’m Oleksii Avramenko. I’m the CEO of EspoCRM Inc. and one of its co-founders. I’ve been involved in creating the product from the early concept to where we are now. 

My role covers overall strategy. I research market opportunities, study our competitors, and analyse industry trends to see where we can differentiate ourselves.  

I also work on strategic partnerships to extend our product’s capabilities and reach new users.  

Last in order but not of importance, I manage our operational strategy and optimise how we structure our team and allocate development resources to consistently scale our business. 

Good business software shouldn’t be a luxury and companies should have the ability to adjust the software to their processes and requirements.

How did you get started in the tech sector? 

My entry into tech was a gradual path. It started in university with a computer science degree and naturally transformed into a junior developer role at a small software company. 

There, I got a chance to work on different projects, including CRM systems, which taught me a lot about building software.  

I saw how many inefficient business processes could be solved with the right technology, and it probably planted the seed for eventually starting my own company. 

What inspired you to create EspoCRM, and why did you choose to make it open source? 

The idea came from our early work with small and mid-sized companies.

Together with my friends, Yurii Kuznietsov and Taras Machyshyn, we founded a consultancy company that dealt with CRM customisation and development services.  

Across our projects, we kept seeing the same pattern over and over: companies either couldn’t afford the expensive solutions or they paid for something complicated that was impossible or difficult to customise for their industry. 

During one of our team discussions, we wondered why there wasn’t a good open-source alternative to meet those needs. 

We wanted to create something that people worldwide could actually use and enjoy. In 2014, the CRM market was dominated by slow, complicated interfaces.  

Single Page Application CRMs weren’t common yet and we thought that if we focused on making the interface simple and the system fast, people would respond to that. It turned out we were right. 

Making it open source was a natural choice. Good business software shouldn’t be a luxury and companies should have the ability to adjust the software to their processes and requirements. 

Community is what keeps an open-source project alive.

EspoCRM has been around for over a decade now. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about sustaining open-source projects? 

I would say that there are two. 

Number one, is that code quality is more important than the number of features. We’ve seen plenty of open-source projects fail because they became impossible to maintain or extend. 

Clean code is about efficiency. When the codebase is well-structured and follows consistent patterns, you spend less time fixing bugs and more time building new functionality, this means you can look at your code six months or six years later and will understand it quickly. 

Number two is that community is what keeps an open-source project alive. Looking back, we made our path more difficult by developing our own framework. 

If we had used Laravel or another established framework, we could have attracted thousands of developers who already know, use, and love that technology.

But when you decide to create something custom, you’re asking people to invest extra time to understand your approach, which makes building a community much harder. 

How do you balance adding new features with keeping the platform simple and intuitive? 

It comes down to understanding the tasks users encounter most frequently in their daily work and being disciplined about feature decisions. You have to learn to say no to feature requests, even to really good ones.  

When you are an open-source project, you get hundreds of requests and opinions about your software (which is a great thing). But with each request, we have to ask ourselves: will this functionality be useful to many people or just a few? The answer to this question determines our next step.  

We also study lots of interface design guides and best practices to understand where elements work best and arrange them in a convenient way. 

There’s always an interesting debate in our community feedback: some users want more modern, animated interfaces, others specifically appreciate our focus on simplicity and thoughtfulness.

But when you use a system daily, you’ll quickly notice that those dynamic animations that might look impressive actually become time-wasters that decrease productivity. 

What role does community feedback, particularly in areas like sustainability, play in your development cycle? 

Community feedback drives a lot of our development decisions. I’d say it’s one of the biggest advantages of the open-source model. Anyone can share their ideas, suggest new features or design changes, and actually influence the project’s future. 

Though with code contributions, we have to remain cautious. Any code that goes into the core system becomes our responsibility to support and maintain long-term. Our quality standards are pretty high for that reason. 

But we love seeing how many users have built their own solutions that extend our basic functionality. They’re solving problems and adding features that complement what we’ve built, which benefits everyone. 

How do you see AI and automation influencing CRM systems in the near future? 

We’re definitely facing big changes ahead. I believe more and more of the data management and information processing tasks that people do manually today will be automated. 

Right now, we’re seeing an interesting trend where people want to generate reports by describing what they need in plain text instead of clicking through menus and setting up filters.  

AI is, in fact, changing how users expect to work with CRM systems. They want their CRM to understand what they’re asking for without having to learn how the system’s tools work. 

It can make CRM systems more accessible to people who aren’t advanced users but know what data they want to extract or analyze. And I think this is just the beginning. We’ll see more automation in routine tasks that currently require a lot of time. 

What is the secret of your success? 

I’d say it’s having the right team and staying disciplined. Everyone has to be in a role where they do what they’re naturally good at.  

You have to provide direction and feedback but also give people the freedom they need. Programming has a creative, artistic side to it and you can’t micromanage creativity. 

The second key is discipline. Developing a product requires total commitment. You have to put in all your time if you want to see progress. Strong software doesn’t come from half measures. 

What do you love most about what you do? 

It’s the feedback from our users. When people tell us how EspoCRM has helped their business, it’s proof that what we’ve built is genuinely useful to our community.  

These messages inspire us to keep developing and improving the product. Knowing that our software simplifies running a business for someone is the best kind of motivation.