At $19.87 a month, Contatta wears its origin story on the price tag. The number nods to 1987, when its founders created ACT!, the contact manager that gave professionals somewhere to keep the details around a name.
Pat Sullivan and Mike Muhney announced Contatta's public launch on November 10. Their new personal contact manager is available on the web, with native iPhone and Android apps still to come. The proposition is refreshingly small: help you remember a person and follow through on what you said you'd do.
I like that ambition. A customer relationship management (CRM) system can tell you how much a deal might be worth. It doesn't necessarily help you return to a conversation without making the other person start over. For a consultant, adviser or independent business owner, that distinction can matter more than another forecast chart.
According to the launch announcement, Contatta brings relationship notes, activity history and follow-up reminders together. It also offers contact imports and professional-detail enrichment that users review before saving. The official site lists Gmail and Outlook connections and contact sharing. Those are vendor descriptions, rather than the results of a hands-on test here.
The interesting question is whether keeping those records becomes easier than the improvised arrangement you already tolerate. A notebook has a surprisingly strong advantage over a new subscription: you know where it is.
For an illustrative example, consider an independent consultant whose prospective customer wants to revisit a project after moving premises. A name and phone number won't preserve that timing. A note about the move, the promised follow-up and the previous discussion might save both people a tedious restart. The value is in remembering the unfinished thought.
That also gives a trial a better purpose than importing every contact you've ever collected. I'd start with a handful of appropriate work contacts and a few genuine follow-ups. Use the system during an ordinary week. When a reminder appears, does it bring back enough context to make the call useful? After the call, is adding the next note easy enough that you actually do it?
There is a limit to what enrichment can do here. A person's public job title can help you find the right record. It can't tell you what you promised them. Personal contact management still involves paying attention.
Contatta lists an annual price of $198 alongside the monthly option and offers a free trial. I'd resist buying the year on the strength of a tidy import. The more revealing moment comes a few conversations later, when the novelty has worn off and a small business follow-up could easily slip.
The personal focus deserves some thought if several people serve the same customers. The site says contacts can be shared, but I'd want to see how a colleague picks up the work during an absence before treating an individual's account as the team's customer record. A shared contact and a workable handoff are different things to demonstrate.
I'd also ask to see an export of the notes and history I care about before committing a large collection. And I'd keep sensitive customer details out of an experiment until the business has decided which information belongs there. Neither question requires turning a simple contact manager into a major software project.
There's room for a tool with this narrow a job. Plenty of useful business conversations never become a deal stage, and they still deserve to be remembered. Give the trial a few real promises to keep. The next conversation is the demo.
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