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Lone Wolf Technologies is shutting down LionDesk, the CRM solution it purchased four years ago this month, Inman has exclusively learned.
The company began notifying customers of the popular CRM’s shutdown “a few weeks ago,” Lone Wolf CEO Jimmy Kelly told Inman. The software will remain available through September to allow plenty of time to finalize customer and data migration.
Kelly said users can take their contacts with them and are being offered accounts and full transition support to Lone Wolf Relationships, the company’s recently launched CRM product that’s part of Foundation, the company’s new enterprise software initiative.
Jimmy Kelly | Photo credit: Lone Wolf
“This is not a decision we take lightly,” Kelly said. “It’s been part of our family for a few years now, but when we got into LionDesk we learned, unfortunately, that it wasn’t going to fit the need of that longer-term vision.”
While Lone Wolf has been promoting Foundation as a strategic suite of end-to-end integrated products, Relationships can be purchased as a stand-alone product and pricing, according to Kelly, will be on par with what LionDesk once offered, which started for some account levels as low as $25/month.
Kelly said the company was envisioning the framework for what is now Foundation back when it looked to acquire LionDesk.
“At the time, we didn’t have front-end pieces, and LionDesk was actually our first CRM acquisition because we felt we’d go with an industry favorite as opposed to build a CRM from scratch,” he said. “The second part was we wanted to bring in some folks with really strong industry backgrounds.”
Carlsbad, California-based LionDesk was founded in 2014 by David Anderson and rose quickly in the real estate CRM space for its balance of affordability and features. It was an early adopter of text and video campaigns and attracted volumes of users because of its easy onboarding, mobile experience and easy-to-realize ROI.
Lone Wolf also scooped up HomeSpotter and its founder Aaron Kardell at the same time as LionDesk. The year prior it acquired W+R Studios, maker of Cloud CMA, founded and run by Greg Roberston and Dan Woolley.
Of that group, only Kardell remains at Lone Wolf. Robertson and Woolley run proptech consultant Giant Steps Advisors, while Anderson is part of Venture MLS and also an independent industry consultant.
LionDesk was initially supposed to be the “core center CRM,” according to Kelly. He said that its scalability became a challenge, and that it wouldn’t ultimately integrate with the goals for Foundation, which is to be a seamless, lead-to-close experience.
Kelly said selling is always an option for some software companies in this position, but he said that LionDesk users are still his customer base.
“From a philosophical perspective, we’re not going to just shut that down and leave users with nothing as an alternative. That’s not how we do business,” Kelly told Inman about the decision. “We spent time understanding how people use LionDesk, what features are the most used, and those show up in Relationships. So we have parity or better when we move customers from Lion Desk to Relationships.”
Lone Wolf’s Relationships earned high marks in an Inman review for its blending of artificial intelligence with a focus on helping agents manage their contacts and how they work.
“The software has a slew of templated emails that use artificial intelligence to compose referral requests, testimonial asks, new buyer messages, open house promotions and other common touchpoints. The AI will also summarize and modify, and the user can edit as needed, too,” the review stated.
