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May 15, 2006
Prague Startup And Really Simple Support For eMailrooms
From time to time we do an early stage company profile and this week, Sproutit, based in Prague is getting the treatment. We interviewed Charles Jolley, one of the three American founders of Sproutit (pictured here, Jolley far left), a software company that offers a web-based email support application, called Mailroom.
The business model is on-demand software, that is, users subscribe to the service on a month by month basis. Rates are based on volume rather than on seats/number of users.
Mailroom targets the small and medium sized business market. Sproutit’s marketing man says the software takes the “pain out of success”. The pitch is that when a company suddenly gets deluged with emails sent to their contact@, support@, info@ addresses, they can be handled faster with Mailroom.
It is different than standard email in a couple of ways. It exploits RSS (the same technology used to distribute the contents of blogs, online news, and search results), which makes it particularly suitable for teams and sharing the email response jobs. As it gives users the ability to "see" (in an RSS reader) and respond to email sent to other members of the team.
It uses “tags” instead of folders for categorizing and archiving (rather than directories, folders, and subdirectories). Being able to apply more than one tag raises the visibility of email correspondence.
A little bit of AI in the mix automates the reuse of past responses to email queries or requests, says the firm. The apps saves every reply sent and "learns" which replies are more commonly used with each email.
Customers include Chicago-based 37Signals, which uses it to handle their software support emails, Texas-based Blinksale, and JadedPixel, the Canadian company behind Shopify.
These customers, all startups themselves, are early adopters and validate to a degree, Sproutit’s product, but to grow the business as big as they want to, Jolley’s team will face the challenge of penetrating the small and medium sized business software market.
It's one of the toughest markets to penetrate, not as difficult as the carrier market, but for a startup, targeting a huge, highly fragmented market is, to say the least, a challenge.
But Jolley eyes what Intuit has done with its QuickBooks software as proof that it can be done.
The plan is to develop other business-oriented applications with the goal of publishing a suite of tools. As for financing, Jolley said the team aims to raise a typical Series A sized round to pay for marketing and sales and new product development. The founding team is moving back to the States in July, he said.
Posted on May 15, 2006 07:03 AM | Posted to Business software | Web 2.0 | Permalink
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