Those Xobni guys are ballsy(zellunit.com)
zellunit.com
Those Xobni guys are ballsy
http://zellunit.com/those-xobni-guys-are-ballsy/
15 comments
The choice not to sell may very well have not been theirs. No VC I know would want to sell a company that's doing well for a 2.5 to 5 times return.
This has been mentioned before: http://mattmaroon.com/?p=361
This has been mentioned before: http://mattmaroon.com/?p=361
If I was the xobni guys...
I would make email a platform; as in, make it easy to develop apps for e-mail.
Like To-do lists, contact lists, crm's, etc...
I would make email a platform; as in, make it easy to develop apps for e-mail.
Like To-do lists, contact lists, crm's, etc...
Which is exactly what IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has been since 1989.
> Which is exactly what IBM Lotus Notes/Domino has been since 1989.
No, like gmail, yahoo & hotmail.
No, like gmail, yahoo & hotmail.
Those are applications, not platforms. Platforms are intended to make it easy for independant developers to build value-added applications. For example: MySQL, MS Office, Common Lisp, Amazon EC2, etc.
Yes, and I was saying that xobni should build out a platform for developers to create VALUE ADDING applications to gmail, yahoo & hotmail, like To-do lists, contact lists, crm's, etc...
Kind of like how facebook is a platform...
Kind of like how facebook is a platform...
It's generally unwise to a build a platform on top of something controlled by third party. Any little change that third party makes is likely to break your platform.
thanks for the ballsy urban dictionary definition link. that really made the post for me.
Getting people to switch email client is tough.
yea completely agreed. but keep in mind they can wean them off it it since they have access to all the data, and they can instantly port it over. they could even let you use their client and your existing client in the interim, or just use each in different cases. obviously this poses new technical challenges, but not out of the realm of possibility.
I would have sell, MS can just get someone to work on those widgets.
If so, why haven't they? There is a common misperception about how well large companies can respond to threats to their cash cow products (and thus many people opt not to enter markets where they will be competing with those theoretical products from the large company).
That said, I definitely believe the single biggest threat to the growth and success of Xobni is their absolute dependence on Outlook in the current iteration. But, by the time MS releases a tool that does some of what Xobni does, Xobni will (I would hope) have a multi-platform version with a dozen additional features. Xobni obviously doesn't plan to stand still waiting for MS to catch up to them.
That said, I definitely believe the single biggest threat to the growth and success of Xobni is their absolute dependence on Outlook in the current iteration. But, by the time MS releases a tool that does some of what Xobni does, Xobni will (I would hope) have a multi-platform version with a dozen additional features. Xobni obviously doesn't plan to stand still waiting for MS to catch up to them.
Yes, this is a good direction for Xobni to go in, and they're already making moves in this direction with the Yahoo! Mail "leak". There is great value in aggregating a user's contacts and relationships across accounts, and being a central platform for relationship management.
> 2. Produce an email client themselves when their value proposition gets good enough.
I doubt it. Their core competency is email analytics, and there's not really a reason for them to create their own email client. Why create Xobni webmail and get a 10% market share of power users, when you can create a Xobni plugin for Outlook, Yahoo, hotmail and Gmail and get over 50% of email power users. Eventually Xobni will expand beyond power users.
> 3. Don’t build a social network, just make email fun to use and make it easy for people to see what their email graph looks like.
Yes, it's fun, but that fun is hard to monetize. This could be a cool feature, but not the focus of Xobni's efforts.
> 4. Become the all-in-one contact threshold tool, and by that I mean users should be able to see their activity across all aspects of communication and set personal alerts for when their interaction level with somebody drops below or goes above a certain level.
Becoming the all-in-one contacts & relationships management tool? Yes. But, I think the idea of completely automating interactions with "Level 1" and "Level 2" contacts is taking it a bit too far. Being genuine is hard to fake, and Xobni shouldn't try to fake that.
> 5. Sell employee analytics to HR departments via the huge amount of mailbox data that they can parse and interpret.
Lots of potential here. The value is less in the data, and more in the interpretation -- HR departments aren't statistical consultants. One option would have to develop a consulting arm to maximize the value here. Another, more scalable, option would be to develop a killer product that does the analysis for the employer.
> 6. Attack other verticals on the local machine
Maybe. But there's more money in email analytics than in file system, IM or iTunes analytics. As for gathering data from other consumer activities, email is still a far from solved problem (and offers far more valuable data). Let Xobni focus on that!