Rate my startup: HobsonFiles.com | Hacker News Reader

Rate my startup: HobsonFiles.com

5 pointsfjabre6 comments

HobsonFiles is a dead simple and fast CRM/task manager that is integrated with Gmail & Google Apps.

We have have been using it at another startup, TeleEMG, to manage thousands of our own business leads for several months now and have decided to spin it off as its own product.

How has it been useful to our company?

1. Since it integrates with Google Contacts we also get a full sync of contacts to our mobiles which means we get caller ID on incoming for all of our biz leads.

2. The UI is dead simple and intuitive. We spend less time fumbling around with the UI like we did with Salesforce and more time being productive. You can instant search through your contacts and bring up any notes/emails/tasks you have associated with them.

3. We recently added a click-to-call feature which integrates with Gmail's phone, making it super easy to dial out to contacts from your laptop..

We spent a lot of time making it as simple as possible so that our users could instantly figure out how to use it.

Please check it out and let us know if there's anything we can do to improve HobsonFiles.

www.HobsonFiles.com

Can tell you spend a lot of time on it, and it shows- the UI is simple but slick.

That said, here are some thoughts:

The main page of the site isn't really getting at what it is. It isn't a personal assistant. It is a somewhat easier to use web-based Outlook Web Access-like saas. Maybe something like "Makes online email and task management easy."

About the bullets:

* Auto-dial any contact in your addressbook in a single click

could be rewritten as "Auto-dial your contacts with a click"

    * Auto-scan & organize your important email sent from real people

becomes: "" (nothing) If it is a web-based email client, right? I don't understand this auto-scan thing at first glance and neither will your customers.

    * Auto-sync your contacts to your iPhone, Blackberry & Android devices

Sounds neat, but without context it doesn't sound revolutionary. My first thought was, "Can't anyone just do <a href="tel:111-222-3333">111-222-3333</a> to do that?" and the second was "Does that work with Skype, etc.?" I think you'll need to specify the GMail phone thing.

    * Auto-delegate tasks to friends & coworkers

This sounds like it's a bit out of focus with the goal of a simple web-based dashboard for email and personal/business tasks. Is it a personal task management and email/contacts app, or is it a task management system like Jira? I'd focus on the former and axe this.

Nothing mentioned about low-cost on front page like "Cheaper than Outlook and connects to your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.".

All in all though, I personally wouldn't have interest in it, and I can't really think of anyone I know that would. I think that basically it's main purpose seems to be a wrapper around Gmail to provide an even simpler UI and task assignment/management.

I think it seriously needs something it does that nothing else can do, that is of serious value to the small business owner (which it seems to be targeted at).

I don't see it as a real CRM, and with Sugar CRM, Salesforce, etc. you'd have to make that the primary focus.

I understand it was in use at another startup, but I really think you need to seriously pick something for it to be really good at, and beef that up.

Good work though! Looks nice!

Thank you for the feedback.

I agree and I've already started to implement some of it.

I agree that the design and interface is really nice.

I hooked it up to my startup Google Apps account. Basically if things are in my inbox, then I need to act on it, and if not I archive it. But when I logged into the HobsonFiles dashboard, I was unclear of what to do. Even though I had maybe 10 things in my inbox, I only had a couple of things show up on the first page. The people in the "contacts" list weren't people who were particularly important. Maybe it would be useful to someone who started using it religiously, but it would be really helpful if you spent some time looking at it at for the "first time" and seeing if it's intuitive what to do next.

+1 Thanks for the feedback. I will put together some instructions on the blog and link to it when I'm done.

EDIT: So I changed the general message to fit the original goal of this app: collaboration.

We originally implemented HobsonFiles exactly the way I currently describe it on the page. We need to bring back the collaborative feature but it should only take a few days to do that.

I believe this type of collab is definitely something that hasn't been done with email before. I'll put up a demo video shortly.

http://www.HobsonFiles.com

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