Xobni - wouldn't get out of bed for $20m
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-Nobody really knows the details of the offer.
-Nobody really knows what Xobni has in store.
-Nobody really knows how much say the VC's had.
Most companies start with a feature that becomes a product which becomes a company. The Outlook plugin could be the tip of a much bigger spear. I have never used xobni b/c I don't use outlook but I can see a bunch of possible directions for them. Who knows though? Maybe it is a minor feature. But anyone in a startup knows enough to know how little they know about the inner workings of another company. And anyone who's tried to raise money knows how thoroughly you have to explain your long term plans and revenue models. If you can't say I'm going to be a $100 million dollar company in X years b/c of Y and Z reasons, you're not going to get a series A. You'd also know that $20 million is a small offer after a series A.
I am interested to hear about the "bunch of possible directions" you can see. Can you elaborate?
couldnt u just then sell the outlook plugin for 20 mil
then start on your real big idea in a couple years with 20 mil in the bank
2. A deal with Microsoft almost certainly requires them to come on board at Microsoft for some period of time.
3. A deal might include a noncompete for after they leave.
It really does depend on what the terms of the deal on the table were.
When you take 4.35 million in investment, you are giving away a percentage of your company. Say it's 1/3rd for the sake of argument. That creates a post-money valuation of $13m. Which means that a $20m buyout (once the lawyers get their slice) is, what-- a 1.5x return on investment? The only way an investor would approve that is if the company was tanking (Xobni isn't-- they are buried in good press).
Outlook (and email) is the #1 technology time-sink on the planet (RescueTime has the data to prove it-- someday we'll publish some interesting stats).
If you could walk up to any enterprise and propose to make email 10% more efficient, that's worth a TON of money.
I see what you did there ;-)
Your business model makes a lot more sense now.
"But isn't xobni just an outlook plugin?"
Clearly people have that idea in their head. Now what is xobni going to do about it?
http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/what-ive-learned-from-sa...
"Drowning in Email? Find Email & Attachments Instantly"
"Xobni is the Outlook plug-in that helps you organize your flooded inbox"
It looks to me like they're focused on reaching people who have a problem to solve, and aren't concerned about being viewed as "just an outlook plugin."
What I've noticed that is that a lot of the stories getting voted up here are just bashing something popular, such as Twitter, or Facebook.
1. Not worth reading the whole post. Here is the summary.
2. Inflammatory / Trollish. But here is a good discussion.
3. Must read the article. Here are some great insights.
A vote up, to a lot of people, is not "this is a great post", but rather "I like this topic".
It'd be interesting to know how many people vote up an article BEFORE ever reading it. I'll bet you a nickel that the majority of votes happen that way... Or at least a significant minority.
Anyone got anything different? I ask only because as I'm evidently missing something in the app, based on some of the comments made towards me.
Let's be clear, if you love the app then that's great and I want to hear how it has helped you. If I am missing a trick, then perhaps others are to and so help us to be believers. If you've spotted where this app is heading, explicitly clue the rest of us in, don't simply allude.
Any extension to the Microsoft Office suite should just be marketed straight to enterprise customers. More hours are spent looking at Microsoft Office every day than probably any other activity save sleeping. It's a huge market filled with deep-pocketed customers.
This is not a bad business plan, by the way-- there are quite a number of folks who have made good money filling some gap Microsoft missed, and getting acquired.
The core problem with this commentary is that the writer doesn't understand that Xobni can be more than just an Outlook feature. I think he has a hard time seeing beyond the UI that's been presented.
I am reminded of VitalSigns that many people saw is just a toy for looking at how well your dial up connection was working. Others realized that the underlying technology was interesting, that it applied in the business environment and VitalSigns was bought out for a good price.
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Email is a very target rich environment, I've done quite a lot of work in this area and I think there are two key things to realize about email:
1. Mining the content of emails can give you information about what's in them and the person who wrote them. Examples are any spam filter, POPFile, GMail ads., automatic email response systems.
2. Email also contains relationship information. And this information doesn't need to be gathered by forcing the user to 'friend' people.
If you have access to the email box of a user you have all their email which means all their relationships plus all the subjects they are interested in. If you then do that across a company (or another group) you have a great deal of information for clustering (both by relationship and by content).
You also have IP addresses which leads to physical location (with some degree of error) and time information (including time zones).
That's a great deal of information to have (for example, companies like Facebook would love to know as much about you as possible but only really get the friend relationship; email gives you that effortlessly with content th analyze).
The obvious follow up on this is 'how are they going to make money'. I don't know Xobni so I can't answer for them, but if you look at the areas where money as been made analyzing content or relationships, it's not hard to see that Xobni could be a trojan horse (an Outlook or other email pluging) that gives the user some value while providing greater value behind the scenes.
On your point about the aggregation of such data across a company, I concur. In a thread above, I did note that their current offering may be prelude to looking at the corporate market. However, this is not virgin territory as there are already tools that seek to discover corporate relationships at a macro level from data mining email inboxes, albeit they are only starting to make inroads into businesses. They work unobtrusively behind the scenes to provide business "intelligence" which can include highlighting colleagues who appear to have active communications with a "target".
Surrendering such data to your employer is one thing. However, you allude to an interesting notion, namely Xobni perhaps aggregating and making use of data from the individual in the personal market. That could be a very tough sell amidst probable privacy concerns, but of keen interest to an advertiser at the very least.
Bill Gates, himself, once the richest man in the USA and the richest in the world, said he liked XOBNI, this alone means XOBNI is like the new MS or the new Google! Which makes it worth at least 200,000,000 dollars ... at least, not just the peanuts they wonna throw at, 20 mil is nothing
XOBNI makes email fun again ... and easy ... and those are values.... see values not feature
So outlook without xobni is lame, and nobody wonna use it, not add XOBNI and suddenly everyone wonna jump and spend the whole day inside outlook, ore more specifically XOBNI
Sayin XOBNI is just a feature is like saying RoR is just a lib for Ruby ...... nooooooooo, Ruby is just a feature of RoR, want proof .... DJANGO and Grails both Rails like,
see the tables are truned, the language is the feature ... notthe other way around
python is a feature in DJANGO and Groovy is a feature in Grails, but rails is the way ... man, rails is the way
Tomorrow you will see XOBNI for GMAIL , XOBNI for Yahoo Mail , XOBNI for Mutt even... and when this happens Outlook becomes a feature of XOBNI and not the XOBNI a feature of Outlook
And again Bill Gates HIMSELF complemented Xobni, this alone makes Xobni worth more than 20 mil
Xobni is the next google, those guys are gonna be billionaires, just like how Linus Torvalds became one for inventing Git ... okay so Git may not have turned Linus into a billionaire, but than its not as revolutionary as XOBNI ... and most important Bill Gates, the richest man thant he once was, never compliment Git or said it was any good
Hot. Scoop.
Can we concentrate on the merits of his argument this time?
2. "especially since there is no clear revenue stream opportunities with the product - do you really want ads inside Outlook or would you really pay in order to get the "information" being thrown up about email traffic?"
I'm pretty sure there are more ways to potentially monetize Xobni than advertising or b2b/b2c SaaS.
Than again, if I remember correctly, this guy didn't really do his homework last time either, so why should I think he's done it this time?
I'd be delighted to hear the ways you think they can monetise the product/feature, partly to demonstrate the amount of thought you've given the matter.
In its current incarnation, Xobni is a tool aimed at the individual user. Obviously, the company/product can go in all sorts of directions but so can anyone given time/money/effort.
Let's consider the possibility that their current offering is a prelude to looking at the corporate market. There are already tools that seek to discover corporate relationships at a macro level from data mining email inboxes, albeit they are only starting to make inroads into businesses. They work unobtrusively behind the scenes to provide business "intelligence" which can include highlighting colleagues who appear to have active communications with a "target".
You should also consider that many CRM tools already enable emails to be automatically incorporated into the communication profile/history of a contact, supplemented by richer tools than Xobni presently offer [task mgt, workflow] e.g. salesforce, zoho crm, siebel.
you clearly still consider just the analytics part of the email, which shows you STILL probably haven't really used the product if that's all you think it is.
"While Xobni is focused for now on email organization for Outlook, it wants to be able to aggregate information from different webmail clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, and others. It also wants to bring in instant messaging, and aggregate information from social networks.
Brezina gave the example of a friend who remembers a story another friend related about a ski resort in Vermont. A user will be able to search Xobni’s database for “Stow,” the name of the ski resort, and instantly find all the related threads , conversations, and media traded with friends."
sounds a bit like useful social search to me.
and since you've already nixed advertising, and a saas model -- again based on apparently never trying the product
there's also freemium, support & service behind the product a la open source, cross-sales/ partnership with a CRM package (read: salesforce or zoho)
Several people have mentioned the requirement to aggregate across multiple webmail clients - I confess that I'm not affected by this as I consolidate multiple email accounts in one location and avoid the need to check separate email services individually. If operating on multiple webmail clients is common practice, then I confess to having been ignorant of this gap in the market - of course, people could consolidate their email in either Outlook or Gmail.
As for search, does Google Desktop search not work on your PC? It searches both within your email [certainly Outlook and Gmail] and across the filing system, whilst being free. This should go some way to addressing your example of locating conversations. As for the media attachments, I concede that I've long since stopped using my email inbox as a filing system, saving them off to file directories if they are important enough [Pst files in particular always seem to react badly].
That's OK -- I'm sure Xobni's not crying about it.
Somehow you've translated Xobni not suiting you to Xobni not being worth $20 million.
That's OK too, but at the end of the day, there are a lot of start-ups following these threads, and I wouldn't expect any coming your way.
Also, it's a good thing that the information they mine from the social structure of your contacts is useless. (Moreso, the joint distributions of contact networks among multiple employees in a large organization, or the temporal patterns therein... nothing to see here, move along now)
But most of all, it's a good thing that everyone commenting on the deal knows all there is to know about the product, its futures, and their value to Microsoft and other companies, due no doubt to vast, deep expertise in the field.
Because if the above were not true, well, then it would be just a windbag yelling into an echo chamber, and that simply would not do!
Yes, it's a great thing that everything has already been invented, cannot be improved, and is already maximally efficient. We're done now, let's go get a low-paying service job (or, worse, program Java for a big company)
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/28/xobnis-secret-project-m...
Xobni is able to be integrated into 'all' email clients.
Lots of people do this because its FREE and provides some immediate benefit (enhanced information, etc.).
When you use Xobni, your 'information' is synced back to Xobni's servers. From this they create a social network-like thing that is sort of a hybrid between Plaxo (contact management) and LinkedIn. [Even if you only try out Xobni, they still extract your 'email social structure' to add to the big picture]
Suddenly Xobni is a Social Productivity Network riding on top of Email that is super useful to businesses and that people are willing to PAY FOR to get enhanced networking capabilities, productivity tracking, spam filtering, mobile directory[People include their cell phone nums. in emails all the time]. It requires almost no effort from people to establish 'connections', email is ubiquitous, blah social, blah networking, blah aggregate, blah circle jerk.
Profit.
Everyone can criticize all they want, but this is a clear case of asymmetric information. Xobni knows a lot more about their value than you or I do. But even with the limited information I have, I have to say they are a lot more than just a feature.
With the Yahoo! Mail release (and I'm guessing GMail/hotmail/other client releases in the pipeline), what they're really doing is being a hub for all your contacts, attachments, and online interactions, INDEPENDENT of your email client. I use 4 different email addresses, and at least a couple different email clients for various reasons.
With this synchronization across mail clients, Xobni has transformed itself from an analytics feature to a full-fledged network to manage your contacts and interactions. I could see this integrating powerfully with, for example, Salesforce.com.
Will it increase or decrease depends on the actions of Xobni and the market.
The arguments that the founders "know their potential value" better than us is completely irrelevant. Don't you think MS investigated the company first, it's offerings and it's future before making an offer? I own a startup and think it could be worth billions someday... does that make it so?
Answer: you don't have enough information to make a decision.
Evidence suggests those with the most at risk believe they are worth significantly more.