Xobni (YC S06) comes to Gmail

I completely understand this problem, and I'm frustrated to no end that innovation in email has stagnated.

I have a standing offer at Hackers & Founders events to pay anyone who helps me fix my email problems $20 to 40 a month as their first subscription customer. My hair is on fire. I'm a motivated buyer. And, I'm convinced that there are millions of business people world wide that have this very problem. Every single business person that complains about email overload has this problem, but probably can't articulate it well.

I need an email system where a contact is considered a first class citized. GMail's innovation was proper management of the conversation (threaded view). But, I'm convinced that their engineers don't see the problems with contact management because they benefit from a universal address book, and they don't interact with random people that aren't in their global address book.

Business communication isn't about viewing a single conversation thread. It's about building a relationship with a person over time.

In my email, I need to quickly know who I'm talking to, I need to have quick and easy access to previous conversations I've had with this person. I need to be able to easily write comments and meta data about this person. I need my email to automatically recognize contact information from a new person I'm emailing, and automatically put that into my address book.

Xobni comes the closest I've seen to fixing those problems. I wish more people would innovate in this space.

I've been running H&F for 3 years, and I have close to a thousand contacts. I live out of my email, and sadly, Gmail is increasingly broken for me. In the next month, I'm going back to Outlook + Xobni for email management ( unless the Xobni plugin for gmail is fantastic), and I'm giving up my Android for a Blackberry, because they have a Xobni app. and their email platform seems much more mature. As for the back end, I might still stick with Google Apps for business, but I'm increasingly dissatisfied, and I'm thinking of migrating over to an Exchange based platform.

If anyone starts work on fixing this problem, please let me know. I'm a motivated buyer.

Xobni kept crashing on me all the time, but otherwise I would have used it. Outlook is terrible for searching/finding mail, Xonbi makes that a lot simpler.

Rapportive is good if you're frequently in contact with new people, it's great for giving you context.

When I was searching for a new flatmate being able to instantly see a potential flatmate's tweets and facebook page made it much easier to decide who I wanted to live with.

On startup mailing lists it lets me see instantly the Linkedin background of someone making a comment. I'd love to have rapportive functionality connected with something like Lanyrd to see the background of conference attendees.

I really like Rapportive for following public mailing lists. It gives me more context for each post and allows me to identify repeat posters more easily.

Rapportive is doing a great job for me. Whenever I get an email from an unknown person, it's great to have some context. For example, I got a couple of bug reports via mail last month regarding a piece of software I wrote. By having the twitter and github account I could easily see what skill level the person had.

I think Rapportive is doing this wrong though and unless they pivot or get acquired I don't think they can go anywhere like this. There is a huge gap between email and CRM, Rapportive is the perfect candidate for the job yet they only support like 3 CRMs, I don't know why. Why they throw away such a great business idea. Unless they focus on the gap between CRM and Email it's just a cool plugin, as soon as they start to solve that pain they are in business, making money and their audience will be people whose got money and happy to spend.

As a small company or just as a person I don't really care twits from whomever emailed me, I don't care twits from my customers or Facebook or any other social stuff. It's pretty much useless. Only LinkedIn information of the client is useful, rest is fun but ultimately pointless.

Maybe I'm missing something as well.

"I could see the value if I were in sales or some other position where I was contacting way too many people to keep them all straight in my head"

I think you answered your own question?

"but that feels like a fairly small minority of people.

Any fraction, no matter how small (1%, 0.1%, 0.01%), of 6-7 billion planetary inhabitants "feels" small but is actually still a vast number.

I don't really need Xobni either, for the same reasons as you. But recently my fiance and I went to check out a wedding venue, after just emailing with the manager. She recognized us immediately from my fiance's gchat picture, and was able to make the welcoming a little more pleasant because of it.

hey Davide, which one stat would you say is most interesting?