Show HN: Streak.com - Do sales, support and bug tracking all inside Gmail | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Streak.com - Do sales, support and bug tracking all inside Gmail

streak.com

306 pointsalooPotato95 comments

Nicely done. Two concerns: 1) exposure to breakage when Gmail changes, 2) potential introduction of protection against invasive integration.

Google has three options: 1) turn a blind eye, 2) block deep integration (same game AOL played with AIM), or 3) introduce client-side integration API. #1 is temporary. #2 is nightmare for Streak. #3 requires strategy change by Google.

[update] Rapport doesn't have this problem because they are using Outlook PIA to work directly with Outlook object model.

This is great timing! We just hired a customer support person this week, and we started using HelpScout.net, but we aren't finding that it's very polished.

We're going to give Streak a shot, and hopefully give you some good feedback.

P.S. You are missing a question mark on your home page: "Want to know where the customer is in the sales pipeline."

OH please tell us how it turns out. It's one thing for me to take a stroll through myself and another thing for someone with a running business to actually try it out with real data and clients and use cases. This looks simple, and I LOVE simple. I'd rather work with something simple and a few features than something complex with a lot of features. Features are useless if I'm afraid of them or have to educate myself to learn them.

Typos are now fixed!

We've been using Streak to help with hiring, fundraising, and business development at MixRank. It works really well. I'd highly recommend it to anyone that needs to stay on top of their email.

I've been trying to manage customers with emails for a while. What a nightmare. This looks like a great product. But, I'm not sure I'm willing to share all my emails.

I think a good work around would be to create a gmail account specifically for handling client stuff. Or you guys could offer email address which are already gmail integrated.

Just some notes. Great product, props from Canada :D

Using streak in a shared gmail account is pretty popular and works great.

Exactly what I was looking for!

But please, please start charging for your product. I don't want this product to disappear in a year when you run out of funding and still don't have a sustainable business model.

The nice thing about the CRM market is people expect to pay for this kind of software, so charging is definitely on our path. Just want to get things solid first. We'll always have a free tier, but ya, going out of business and disappearing is not part of the plan.

Taking a quick poll here - how much would everyone be willing to pay for this?

It would be great to have this free for individuals - so that they can see if they love it or not. Either make it completely free for them, or free for 2-3 micro-funnels, or free for managing ~250 leads (like highrise).

After that it would be ideal to charge a little ($5/month) for the next 2-3 users, and more for larger teams. Ofcourse, give more features as the team sizes grow.

Note that your market is larger than a CRM.

Super cheap, less than 15 monthly for micro teams less than 4 maybe.

Then scale a lot for larger groups/companies. Something like the atlassian pricing tiers?

There is a large government market to hit also.

I was just thinking this - I think < $8 / mo. would be a no-brainer, between $8 - $19 might be worth it and > $19 I probably wouldn't use it.

I would pay between 9 and 19 per user

Don't worry, Salesforce has big pockets. I think they will be fine. Great product.

Already got my support and deployments team using Streak and its been an amazing experience! Constantly adding new features and making our lives easier.

Finally, it looks like someone nailed it, or at least has a great start. We want to work inside email, not launch a separate app.

Just started using it for our hiring funnel at AeroFS and I already love it. Well done!

This looks extremely cool, and I'm really tempted!

In light of recent things like Path etc. (and without insinuating anything!) - could you clarify what information is sent via Streak's servers, if any?

In order to use Streak you have to give oauth access to your inbox. We use that data in order to link you to your emails from within Streak.

Specifically on Streak's servers we store message meta data but no email contents.

Security and Trade Secrets are my major concern as well. Meta data could mean "gmail message ID", but it could also mean "all header info, including message title & users emailed." Of course, that's in addition to the value of the additional data (box title, notes, "deal size") that streak is being used for.

Privacy policies are not very comforting on their own... Heck, "everyone" has one! I might suggest some more details, perhaps on your website, to satisfy wavering customers. So far there isn't much to make a businessperson feel comfortable.

Looks nice! But I can't watch any of the videos because clicking on the play button (in the lightbox) closes the lightbox :-) I'm on Safari 5.1.3 on OS X.

I'm using FireFox 10.0.2 on Windows 7 and nothing loads in the lightbox when I click a video link...just white and empty. The video works fine in Chrome though.

Same here, with FF 10.0.2 on Snow Leopard, when I click on a video I just see an empty box.

I have the same issue on Safari 5.2 on OS X 10.7

Apparently the youtube embed object takes a while to load on Safari, we're looking into it....

Oops. I'll fix this.

fixed!

I've used google apps/gmail for years, in my large previous organization and currently in our 100+ organization. Obviously you know this, but this type of "glue" is great - I'm glad you guys took advantage of this. I am in the market place daily, there is NOTHING that compares to this so far. I am excited to see where you take this!

I was literally thinking earlier today that I wish someone would write this app.

Unfortunately it doesn't play well with Rapportive profiles for me (HD Beach theme, comfortable sizing) - seems to be some jumping over each other.

I realise it must be very hard making bootstrap GMail addons play with each other but it would be great to use the two together

We do play nice with Rapportive usually, but ya difficult to test all different configurations. Will have to troubleshoot that with your specific settings.

I've also got boomerang in there too. You've got an heroic job on your hands ;)

Crap - I definitely want Rapportive, but glad I can get rid of Boomerang.

It works fairly well with rapportive, sometimes when scrolling you may see overlap.

Really really cool.

Minor copy edit on your splash page - there's a 't' on the end of 'messages' in this section:

Streak Plays Nice Streak never alters any data in your Gmail. No extra labels, and no moving around your messagest. Streak adds a layer of organization on top of your email and stores this separately and securely in our own cloud.

You need chrome 15 or better for the extension to install. If you go go there and click on the install button without chrome 15, it generates a javascript exception with no visual or textual clues to the user that is going on. Person on chat was responsive.

Can you provide some insight as to how this is implemented? Do you use contextual gadgets?

Contextual gadgets are pretty limited. If you want to get started in Gmail the best way I recommend is to use James Yu's excellent Gmailr (https://github.com/jamesyu/gmailr). We did some prototyping with that. Since then we've taken that core code and rewrote 90% of it to fit our needs and make our own platform.

+1. I would love to develop some customizations on top of GMail, but haven't seen a good explanation of how to do it (yet). Maybe I just haven't looked closely enough...but is this something Google actively encourages or something you have to mangle with a plugin like greasemonkey?

This looks incredibly useful and well designed. I've shown my CEO; perhaps we'll be incorporating Streak soon. Two copy niggles:

"Streak is great for sales, but did you know you can also use it for: hiring candidates, handling email support, organizing dealflow, fundraising and organizing your personal projects."

This is a question - add a question mark to the end (bonus, invented by Dr. Evil)

"We put indicators right in your inbox to show you which emails have to do with which deals you are working on."

Awkward / run-on. Try - We added email indicators showing you the association to the deals on which you are working. (remove the wordy noun modifiers and prepositional phrases)

What a beautiful homepage. Professional and...just beautiful!

Would this be compatible with Fluent.io?

Fluent.io appears to be a different client to Gmail. Right now we only work with Gmail's webclient.

Same impression here. Love the out of focus background image. Great effect.

Thanks. :-)

nice product. Just out of curiosity, how exactly do you attach your app to Gmail? The way I imagine it: basically, this is just a big javascript application which inserts itself inside the gmail view using DOM manipulation?

Looks cool - although my cynical assumption is that this product a) would work great in demos with a simple number of folders,etc and b) will be bitch to maintain given when Google changes the UI or generated code / structure.

Having looked at the gmail generated source there isn't a human generated component so something trivial like $('#button_bar').appendChild(..) doesn't work requiring more clever approaches (and perhaps the streak guys are insanely clever). If I had the time I'd pick apart the extension source to see how streak works.

Trust me, it took a little while but we've been able to tame the beast known as Gmail's DOM. We have some pretty sophisticated infrastructure to handle the different versions and updates to Gmail.

Any plans for Salesforce integration? Can you use SF.com as a backend?

I've used the Beta for a multi-user sales pipeline. Worked wonders!

Some dreams come true. Even when you are not hacking on them.

Good work, but I think good for Google apps users (only?)....

co-founder of streak here: streak works with both google apps and non apps accounts. We've noticed some of our early users using it for non business purposes as well (task management, event planning, etc).

I'm using it today for both and i like it.also, im blown away with snippets. the shortcuts to access them is genius too. i've now begun to remove clippings and other add-ons that i've used for this specific feature.

Exactly how did you "notice" this?

Our users told us. As we were building features, we'd email our users and ask them for feedback.

Something I've been thinking I should do, but never got round to. Good idea, will give it a spin. BTW, I was thinking about working on this because a number of Mortgage Brokers I have interacted with in the past have all been using gmail and they all seem to be in desperate need of a CRM solution that integrates with gmail. So, there, a segment for you to target.

BTW, found a typo on the main page -- "messagest".

This looks really useful, but some parts of a pipeline I might need external people (who are probably not using gmail) to action/move items along a pipeline.

It might be cool if you could generate a URL for a pipeline for someone so they can collaborate (change statuses/comment) without needing to use gmail. Although I haven't really thought of all the consequences of this.

This is fantastic. Glad you guys came along. I was wondering why it took so freaking long for something like this to show up.

This is awesome! Thanks for the great work.

  The site XXXXX.apps.googleusercontent.com is requesting access to your Google Account for the product(s) listed below

That's a Google domain, and the numbers represent a specific Chrome extension... in this case, Streak.

I realize it's a Google domain, but not a trusted Google domain.

If you look at do a search for "googleusercontent.com" it shows that it hosted malware and some other nasty stuff.

  http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=googleusercontent.com/

If I'm on streak.com and try to login I would like to be authorizing Streak.com

I understand the sentiment, but it can't work that way. What you're authorizing for access is an anonymous unsigned Chrome extension, not the website streak.com. If they allowed the extension to define its own name so that you'd see "streak.com", then you'd see malware masquerading as safe-sounding names in the authorization dialog.

Amazing work guys. Played with it a bit and looks really intuitive and easy to use!

Looks impressive so far, I've basically been doing this kind of thing manually in gmail using labels, for supporting Smart Shooter.

So its free for now whilst in beta, I just might be hooked by the time they start to charge for it..

Wow. This is really great. We are just at a point where we consider switching away from Lighthouse for bug tracking. Do you provide - or plan to provide - an api, so it's possible to integrate with other systems?

Congratulations to the streak.com team. This is a great product.

This brings another point: There is a need for a better business email application that is as easy to use as Gmail, but is not owned by any of the big 4 (MS, G, APPL, Y!).

Congrats on the launch! I love the UI and set-up process, it's very smooth.

This looks very promising... I've been looking for a CRM solution for my company for awhile. Question: is there a way to set up a gmail filter to add existing client e-mails and contacts into a box?

This looks awesome - I'd love more information about how it works in a multi-user environment.

For example, if 3 guys in my company do sales, how do we prevent everyone contacting the same leads?

We don't go into it much on the homepage but we think Streak really does well here. You can share a sales pipeline to specific people or to your entire domain and you can assign leads to different team members.

There's a small demo of how sharing works at the end of the bug tracking demo video.

I can't see the bug tracking demo. Screen-shot : http://imgur.com/6cOhL

I am on Firefox on the Windoze.

and what about multiusers helpdesk?

We use it internally as a multi-user support tool but have a ton of new support related features coming.

I use Streak as a "Personal Salesforce". It has been incredibly useful because it helps me stay on top of 30 different conversations in 5 different contexts.

Great product. But I personally prefer to use my inbox for handling mail only and not get it in the mix of other processes like hiring, bug tracking etc...

Given that Google might acquire your company, why would you want to provide it with 100% of your sales, support and bug tracking information?

100% of your sales, support, and bug tracking information will be reflected in the email inbox of your employees.

If you're not hosting your own email servers, all that information is available to some 3rd party.

These companies have contracts in place preventing them from abusing the potential information they can gain, and they usually have a lot more to loose from violating it than what they could gain from cheating like this.

> and they usually have a lot more to loose from violating it than what they could gain from cheating like this.

No they don't. That's the problem.

Apparently there are not a lot of folks here who have spent time on the other side of the acquisition table: They're confusing a gentlemenly game where people play by the rules with a streetfight.

I was looking for a similar comment. Not just from an acquisition standpoint, but having all that information right where Google can look at it doesn't sound smart just from a common-sense standpoint.

"What could possibly go wrong?"

Google's terms of use prevent them from having humans read your data.

> Google's terms of use prevent them from having humans read your data.

Given the choice of

1. spending a few zillion dollars on a lemon of a startup and

2. violating terms-of-use behind your back

do people really believe 1. over 2. is the most likely outcome?

They would have to play their hand at behind the scenes knowledge of your actual figures somewhat openly for this to work. That would be disastrous for them.

signed up, and been loving it! for now no slow downs of gmail. Is there any way to group boxes together? I created one box per client for some of my clients thinking i would put each issue in there and then figured out that i would have to create a box for each issue. so how do i group boxes, eg those belonging to the same project?

Looks like you could create a Pipeline for each project, and then add the boxes to the project pipeline.

It would be nice if you could save a pipeline setup so you don't have to recreate the same stages every time you need a new project.

Looks cool, is it just for a single user or does it sync with everyone in your organisation?

This looks awesome, is it a Chrome plugin? Is there only Chrome support?

Right now we only support Chrome.

In the future we'll be in all the major browsers.

My question is: Are you guys a YC company? Because you should be!

I am having login problems. I am stuck on step 2.

If you're having problem, please goto gmail and Streak will ask you to sign in there.

The usual culprit is third party cookies being disabled - we wrote a help article here: http://support.streak.com/customer/portal/articles/386931

I disabled 3rd party cookies when the whole Google/Safari flap arose recently and was wondering if I might be missing anything. In this case the app just doesn't work so that's pretty obvious. I'm wondering if I'm experiencing any other harder to discern problems?

Are 3rd party cookies really required to deliver this sort of app or is it just easier? I suppose otherwise session IDs would need to go in the URL or POST variables.

Looks great, but no FF 10 support?

Omar, this is fantastic. You rock

What is the Streak.com stack?

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