As CEO of an email productivity company, the opportunity to flex my muscles and rip through a few hundred emails at a staggering pace feels sort of like a NASCAR driver getting ready for a race. It’s exhilarating to know that you’re going faster than almost anyone else on the planet! For most folks, though, it’s not quite that exciting. If the thought of clearing your Inbox on a Monday morning doesn’t make you leap out of bed already, these tips might change that.

As part of our ongoing efforts to help folks manage email better, we’ve compiled a list of the top 10 tips for managing a lot of email from our Revive Your Inbox 21-day email course. If you feel like your email could use a small shot in the arm, give these tips a read-through and start putting them to work! If you feel like your email could use a BIG shot in the arm, sign up for the 21-day course. Every day includes digestible, actionable information about how to make your email work better for you. Best of all, it’s completely free!

1. Use search to find specific emails. It takes less than 30% as long to find a message using search as with any other way. Modern email clients include very powerful search capabilities – spend 15 minutes learning to use them, and it will pay dividends for years.
2. Try turning off email notifications on your computer and your phone! Every time a notification comes up, it takes your brain over a minute to fully regain concentration.
3. Don’t bother with complicated folder systems – research shows it’s significantly faster to find messages by scrolling through a list of every message you’ve ever received than by looking through an “organized” set of folders.
4. Send messages at optimal times – usually just before work or during lunch, and rarely in the late afternoon. A message sent  +at 7am is almost 4 times as likely to be opened as one sent  +at 4pm.
5. Leave only messages that still need your prompt attention in your inbox. Move the rest to a single old mail folder, or Archive them in Gmail. That way, your old messages are still searchable, and it’s harder for emails that aren’t “finished” to fall through the cracks.
6. Try writing shorter emails. You’ll be surprised at how well people respond to brevity in email. A good guideline: try to keep most of your messages (though clearly not all!) under five sentences.
7. If your schedule allows, set up specific time blocks each day to handle your email. During those times, go through your emails in batches. If possible, try not to make one of these times first thing in the morning, so that you start your day with your most important work, rather than the seemingly most urgent.
8. Figure out a system for deferring messages to later. Research from CMU shows that over 1/3 of all email doesn’t need attention now, but needs it again later. Some options include an email reminder service like Boomerang for Gmail or Boomerang for Outlook that can bring messages back to your attention later (full disclosure: we make these!) or a system of folders like the one popularized by the Getting Things Done system. Both these methods work much better than leaving dozens of messages in your inbox.
9. If you’re sending an email where you ask for more than one thing, number your requests and put them near the top of the message. If the requests are numbered, it’s easy for the recipient to figure out what he/she needs to do!
10. Finally, try to make the first sentence of your emails descriptive. Most mail clients show a small snippet of the message in the inbox view. Which one of these is more likely to get your attention? “Important meeting next Friday. Please RSVP!” or “Hey Frank, I’m just writing to let you know”

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I have an enormous amount of respect for what Jeff Bezos has accomplished at Amazon. One of his most insightful practices is to send a letter to all Amazon shareholders each year. In this letter, he articulates the vision of the company, a high-level overview of what Amazon accomplished and learned from the previous year, the trends that impact Amazon, and the medium-term plan to remain ahead of those trends.

Mr. Bezos writes these letters because they provide a unified message about the company to everyone involved. They also provide a vehicle to clarify his thoughts and reflect on the path of the company each year. I believe this kind of reflection will be a powerful tool for me and valuable for you.

This year marks the first of what I hope will be many years of writing this letter.

2011 Overview

Baydin achieved many milestones in 2011.

This time last year, Baydin was a three person startup, new to Silicon Valley. We had two products on the market, Boomerang and The Email Game, and we were splitting our time 65/35 between them. Boomerang had roughly 300,000 downloads, no payment system, and had just added response tracking to the list of features. We had brought on a fantastic team of investors, but were just learning how to unlock the value of the network you all provide.

Last year, we were tenacious and fortunate enough to see many of the events that significantly move the needle for an early stage startup:

• In July, we transitioned Boomerang to a freemium SaaS product. Our conversion from active-to-paid users is ~10%, which is an incredible rate, and far above the SaaS average.
• Baydin has the option to be a profitable company in 2012, including all salaries and expenses. We are likely to eschew this option in favor of faster growth, but it is amazing to have it on the table.
• Boomerang crossed the million-download mark, and between The Email Game and Boomerang, our systems handed over four million messages in 2011.
• We closed all of the committed funds from our seed round, ending up at a $400,000 raise in May.
• We explicitly chose to focus on Boomerang as our core product last year. Although focus remains a test of willpower for us, spending 95% of our time on Boomerang allowed us to establish a significant early lead in mindshare in the email enhancement space.
• Our interns made some significant enhancements to The Email Game. The Email Game is much further from achieving its potential than Boomerang, and largely received benign neglect from the Baydin team last year.

We are very pleased with the results of 2011, and we look forward to an even more successful 2012.

Trends from 2011

Last year was a significant year for the email development ecosystem. Several new trends emerged, and Boomerang was at the forefront of many of them.

• Baydin showed the world a path to making substantial, sustainable revenue in the horizontal consumer-facing email market. Venture capitalists have invested millions of dollars in email over past decades, with significant returns in infrastructure and marketing companies, and significant hemorrhaging in consumer-facing investments. Baydin has established that it is possible to build a SaaS business on top of a major email platform and achieve traction.
• Gmail is becoming a more significant development platform, and one that is easier to build on. In part due to requests from us, Gmail’s APIs now provide richer, easier to use functionality for integrating client and server interfaces. Adding interface elements to Gmail has gone from a difficult technical challenge to one that many developers can conquer, thanks to improving browser extension functionality. In short, the technical integration challenges that prevented anyone from building features like Boomerang’s for the last 18 months are disappearing. As a result, our technical barriers to entry will need to become broader and more universal, rather than platform-specific.
• The trends above mean that the copycat services will begin to arrive in 2012. One service recently launched as a clone of Boomerang’s send later feature, all the way down to the menu text. A company adding CRM to Gmail copied our Send Later interface as roughly half their service. Fortunately, the quality, user experience, and reliability of Boomerang dramatically outstrips both these services. Another email service, better funded and currently focused on salespeople, will launch a pro product in 2012. Their customer development survey indicates that it will be a ripoff of Boomerang from top to bottom, with the same feature set and at the same price point. None of these services have a high quality product or a significant user base yet, but the increased ease of development means that they likely will, before the end of this year. We will be aggressive about growing our market share while these companies’ products remain nascent.
• These trends also mean that in addition to outright copies, several companies are introducing email products that seek to achieve different goals. We will consider partnerships with some of these companies.
• The idea of email as a user interface started to emerge last year as well. Movable Ink announced raising a fortune to create email that will load images that can change based on the time it’s opened. Many tools in which reading and replying to an email replace a web interface were introduced.

Some trends we identified last year have continued or accelerated since

• Google Apps continues to cannibalize Exchange at roughly the same pace Exchange cannibalizes Lotus Notes. Google Apps is making inroads into large corporations, which means greater opportunities for Boomerang to sell to enterprises. To date, we are working on deals with two of Google Apps’s five largest customers that may or may not come through.
• Email as a whole is becoming an interesting development ecosystem. From services seeking to replace email (doomed projects, in my opinion) to the growth and proliferation of infrastructure services like SendGrid, Mailgun, and Context.io, to the burgeoning add-on space, things are getting crowded. This trend works to our advantage (more legitimacy, more general awareness of products like ours) and to our disadvantage (lots of companies fighting for low-differentiation market space)
• Naïve gamification is reaching the mainstream, but the leading edge is starting to look for something else as the effectiveness of points and badges proves fleeting.
• Social networks and text messages have begun to displace personal email, and will continue to do so, especially among students. There has been no similar shift for business email, since Facebook messages and text messages are not conducive to high-information-density communication.

Baydin will keep a close watch on these trends through 2012.

Baydin Mission

We are still much closer to the beginning of this journey than to the end. We are very happy that you have chosen to embark on it with us. In 2011, we were finally able to stop worrying about how we were going to pay rent and buy food each month, allowing us to clarify our thinking about the longer view of the company’s development.

Today, Baydin helps its customers focus on email that matters, when it matters. Our tools allow for reading and responding to messages faster and more decisively than before. These achievements mark only a small part of how we envision the company growing.

Our mission is to make productivity software that encourages people to be more productive. Some
of the beliefs that will guide us as we work toward this mission include:

• Context-aware. The next revolution in productivity software will come from software that analyzes the context of what we are working on and adds value on top of it. Leading the shift will require technical skills that few teams have. Fortunately, we have these skills, and cloning the functionality will remain difficult for years to come.
• Sensible defaults. Context-aware systems will not be perfect, and spending time trying to make them so is a task for academic researchers. Instead, the system needs to supply an easy way for users to change mistakes, without imposing too heavy a burden on them. Designing this interaction properly will be a major challenge, which our team is well suited to conquer.
• Persuasive Software. Research in practical psychology continues to uncover surprising truths about how our minds work. Our productivity software will incorporate the results of that research into broad, horizontal products. Designing these interactions will require significant skill and discretion, as we have learned from The Email Game.
• Communication first. Applying our core productivity themes to communication and collaboration software will result in the greatest impact. We will not make the mistake of trying to build a competitor to all of Microsoft Office in one fell swoop, and we will likely never make a spreadsheet.
• Data-Driven. We believe that data is the closest approximation to the truth. We will base our decisions, wherever possible, on the results of statistically-significant measured data.
• Respectful software. We will not make software that helps one party profit at the expense of another. There is a fundamental conflict in the email space. Some companies seek to profit by increasing the effectiveness and intrusiveness of gray email, to the detriment of our privacy and our ability to choose how we spend our attention. We seek to profit by increasing the effectiveness of everyone else.

2012 and Beyond

In 2010, we built Boomerang and achieved product/market fit with it. In 2011, we channeled Boomerang’s momentum into meaningful revenue. In 2012, we will focus on scaling the business and making it more robust against adverse events.

[Section on detailed 2012 plans removed. Sorry, competitors!]

The past two years have been a wonderful experience. It’s an incredible privilege to be able to work on these problems with such a great team. I’m grateful for the hard work that the team put in this year, for all our customers who have chosen us, and for all of your support over the last year. We look forward to accomplishing great things in 2012.

-Alex
March 2012

Starting immediately, when you refer a friend to Boomerang and they use the product for the first time, you and your friend both earn a spin of the Wheel o’ Prizes. So every time you recruit a new friend using your referral link, both of you benefit instantly.

When you refer friends to Boomerang, you can help them make email infinitely more satisfying. Now, you’ll also give them a chance to win a Kindle Fire, a stylish T-Boomerang shirt, or any of the other amazing prizes on the wheel:

We hope you (and your friends) enjoy the change. Happy spinning!

I’m thrilled to announce that we deployed Boomerang for Gmail 1.0 tonight! The team worked incredibly hard, over very long hours to put together the release. We’re really proud of how smoothly the improvements make everything run, and we hope you’ll enjoy them!

As part of our conversion from a beta service, we’re also announcing new pricing plans. For more information about the new plans, check out http://www.boomeranggmail.com/subscriptions.html and for answers to common questions, take a look at our updated FAQ .

If you’re a current beta customer, watch your email! We’ll be sending updates rolling throughout the night with more details on what’s new. The emails will also contain a special coupon as a thank you for all your help during our beta period.

Thanks!
-The Baydin Team

Boomerang is running again, but because of the AWS outage, we weren’t able to access messages that were scheduled using Boomerang within the last 9 days.

When AWS services resume normally, we hope to be able to recover the missing messages. In the meantime, please check the Manage Boomerang screen and compare it against your Boomerang label and Boomerang-Outbox label to see if there are messages that need to be returned or sent.

Again, we apologize for the problems and we hope to be able to have everything running again soon. We’ll be working very hard to improve our redundancy in the upcoming few days, because if this happens many more times, I’m going to go bald from stress.

-Alex

We’re sorry that this happened, and we apologize for any problems this caused.

What’s going on is that we’ve seen a lot of growth in the number of messages scheduled per user over the past few weeks, and as a result, we’ve outgrown our server capacity. Our maintenance scheduled for tonight is supposed to resolve that problem, but it’s happening a day too late.

We’ll do our best to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Thank you for understanding.

Any emails you scheduled during the downtime will be returned/sent when service resumes.

I felt like we were preaching to the choir, because the keynote speakers who talked before us, including Tony Zingale from Jive and Jamie Whitmoyer, who implemented Sony’s E2.0 infrastructure in SharePoint, showed data about how much room there is for email and search to improve inside the organization. We were thrilled to be able to announce a product that makes email collaborative, for everyone in the enterprise, just a few minutes later.

We had several large/medium companies approach us about setting up pilot programs, so I would definitely encourage other startups in this space to apply to be part of the LaunchPad at E2.0 San Francisco in November. If you weren’t able to be at E2.0, but are curious how Unsearch’s email integration can get 100% of your coworkers involved and collaborating using the systems you already have, like SharePoint, please email us about setting up a demo.

Below are a few thoughts about the conference.

Major Themes

Collaboration and Social Software is back again in 2010. After a couple rough years because of the economy, it looks like companies are again making major pushes to find and deploy software to try to get people talking, collaborating, and connecting with their coworkers again.  There were several major themes that appeared throughout the keynotes, across the Expo, and in the panels.

The Rise of Feeds
Everyone has a “News Feed” view now. It’s clear that vendors have discovered value in bite-size pieces of information, delivered in chronological order, from people you already know (or groups you are already part of). This is a major part of practically all the new E2.0 products. The big value in these feeds is that they are public and somewhat customized, but unlike email, they are not directed specifically to you, so you can read just part of the stream and not worry about missing something.

There’s a lot of value in being able to filter information this way, even if the filter is “I don’t have time to look at this today.” The software demos looked like they would have a lot of irrelevant information in the feeds, though and there was a large number of unread items in most of the demos. I tend to feel stressed by unread counts, so I’m not sure the ability to come and go through the feed, without worrying about missing things is as strong as in the consumer News Feeds.

I worry that these systems will continue to create more information overload, but I think there’s a lot of potential here. Especially since most of the feed systems allow comments and discussions to form around news entries as they catch people’s interest.

Innovation in Search
Between the “Search is Not Enough” panel, the keynote speeches describing information overload, and the cool techniques presented for incorporating more serendipitous information browsing (like DarwinEco), I think the big technological shift over the next couple years will be in changing the way search works. Of course, I’m biased. But the panelists made it clear, over and over again, that searching through these new systems is going to require more intelligence on the part of the system.

The amount of information getting shared, through microblogging and social collaboration systems, continues to increase. Files are still important, but most of the new shared information is showed through searchable, non-proprietary-file-format HTML, which means that all the Web 2.0 tools for navigating this information can be brought to the enterprise.  That’s exciting.

Millenials
Barely a panel went by without a mention of millenials (people who graduated from college after 2000 seemed like the general definition) – a bit strange, since I only saw a handful of fellow millenials in attendance. There were two major ways that millenials came up in discussion.  The first is that we were described as being more comfortable sharing information digitally and more willing to become contributors using collaboration software. In my experience as a millenial at a big company, this was absolutely true. There were plenty of older (even 50+) people who were heavy users of our wikis at ADI, but virtually ALL of the millenials used it a lot.

The second context where millenials received frequent mention was in a sort of reverse-Luddite way. Essentially, said some panelists, millenials grew up with Facebook and are incapable of learning to operate in an environment without it. We are apparently too young to understand how to communicate via email or in person, and without Facebook for Business, we are unmanageable. Selling social software based on these premises struck me as asinine – selling software on the basis of old people being too dumb to adapt to a world where the telephone isn’t the dominant form of communication would be clearly offensive, so why is it OK to generalize about millenials in such an obviously wrong way?

New Infrastructure Ideas
My favorite product at the expo was an infrastructure product.  Cisco’s Pulse has some very bright minds working on it. Pulse is based on physical boxes that sit in front of Exchange servers, or Wiki systems, or video sharing systems, with all the network traffic itself running through them. Like, with a physical wire. The Pulse systems pull information out of the physical packets on the network and identify the appearance of a set of pre-specified keywords as they go over the wire, connecting people with the experts who regularly communicate about that keyword.

They’ve also got some incredible tech baked in for detecting phonetic appearances of those keywords in online video, making the video searchable. This reverse-keyword technique is different, because instead of building an index of every word mentioned (and dealing with associated transcription issues), they instead look specifically for a dictionary of words that are known to have meaning.

This approach is technically very interesting to me, and I am looking forward to seeing how the product develops, and potentially integrating Unsearch with it. I am very impressed with Cisco’s ability to innovate as a HUGE company – and a system this complex needs a lot of resources and a lot of different expertise, so it almost requires a big company to build it. Very impressive.

The LaunchPad

Baydin was incredibly excited to be named the winner of the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad. Companies from around the globe, including some pretty big names, competed to launch products at the LaunchPad. The four companies on stage came from Cambridge (us), Portugal, Switzerland, and Germany.

Our fellow finalists put together some amazing demos. They did a great job presenting, and all of them are working on stuff that could really have an impact. We were honored that the Enterprise 2.0 attendees selected us as the winner out of a group with this much potential.

The finalists were:

Doodle – A very easy way to schedule a meeting. Suggest times that work for you, and let the other invitees vote for which times they’d prefer. They announced a new feature that lets a meeting organizer see free/busy status for fellow Doodle-users when first selecting possible times for the meeting.  Think MS Exchange-style scheduling, but cross-platform.

InnovationCast – Leonardo described InnovationCast as a tool for managing innovation as a company develops new products and services. Built on top of Telligent, they provide some really neat analytics on how innovation grows and spreads through an organization.

MindQuilt – Enterprise Q&A tool, think StackOverflow/Yahoo Answers for inside a company. I expected MindQuilt to be really derivative, but it turns out they add some really slick autotagging features and integrate really well with email and IM clients, making it easy for users to get into it. I expect them to have a lot of success in large companies.

The E2Conf folks haven’t uploaded the video of our presentations yet, as far as I can tell, but you can see some photos from the LaunchPad and the other Wednesday keynotes here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adunne/sets/72157624252543430/.  The videos that we created to be selected as finalists are here: http://launchpad.e2conf.com/final-four-2/.

Thanks very much to all of you who voted for our video and made it possible for us to be part of the conference this year.

Image via Wikipedia

My fraternity mailing list is home to a great group of people, including some great entrepreneurs and some great investors. But when you get 400 opinionated MIT grads on a single mailing list, and the topic shifts to anything controversial, the discussion might explode. We’ve had well over 125 emails come through in the last three days after someone brought up the health care bill, and several folks have emailed to get off the discussion list list. 

Don’t do that! Instead, use these super easy techniques to mute or filter the discussion out of your Inbox in less than 30 seconds. It’s faster than removing yourself from the mailing list, and better too, because when this discussion peters out, you’ll still be on the list in case something interesting comes up later.

Muting a Thread in Gmail

Gmail provides this functionality out-of-the-box, without needing to create a custom filter. Just turn on keyboard shortcuts and press the “M” key while the thread is selected or opened. Unfortunately, there’s not a keyboard-shortcut-averse way to mute the conversation, but the keyboard shortcuts are fast and efficient anyway. For more info, here’s Google’s official FAQ entry on muting conversations.  

Muting a Thread in Outlook 2010

Microsoft has done a great job playing catchup to Google in terms of features like this one in Outlook 2010. Hopefully, it won’t be three more years before they catch up to whatever Google builds in 2012! 

Outlook 2010 also comes with the ability to mute threads right out of the box.  Just right-click a message in the thread, choose the “Move” menu, and choose the “Always Move Messages in this Conversation” option. 

Click the screenshot to the right to get a visual look at the menu option.

Muting a Thread in Outlook 2007/2003

Unfortunately, muting a conversation in Outlook 2007/2003 will take a full 30 seconds, instead of two clicks or a keypress, because they’re 3 and 7 years old. 

The best thing to do is to create a rule that will move all messages sent to the mailing list, for a specific amount of time, into an archive folder or the Trash. 

Just click the “Tools” menu, and choose “Rules and Alerts.”  Select the “New Rule” button, then choose the option to “Move messages sent to a distribution list to a folder.” Click the “people or distribution list” hyperlink in the pane at the bottom, and type in the email address for the mailing list.  Click the “folder” hyperlink, and pick your folder.  Then, click Next, scroll down to pick the “received in a specific date span” box, and click the hyperlink to set the date range. 

Boom! For the next 7 days, anything coming over the mailing list will go to the Trash. And in 7 days, the rule will stop firing, so you’ll see messages that you might care about again, once this thread has stopped dumping political diatribes all over your Inbox. 

Take a look at the screenshot on the left for a quick intro to the Rules Wizard.