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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

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With one of these, you’re guaranteed to make your Valentine feel special. Or, if you don’t already have a Valentine, giving a lucky lady or gent one of these will ensure that he or she will become your Valentine! Get the printable version here!

Streamlined Boomerang and Send Later Menus

The “At a specific time” window is now integrated into the menu. We hope that this will make it easier for you to specify a custom time and reduce a couple mouse clicks for you.

Track responses from the Boomerang menu — not just while sending a message.

You can now track response to any message – in your inbox, sent mail, or anywhere else – and Boomerang it only if you don’t get a response. This was one of the most popular feature requests from Boomerang customers.

Did you know there’s a Boomerang menu at the top right of the Gmail screen?

It’s now a drop down menu, including ways for you to view and manage your scheduled messages, and tell your friends about Boomerang.

You can also now specify a custom date and time to track responses to a message you are sending. Before you were limited to choose one of the default time options, now you can choose any date, time to your heart content!

Improved support for multiple accounts sign-in.

My favorite feature of this update is that Boomerang no longer requires me to select which account I want to use every time I switch between my Gmail and Google Apps email addresses. It knows which account I am in and maps the right account.

Manage Boomerang page improvements

We added links to open up individual scheduled messages in new browser windows.

I’ve been working on a system to streamline handling the stack of cards for quite some time, and I think I’ve finally hit on one that works. The new system:

• Helps me make sure I contact everyone I want to follow up with
• Helps me do it quickly enough so I remember why I want to talk with them
• Clears the stack of business cards off my desk
• Saves me time
• Keeps my perfectionist instinct from kicking in

It’s been quite effective for me. Here’s how it works, in traditional SEO-optimized style.

1. Make sure that the stack of business cards in front of you is actually the stack of business cards you want to deal with.

Just kidding, we haven’t outsourced our blog to

The Content Farm

just yet

First, you’ll need a couple tools to help you get started

• Canned Responses from Gmail Labs
• CardMunch from LinkedIn (iPhone is available today, Android is coming soon, I hope!)
• Boomerang for Gmail (full disclosure, we make this one)

Got them all wired up? Great! We’re ready to start cranking through the stack.

1. Create your Conference X Canned Response. Compose a new draft message that will say all the generic things you want to say to everyone you met. Stuff along the lines of “it was great to meet you at Conference X” and a reminder about who you were in case they forgot should go in here. Instead of sending it, use the Canned Responses lab to save it for later. We’ll be adapting this message for all of our follow-ups.
2. Sort the business cards you collected. I find that using four categories works best for me: VIP, Useful, Marginal, and Unhelpful. VIPs are people who I would be a fool not to contact: potential partners who could offer company-changing partnerships, VCs who we’d like to work with, top tier or especially relevant press contacts, and the like. VIPs also include anyone who I would like to ask for something specific.Useful cards belong to folks who I found interesting at the event but who aren’t obviously going to move the needle for our company: folks who work at companies in our space, people who were especially interesting to talk with, service providers who offer services we need immediately, or people who could connect us to someone helpful.

   Marginal cards belong to people who I would like to contact if I have time. Other entrepreneurs who are working on areas outside our domain, people who could be helpful months or years out into the horizon, most service providers, and tire-kicking VC types all fit into this category.
   The final category are people who are explicitly unhelpful. People who I know will waste a lot of my time, who want to impose an agenda, wantrepreneurs, and negative people fall into this category.

3. Go through the VIP cards. Grab the first card off the VIP stack. Open a new message in Gmail, insert the canned response, and customize it to the specific person you are contacting. Reference something you talked about at the conference, and explain why you are contacting them. Include one clear ask in the message if you have one – and since this stack is for your VIPs, you probably do. Keep the message short and to the point, just enough to make it clear how you’d like to proceed and remind them how you met.

   Once you’re done customizing the response, you’ll want to add their email address into the To: field (secret tip: this keeps you from accidentally sending a message before it’s ready!), save the draft, and set up a reminder to track their response to the message. Check the box that asks Boomerang to bring the message to your Inbox if you don’t hear back. Set the time appropriately – I usually give 4 days – and send the first message off.

   Finally, when you’ve sent the message, fire up CardMunch on your phone. Take a picture of the business card, and in about 10 minutes, you’ll have all the person’s contact information transcribed automatically for you. It will be on your phone whenever you need it, along with a picture of the business card itself, and you won’t need to sift through a giant stack of cards the next time you need to contact that person.

   Once the transcribing is done, you’ll get a push notification that the contact is complete. You can then edit the contact and Add the Notes field, in case it’s unclear from just the contact information and a picture of the card why this person was important.Wash, rinse, repeat until you’ve handled all your VIPs. It’s most effective to follow up with people within 24 hours of when the conference ended, so make sure you get through this stack as fast as you can! Then take a break, and move on to the next batch.

4. Go through the Useful cards. In general, I handle these cards much the same way as the VIP cards. However, for most of these cards, I will have either no explicit ask, or an ask that is less impactful. It’s less important to get these messages off quickly, so I typically use Boomerang to schedule contact emails to go through over next couple days.

   Just customize the canned response, save the message as a draft, and use Boomerang’s Send Later function to send the message in a little while. I find the “At a random time before 5pm today” menu option gets a heavy workout here, so that I never get deluged with a giant pile of responses to my messages at any one time.After sending the message, I Munch the card and throw it out.

5. If time permits, send contact emails to the Marginal cards. I’m usually about 50/50 on going through the Marginal pile. I’ll pick as many at random as I have time to contact, and schedule messages to go out to them in 2-3 days, once I’ll have already scheduled meetings or taken action with the people in the higher-priority category. The rest of the cards just get Munched even if I don’t have time to contact them, because you never know when that person could be exactly the person you need to see.

   In general, if someone in this category contacts me, I’ll take a meeting because they thought it was worth the time to reach out. Most of them never do.

6. Throw out the pile of Unhelpful cards. It’s not worth it to give these people an excuse to contact you. If they reach out, politely pass on their invitation to “grab coffee” or the like. If they’re people you explicitly don’t want to meet or talk with again, you’re under no obligation to let them soak up your time.
7. After 4 days, politely reach back out to VIPs who didn’t get back to you. Since you used Boomerang to track responses, you’ll have a couple emails in your Inbox that did not get a reply. Reach out again – you can politely say that you wanted to make sure they received the message, or that it didn’t get lost in the spam, or just repeat that it was great to meet them.

   About 2/3 of the time, I find that they weren’t trying to ignore me, they just were busy, and the second email solves the problem. In the other case, if they don’t reply to email #2, I typically don’t follow up again.

There you have it! 7 steps that have helped me don my cape as a master of following up after conferences. Remember: if you’re not going to build any relationships after a conference, why bother going?

We will update more info on what impact this outage has on scheduled messages very soon.

Our service is was unavailable starting 4/22 morning because our hosting provider, Amazon AWS, is having widespread outage that affected many web services. The AWS outage started yesterday and they still haven’t restored their service. We weren’t impacted yesterday and thought we were safe but they took us down this morning.

We advise users to manually send messages scheduled with Boomerang for now. To check if a scheduled message is already sent, please look in Sent Items folder. If it’s not there, please send it manually. You can find the scheduled messages in Boomerang-Outbox.

We’re working on restoring the service and we’ll let you know when it’s back up.

Thank you for your patience and we’re really sorry.

-Baydin Team

The list of requirements for a high-quality to do list for me (in rough priority) are:

• Runs in Windows
• Create a new task with one keyboard shortcut (ideally the enter key)
• Accessible via iPhone
• Supports multiple lists
• Somewhat attractive and somewhat elegant
• Rearrange Tasks

Has anyone found a great app like this?

We’ve tried Remember the Milk (multiple lists support sucks), Google Tasks (works OK, but has some quirks, and native app would be better), Tudomo (no web/iPhone access, plus expensive), FruitfulTime (entering a new task is a 3-step process, total dealbreaker). Since we build Outlook addins, we’d use Outlook, but we can’t get to the tasks in the cloud. 

Image via Wikipedia

It’s already 11 AM, and you’re staring into the monitor with your eyes glazed over. There are still 21 messages in your inbox, and none of them are compelling. So instead, you decide to read a little bit of news and catch up on how the Red Sox did last night.

Next thing you know, it’s lunchtime, and there are still 21 unread messages in your inbox.

We’ve all been there, and that’s part of why we included a special structured procrastination tool in Boomerang.

Good procrastination vs Bad procrastination

Procrastination is like cholesterol – there’s a good kind, and a bad kind.

The real problem isn’t that we can’t face dealing with any of these messages. It’s that the number of them is overwhelming, especially since many of them require at least a couple minutes worth of yak shaving to get them finished.

At this point, we can either fall into the trap of “bad procrastination” and go check out some links on the web, or we can use “good procrastination” to help us get rid of some of the less-important or more annoying email messages for a while, so we can focus on the more valuable and easier messages first. 

Here’s how Boomerang can help

Just right-click the one of the low-priority emails that you want to deal with later, hover over the Boomerang menu, and choose to bring the message back at a random time.

Use Boomerang to bring the message back before 5pm today, within a week, or sometime in the next month. Boomerang will return the message to your inbox, unread and flagged, for you to work on some undetermined but bounded time later. That way, instead of dealing with 21 messages all at once, you can take care of each one individually.

Of course, the messages are still accessible, right there in the Boomerang folder. So if you find yourself a few extra minutes, you can work on them right away.

It’s all about willpower

Scientists have discovered that the root cause of procrastination is often that people have only a limited amount of willpower. Clearing out some of the messages that you don’t want to deal with right away can make it easier to get your to-do list under the threshold of how much willpower you have right now.

You can deal with the other messages later, after your willpower has had time to build back up. Try using Boomerang for structured procrastination today (it’s free to try), and discover a better way to procrastinate.

The analyst firm is ZapThink, and their focus has been on enterprise SOA and cloud computing initiatives.  They are now taking a deeper look at the startup ecosystem – both describing how startups can create value for enterprises and helping startups themselves figure out how to position themselves to get larger companies as customers and form partnerships. 

They are beginning their work with startups with a new report format called ZapTakes.  ZapTakes are quick one-page synopses of promising startups.  They describe the problems the startups are tackling and how their solutions work at a high level.  Based on a conversation with the founders and some time spent with the products, they describe the areas in which the startups show the most promise and the key areas where they need to improve. 

Baydin was featured in the first ZapTake, which was published this morning. 

According to Jason, “Baydin (www.baydin.com) targets the information overload problem so prevalent in organizations today by helping individuals manage the information in their email inboxes and on their corporate portals.” 

To read more, get the full report here:
http://www.zapthink.com/2010/04/01/baydin-email-collaboration-productivity-enhancer/

We think it’s a pretty reasonable summary for such a short format.  Of course, we think the technology Baydin’s working on has 6-lightbulbs of game changing potential (since we’re totally revolutionizing the way people search for information inside the firewall), but we’ll give ‘em a pass on that

Since they’re just launching this new format, the report is available for free.  If you’re an enterprise or an investor looking to learn more about startups that are poised to make a big impact, this is a good place to start.  If you’re part of a startup that wants to be featured in one of these reports, we’re happy to make intros to the folks at ZapThink.