Hello, World: Meet Xobni

This is the first of a three-part series on the Xobni launch. Come back on Thursday to check out Part II of the story. This series was co-written with Marie Baca.

Every day, millions of people are forced to deal with the inefficiencies of Outlook. Almost 50,000 people have tried the early versions of Xobni's private beta. Today, we are opening the floodgates and allowing anyone to download a beta version of Xobni's eponymous product for free.

You can read our official announcement here. The New York Times details our launch in this article.

I've devoted this post to explaining why we built Xobni's software the way we did. The other posts in this series will document the journey up to the launch.

Email Overload

Experts say that there are two types of email users: Cleaners and Keepers. Cleaners receive only a few emails a day, and they meticulously file each email into a specific folder. Keepers, on the other hand, receive copious amounts of email, and although they may start out with a good organizational system, it is quickly abandoned. We designed Xobni for the Keepers — the everyday people who need a product that will help navigate their flooded inbox.

The average Xobni user deals with a whopping 30,000 stored emails and communicate with some 1,900 people. For many, this means sifting through several hundred messages every day. It’s only going to get worse: the Radicati Group estimates that by 2009, people will spend up to 41% of their workday dealing with emails. We are experiencing bona fide email overload, and the challenge for us "power users" is to find a way to process and organize large volumes of information over a short period of time.

A People-Focused System

One of the key insights the Xobni team had early on is that users think about email in terms of people and relationships, not abstract tasks. For example, think about the last time you went hunting through your inbox for an attachment. What was the subject line of that email? Can’t remember? Well, what about the name of the person who sent it to you? I bet that you were able to recall that bit of information far more easily. Indeed, the majority of searches inside email clients are for names of people, and it’s those same names that help us identify the relative importance of a particular message. It’s this idea of a people-centered email system that drove nearly every aspect of our development process.

A Smarter System

Let’s take a look at a few of Xobni's features and discuss the rationale behind them.

1. Super-fast email search. Other than acting as a holding pen for messages, one of the most important functions an email client can perform is allowing the user to quickly search through your emails to find the information they’re looking for. It's such a fundamental need, and yet Outlook’s search is often painfully slow. That’s why we designed Xobni with as-you-type search, so that as soon as you’ve typed "Jan," Xobni has already pulled up all the emails from Jane Smith, as well as all the emails where she is mentioned.
2. Threaded Conversations. Research indicates that one of the biggest problems people experience with their email systems is being unable to put their messages into context. In a standard inbox, messages are sorted by arrival time, which adds very little meaning to what is being said in the body text. Gmail has an effective method for grouping emails, and with the advent of Xobni, Outlook will also have this ability.
3. A Built-In Social Network. Just as it is easier to remember who sent you a message than it is to remember the subject line of a particular email, it's much easier to recall relationships between people than it is to remember a name. For example, one of our investor's names is Rob. I can never remember the name of Rob's assistant (sorry, Carly!). For this reason, we designed Xobni to analyze emails and automatically create a network of relationships around each contact. Now when I pull up Rob's name, Carly's name appears on his list of related people, and I can call or email her with the click of a button.

Research vs. Reality

If you take a look at the research that has been done to improve the usability and usefulness of email clients, you'll find that a lot of the work was performed at Microsoft Research. But these ideas haven’t yet made it into Outlook. It's difficult to change Outlook because the improvements have to be compatible with all of the previous versions of the software. Meanwhile, rebels like us are free to build the next generation of email clients, making them faster, smarter, and easier to use.

Be sure to check back next Monday for Part II of this series, where I’ll tell you about a big mistake we made early on: building the wrong product.

Further Reading

• In my thesis, I review significant research into improving the UI and smartness of email. Chapter 2 gives you more insight into email overload, and Chapter 3 lists a lot of work done in this area.


• For more background on interesting email-related research ideas, read my earlier blog entry, "How Researchers are Reinventing the Mail Client".

Startup School: Surfing the Wave

The most interesting pair of talks at Startup School were Greg McAdoo from Sequoia, followed by David Heinemeier Hansson from 37 Signals. McAdoo talked about how to build a billion dollar company, and Hansson spoke about how to create a small profitable one.



The contrast couldn’t have been bigger: The Sequoia talk was about big words and surfing metaphors. The ridicule in the video's comments shows that the audience was displeased. Hansson, on the other hand, wanted small web companies that charge users. A simple model. People loved it.

In reality, the two talks were about different things. Hansson talked about how to create a profitable business with a web site. This is a well-known if underused model. McAdoo, on the other hand, was talking about building the next Cisco, PayPal, Yahoo, or Google. Billion dollar businesses, not million dollar ones.

In order to make a really successful billion-dollar startup, you do have to have find a large, growing technology market. Marc Andreessen agrees. Xobni, for example, found great market when we changed our focus from an analytics package to today’s sidebar, a product people use for hours a day. We’re now in a much better, billion-dollar market, have a wider audience, and greater odds of success.

So why the disconnect? Two reasons.

First, I think that smart technical people – the kind that inhabit the computer science halls of Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, ETH and Oxford – have a strong appreciation for beautiful technology: The beautiful technology that, for example, made Google what it is today. But it’s not the technology that created that success, but the fact that people wanted fast full-text web search, which was just happened to be very hard to build. The market did it, not technology.

Second, when business guys mention "identifying customer needs", "designing a platform", and "assembling great team DNA", hackers shrug. Why use these big terms for talking to customers, drawing up architecture diagrams, and recruiting that great hacker? Because these are abstractions. Just like you wouldn't discuss each for-loop when describing what that method does, VCs use these abstractions to communicate effectively. It often takes experience to really understand the meaning behind them. Once entrepreneur, you’ll understand what it means to identify markets and customer needs, and you won’t need the baby steps spelled out for you. You’ll be using those big words yourself.

The Startup School Career

I’m at YCombinator’s Startup School at Stanford. There’s a great audience here with lots of hackers. Still, I think a lot of the guys here came with the belief that their first startup is going to be Facebook. That’s not going to be the case.



There’s a disconnect between the public image of doing startups and the realities of the game. The press wants you to believe that startup founders, through a fantastic idea, become billionaires, complete with Boeing jets and petting zoos.

Reality is different: Entrepreneurship is a career. You start your first startup, maybe with backing for YCombinator, and it will probably go well: Paul Graham said that 57 of the 80 startups they funded are still alive, for some value of alive. You’ll learn all these things that today’s speakers are talking about - angel and VC funding, building a product, finding a market, and making money. You might get sold, might go bankrupt, and maybe you’ll make some money. But with a large probability, you won’t own a Boeing jet when you’re done.

The great thing is that you can put another dime in the slot. The second time around, you’ll have more experience, more firepower, and a track record. This was best illustrated by today’s first speaker, who by the time he got around to doing Xfire, instantly got a term sheet, and 100 days later had a built product. Jeff is another great example of this model.

Startups: It’s not a shot for the moon, it’s most likely going to be your career.

PS: I remember the first time I went to Startup School back in 2005. Seems like a decade ago!

Xobni Turns 2

Almost exactly two years ago, Xobni was born. It spent its first months of life at YCombinator, saw the development of Xobni Analytics, and the raising of venture capital. One year ago, I joined Adam and Matt in their quest for global domination. Greg arrived 6 weeks later, then La Donna, then Bryan, Skyler, Aamir, Tyler, Ryan, and suddenly we were one big family, celebrating Xobni’s second anniversary. Here’s the team holding the cake at our BBQ.



And here's the cake itself:



Happily, Skyler created a little "Xobni Turns 2" collage with our pretty faces to remind us of these days of innocence.



I recently found my photo blog entry about the days before the Xobni launch, and tears were rolling down my face. Yes, we look very tired in those pictures, but those were the days! I decided to post some more pictures so I can relive the feelings of nostalgia a few months from now.

Greg T, for example, caused quite a stir when he joined, since there was already a Greg on the team. We decided to name them “Greg 0” and “Greg 1”, somewhat inspired by the scheme that Jobs and Wozniak gave themselves employee numbers at Apple.



This is Bryan, our web engineer extraordinaire. Note that he got the corner office.



Here’s Jeff, our new CEO, looking very serious at work.



Ryan, less serious at work. No, his behavior is not encouraged by our employee handbook.



Tyler is our QA rockstar and has by far the biggest collection of monitors of anyone at Xobni.



Here’s Rob, who recently joined us from Google (read about it at Wired). Rob and I share not only the same previous employer, but also a wardrobe composed of Google T-Shirts.



If you’ve ever sent us your resume or a support request, you probably had a chance to talk to Skyler. Here’s Skyler looking at that email you sent.



We’re not the only ones who hit an anniversary this month. Our friends from Scribd below had their 1-year anniversary, but their party was a bit more opulent than ours. To seal our friendship, we had a little Xobni-Scribd ping pong tournament. Here’s Greg 0 trying to nab the title.



We lost the tournament, but have high hopes for 2009.

Arrington on Email Overload

Michael Arrington has a post about email overload on TechCrunch today. A lot of people feel overwhelmed with email: Too many emails, from too many sources, coming in at a faster pace than what you can deal with.

I stumbled on this problem in 2004, while working on Gmail. It is a fascinating space, in which we're stuck in a dilemma of email clients that haven't changed in 15 years and weren't designed to do what they're dealing with today. On the other hand, there is an abundance of academic work trying to address the problem: Just read "How Researchers are Reinventing the Email Client" or my thesis on organizing email.

Even with Xobni, we're only scratching the just the surface of this problem, and there is still so much opportunity out there to improve the email experience for users. It's a huge market with big, established players, ripe for a revolution. Thanks, Arrington, for keeping this on everyone's minds.

Update: An interesting comment from the man himself (#74): "I didn’t quite write this post the way I intended to. There are lots of startups addressing the email problem, one of my favorites is Xobni. I’m thinking of something significantly more revolutionary than fixing email. Like a new way of communicating entirely."