Goodbye, Xobni!

Wednesday was my last day at Xobni. We took a quick trip to Ben and Jerry's to honor the occasion:


The last one and a half years seem more like four - it was an intense journey and very hard work. This has been a great learning experience and I'm sure I'll have plenty of fond nostalgia for the Xobni days. Good luck, guys, I'll miss you!

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to my round-the-world trip and building my new company!

A New Company

I am leaving Xobni in late August and starting a new company.

Xobni has been an amazing ride, and I'm proud how much we learned and achieved together. We took Xobni from humble beginnings in Adam's apartment to a wildly successful product that is used by hundreds of thousands for hours a day. I've learned tremendously, and went full-cycle from making the original mockups, managing the team, and writing a large part of the product's code.

Ever since reading a biography of Bill Gates when I was 14 years old, I've wanted to be a founder of a company that makes a difference. I've wanted to build a workplace where people can be creative, productive, and happy, and a product that delights users and improves their lives. I feel like the time is now.

There are lots of challenges left in the email and communication space. I have some exciting product ideas for my new company, and I feel like I understand the space like few others do.

After wrapping up at Xobni at the end of August, I'm going on a trip around the world, covering Switzerland, Germany, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Australia. This trip is mostly for pleasure: I figured this would be my last break for a while. However, I will also be raising a small angel round from investors around the world.

Enhanced Messaging Workshop at AAAI

I'm in Chicago for the AAAI 2008 Conference's Enhanced Messaging Workshop. Greg and I will be talking about some of the driving ideas behind Xobni, the hardships of building commercial email software. We'll also demo some products from our skunkworks.

I'm hoping that this workshop will hopefully fill an important gap: There are some conferences about spam fighting on one end, and general machine learning / data mining / user interfaces on the other end, but no forum for academic discussions of fighting email overload. See you there!

Wired: The Great American Timesuck

Xobni is mentioned in this month's print edition of Wired Magazine.

Clive Thompson writes:

"[...] I've been using a new software app called Xobni to manage my horribly overstuffed inbox. Among other cool tricks, Xobni spots hidden patterns in your email usage. [...] This is incredibly useful knowledge."

This is one of my favorite pieces of Xobni coverage so far: When I was a teenager, I used to read every single issue of Wired cover to cover. It was the magazine from the future.

An online version of the article is here.

"Email Sins" on NPR

This morning, National Public Radio ran a story about how people are feeling crushed by the volume of email they receive. In the story, NPR's Yuki Noguchi interviews Joel Cherkis of Microsoft, John Kremer of Yahoo, and me. I chat about how new ways of looking at email, such as Xobni's people-centric view, can help us tame the email flood.

NPR: E-Mail Sins, Horror Stories and Strategies - "Make It Stop! Crushed by Too Many E-Mails"

The Right Stuff: Building The Team

This is the last post in a series of three articles on Xobni’s launch. Check out the first episode on the ideas behind Xobni, and the second post about the journey to building the right product. Co-written with Marie Baca.

This is the story of how we are building Xobni's team and culture, and the things we've learned along the way. I think the jury's still out on whether what I'm describing is the right way, but I’ve certainly learned some things along the way.

Origins

In Xobni's application for YCombinator funding, the company was called "EmailDM," where the "DM" stood for "Data Mining". As Matt describes here, Adam was also toying with the name "InboxAdvisor" when Paul Graham suggested Xobni – the word "inbox" name backwards. The domain name was still available and so we snapped it up.

I met Adam and Matt during a 2006 trip to the East Coast. What was initially meant to be a friendly brainstorming quickly morphed into a caffeine-fueled two-day coding session at 16 Elmer Street in Cambridge, MA (Xobni's original headquarters). Over the course of 48 hours, I coded a new project for Xobni. While that product was never released, the concept of coding assignments during interviews would become a Xobni tradition.

Hiring

Some months later, Adam and Matt moved to San Francisco by driving Adam's rebellious Toyota Avalon across the country. I joined as the VP Engineering, and one of my first duties was to define a hiring process for engineers.

Everyone seems to know Joel Spolsky's motto of "Smart and Gets things Done", but finding a way to easily identify that in job candidates is a different animal altogether. Initially, I modeled our interview process off of Google: tough interviews that test "smartness." In the spirit of "seeing the juggler juggle", we added a crucial component: a coding assignment where candidates are given a workstation and a project to complete. This has helped us tremendously in identifying productive developers. Instead of testing for knowledge of algorithms and ability to solve brain teasers, you can see a person's coding style, maturity, and whether they were able to complete the project on time with a reasonable set of features.

Quality Assurance

My biggest mistake during my first months at Xobni was that I didn’t bring in top-notch quality assurance talent early enough. While it
s true that Xobni’s range of functionality is not as complex as, say, Microsoft Word, the product is still exposed to a wide variety of configurations and environments: Different versions of Windows, Outlook, user permission settings, email account types, and storage types. It's no coincidence that Microsoft allegedly has a 1:1 ratio of developers to quality assurance staff.

We needed someone who would think about QA night and day. After our private launch at TechCrunch 40, we learned our lesson, and I'm happy that we found Ryan and Tyler, who have taken ownership of making Xobni rock-solid. They of old laptops, set up test accounts and mail servers, virtual machines, and wrote test plans. I only wish we had brought them on earlier!

Data, Data, Data

Historically, we've made our best decisions when data and statistics were readily available. This isn’t always possible in every decision making process, but it's a good rule of thumb to try to surround yourself with as much relevant data as you can. For example, when you’re deciding what to have for lunch, it helps if you see what others are getting, and what you ate last time. When you’re debugging an odd bug from the field, it’s best to have log files, exception counts, and more. When you're making decisions about how to grow the user base, it helps if you have data about past user growth, uninstalls, and reasons why people like or dislike your product.

At Xobni, we’ve built systems and dashboards for all of the data listed above, from Greg’s exception robot to Bryan’s product dashboard (not to mention Ryan's lunch ordering system). When encountering a problem, we like to think about when we’ll need the same data in the future, and if the answer is yes, we build a system, not a one-off solution. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

The Future

Xobni the product, and the engineering team behind it are growing. It's interesting to participate in this process because with every new person, our engineering culture morphs as new hires bring new viewpoints, insights, and abilities. Jeff, our CEO, has said that with every 20 people, the company feels different, which means that we are getting close to experiencing the next chapter of the Xobni story. Oh: we're also hiring.

Xobni's Journey to the Right Product

This is the second of a three-part series on the Xobni launch. Come back on next Monday to check out Part III of the story. Co-written with Marie Baca. An abridged version of this article was featured yesterday on GigaOm.

I often speak with entrepreneurs applying for funding from YCombinator, and when I do I give them this advice: the most important decisions you make are the ones in the beginning of the process. Choices like what product to build and what market to serve determine whether you’re headed for failure or a multi-million dollar exit. Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, calls this "product/market fit" and says that it’s the only thing that really matters when it comes to building a company.

It's fair to say that at Xobni, is that we stumbled into product/market fit. We initially built the wrong product, but then we quickly corrected our course.

Building the Wrong Product

When Adam first wrote up our YCombinator application, Xobni was called "EmailDM"—the DM stood for "Data Mining." Adam included demos of how EmailDM would summarize emails, highlight important passages, and so on. Eventually this vision morphed into Xobni Analytics, which lets you analyze email usage by creating a diagram of your message traffic.



The initial plan was to offer this program to companies as a productivity tool. Workers would install the software into Outlook and use the data to find ways to become more productive. We would then offer this product to corporations so managers could remotely monitor employee email productivity.

This Boston Globe article, the first major coverage of Xobni, illustrates why this model was a bad idea: employees would feel like they were being spied upon. But even beyond the spying problem, Xobni Analytics was the wrong product to build for a more important reason: users would install the software, browse it for a bit, and then close it and quickly forget about it. Analytics was not a sticky application that tempted users to come back again and again.

The Xobni sidebar is completely different. There are many features beyond the analytics that add value for the user. Plus, the sidebar sits right next to the inbox, so users are exposed to it for the 2 hours they spend checking their email every day.

Our mistake became even clearer when we shopped early versions of Xobni around to venture capitalists. We first tried to remedy this problem by designing something called Xobni Feeds, which allowed users to create different types of XML queries that we would show up in the sidebar. Only later did we realize that this way too much flexibility for the average user, and we decided that it was a much better idea to show relevant, people-based default information.

In short, we discovered that our product was most successful when it provided focused information about people, not numbers. It is essential that entrepreneurs remember that they are serving an audience of individuals who need simple solutions to their everyday problems.

Why Outlook?

Unlike the initial problems with product development, Xobni made the right decision early on to target the Outlook market. There are an enormous number of Outlook users out there (around 350-400 million, depending on whose numbers you trust), and yet there is also major dissatisfaction with the program.



After Outlook, users most often requested that we build Xobni for Gmail and Apple’s Mail.app. However, both of those clients have much lower pain levels than Outlook. In addition, the addressable market is much more interesting: Outlook users are more likely to have business credit cards so if we ever switch to a freemium model, we can charge them. Also, there’s a strong demand for advertising partnership opportunities within Outlook, an application that users interact with for hours each day.

I like to think of it this way: there are a huge number of Outlook users out there who are so frustrated with the program that they feel like there hair is on fire. What Xobni offers is a cold bucket of water.

A Generalized Architecture

One of Xobni’s major differentiators is that we didn’t build a simple addin for Outlook, but an email application platform. Whenever we write software, we aim for a more general solution than what is required by our current needs. We can easily build new applications and build integrations into other email clients, as these leaked screenshots illustrate.



Building this platform took a significant amount of time and effort, but I’m happy that Adam made this decision early on: It allows us to quickly iterate on functionality, and build new, exciting products in the future!

Choosing a Look

Here are some mockups I created more than a year ago that illustrate the looks we had in mind for Xobni. The mockup on the right was our original choice: it blends nicely into Outlook, almost as if Xobni was built into it from the start. We created the third one almost as a joke, to show how the sidebar would look if we used a funky color palette.



We decided to go with the bright, saturated colors, because it would have what we call the “What the heck is that?” effect. Jane would walk by Jack’s desk, and see a bright blob on the right side of his Outlook screen, and she would blurt out: “What the heck is that?” Jack would have to explain Xobni and what it does, and Jane would probably download it once back at her desk.

Search as an Afterthought

Ironically, Xobni’s search function was initially an afterthought – Greg Duffy implemented it just a few days before we launched our private beta at TechCrunch 40. Even considering the rapid pace at which startups do product development, this was an immense accomplishment: Xobni’s search is twice as fast as Outlook’s, thanks to highly optimized and efficient search indexes. That combination of speed and usefulness make search our top-clicked feature.

Launch!

Let’s say you have a great product. How do you know when you’re ready to launch? That’s what I asked Gmail creator Paul Buchheit two months before our launch date. At the time, Paul was pretty skeptical, but he inspired us with an idea he repeated at Y Combinator's Startup School: Before launching Gmail, Eric Schmidt gave him the assignment to find 100 happy users. After talking to users, and eliminating their top feature requests and bugs, they met that number and thus, Gmail was ready to fly. We followed a similar spirit by adding the Are You Happy box to the product, and by listening closely to customers via our support team and users we knew personally.

We originally launched a private beta at TechCrunch 40, a conference where 40 startups launch their product within 2 days. The schedule was very tight, and the days leading up to it were a chaotic blur. In retrospect, we probably launched a little earlier than we should have. The product hadn’t been heavily tested at that point, yet we grew our user base by 50x that very day. With our open beta launch on Monday, we were finally ready in terms of speed and stability, and the feedback since has been extremely positive:

"Xobni is such a simple idea, but it is sure to radically change how you handle email." - Tom Spring, PC World

"For those who work in the corporate world - where Outlook is still heavily used - Xobni's public beta will be of great help, allowing them to quickly find and expose the data trapped in their inbox." - Sarah Perez, Read Write Web

"This plugin looks like it would be insanely helpful. Gmail, are you paying attention? :)" - Comment by Ross M, Lifehacker

"Given that Outlook is pretty much de rigueur for most corporate e-mail systems, this should be a welcome addition for those of you trapped in Outlook at work." - Scott Gilbertson, Wired

"Oh Microsoft, you’ve missed the boat yet again it would seem." - Zach Epstein, The Boy Genius Report

"In just a short few days, I can already share my belief that Xobni is a must download for Outlook users." - Kevin Tofel, kjOnTheRun

"Designed to make it easier to handle the deluge of daily messages, Xobni integrates with Outlook and - to quote our original review - becomes an invaluable weapon in the daily war with email." - Tim Danton, PC Pro

Thanks to Evan Solomon and Sean Ellis for reviewing drafts of this article. Be sure to check out Part III of this series, where I’ll talk about how we built a great company, assembled a superstar team, and built a culture that encourages building solid products.

Further Reading

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out my earlier blog entry, The Days before the Xobni Launch which talks about the days before launching our private beta at TechCrunch 40.

If you haven’t done so yet, read the first part of the series "Hello World, Meet Xobni".

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".

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.

The Cost of Switching Your Logo

When big companies change their logos, brochures have to be reprinted, signs changed, and trucks repainted.



About a week ago, Xobni switched to a new, lowercase logo. It eliminates the dash above the o: Since the Bill Gates demo, the short o has fallen out of favor. In addition, the new lowercase format allows us to mirror the logo on our homepage to make the "inbox backwards" connection obvious.

After Bryan created the new design and put it up on the website, I decided to switch our logo everywhere else. Original estimate: 1 hour.

I changed the logo in the product, our internal Wiki, the bug tracker, Nimda, and even ordered mousepads with the new design. Then, I figured out how to change our logo on Wikipedia, and even wrote an email to Crunchbase asking to change our logo. Total time taken: 3 hours! And I'm sure the old logo still lingers somewhere.

If this small change takes hours even for a startup like ours, I can see what corporations spend those millions of dollars on.

Microsoft's Office Transformation

John K. Waters from Redmond Developer News - a magazine devoted to developing on the Windows platform - wrote an article on how companies are starting to use Office as an extendable platform. Interesting stuff.

The article also has some quotes by me where I talk about Xobni, our experience with Outlook and our plans beyond it. Read it here.

Does your Outlook speak a Foreign Language?

If you have a non-English edition of Microsoft Outlook, I need your help!

Here at Xobni, some of our algorithms and heuristics rely on Outlook speaking English. Unfortunately for our software, but fortunately for us, a very significant percentage of our users work with non-English versions of Outlook.

Since our Pirate Testing Lab and our impressive farm of happy virtual machines contains only English-language Outlook installs, I need your help.

If you have a non-English edition of Outlook, please leave a comment with the following:

• Your country, the language, and version (2003/2007) of your Microsoft Outlook
• The names that your edition of Outlook uses for:
1. Inbox
2. Outbox
3. Sent Items
4. Deleted Items
5. Drafts
6. Junk E-Mail
7. RSS Feeds
8. Search Folders
9. Calendar
• The prefix that your Outlook adds to the subject on an email you reply to. For example, in English this is "Re:". In German this is "Aw:". In Italian, this is "R:"
• The prefix for "Reply All". In English this is "RE:"
• The prefix for "Forward". In English this is "FW:"
• (Extra credit): The prefixes Outlook uses when someone accepts or declines your appointment, or sets attendance to tentative. In English, this is "Accepted:", "Declined:" and "Tentative:"

Thanks so much – your help is greatly appreciated!

Xobni Blog: Behind the Scenes

Matt wrote this post on the Xobni blog that talks about the internal tools we use behind the scenes.

Visitors to Xobni are often surprised how much data analysis we do in the background. We're trying to be smart not just with the software we ship to users, but also the software we use internally.

Nimda and LunchBotr are just two examples of our toolset - upcoming episodes will hopefully talk about the other tools we use every day.

Xobni in Newsweek: Reinventing the Inbox

We'll be in next week's Newsweek: "Reinventing the Inbox: Tech firms are trying to combine e-mail with social-networking tools."

One of the leading startups in this new field is Xobni. The San Francisco firm hopes to capitalize on dissatisfaction with swelling IN boxes that make the eyes glaze over. "Google organized all the information on the Web," says cofounder Matt Brezina. "Nobody's really done that for your personal information."

Here's the best part:

Xobni is looking at other ways to expand the social possibilities of the IN box. One project in development is called Stay in Touch, which looks at your e-mail pattern and creates a list of the people you once sent e-mail to but haven't been in touch with recently. "We call it the ex-girlfriend finder," says Brezina.

Is Xobni the next Google?

Read this.

Jeff Bonforte joins Xobni as CEO

Jeff joins us from Yahoo, where he made Yahoo Messenger become the #1 IM client in America, and went on to be their VP Social Search.

We're bringing on Jeff not because we had to: We led the company through the adventerous early days, built a killer product, and assembled a superstar team. Instead, when we first met Jeff, we immediately clicked with and thought "he's so good, we'll just have to get him".

We're looking forward to taking Xobni to the next level with Jeff: A billion-dollar company with millions of users.

Welcome to Xobni, Jeff - we're excited you're here!

Read our official announcement over here.

Bill Gates demos Xobni

Earlier this morning, Bill gates demo'd Xobni at the Office Developers Conference in San Jose, California.



Here's a link to the webcast. The demo is about 44 minutes in.

And some quotes from the show:

"Xobni - it's actually the word inbox spelled backwards: This is where someone has come into Outlook and decided to add value. "You look over there to the right, that's their unique display area. They help you understand how you communicate, what groups of people you work with."

"In fact, this is really a social networking set of capabilities, but brought into Outlook itself. So we think it's very, very cool to look at mail messages, extract information, they give you statistics about email patterns. It lets you manage relationships. It actually understands the richness of different types of relationships, which is I think the next generation in social networking. Not just one set of friends who all see the same thing, but rather different relationships and the way you connect up and share information."

"This is a great example of having something like Xobni come in and extend things. It lets us see where people want new capabilities in the Outlook-type environment."

Update: A short video clip with Bill's demo is now on YouTube.

Celebrating User Happiness

Matt, Skyler, and Bryan compiled some user quotes from our feedback emails. Check out "Celebrating User Happiness" on the Xobni blog.

Three Clever Xobni Features (3/3): Prefilling Invites

This is installment 3 of 3 blog entries about features in Xobni where I discuss well-implemented, clever ideas. None of these are Xobni-specific – you should be able to port these ideas to any web or desktop app.

Previously:

1. Are You Happy? (1/3)
2. As-You-Yype Search (2/3)

On January 9th, we started allowing our existing users to invite their friends to Xobni. If they have invites to send, this is what appears in the sidebar:



Clicking on the box brings up this window:



The dialog shows a list of your top contacts who use Outlook, which we identify by looking at headers of emails you received from them. These people are exactly the audience for Xobni!

This feature is an instance of smart defaults, not just sensible defaults. We take the vast amount of data in your email repository and do something smart with it. (The beauty is that the core piece of this functionality was written in one day with our powerful email data framework.) That's exactly what Xobni is about.

Xobni Makes a Splash

Below are some reactions to last week's launch of our invite system that lets you invite your friends to Xobni.

ReadWriteWeb: Xobni: Social Network in Your Inbox:

"Xobni's brilliance is in providing you with a true social network filled with information that can help you stay productive and get things done. [...] This makes Xobni not just useful, but one of those, "how did I ever live without it" kind of things."

TechCrunch: Xobni: The Super Plugin for Outlook

"Being the only guy with Outlook in the office, it’s been a personal favorite of mine. Xobni’s sidebar has improved Outlook for me by offering faster search, and automatic organization of my email and contacts. Their search function alone has saved me time by just being faster and more comprehensive than Outlook’s native search."

Lifehacker: Supercharge Outlook with Xobni

"Freeware Microsoft Outlook plug-in Xobni (that's inbox backwards) adds a handful of killer features to its new Outlook sidebar. [...] Seeing as Xobni has successfully made Outlook appear exciting (which is no easy feat), this freeware, Windows-only plug-in looks like a winner."

Threeminds:

"[...] after a few minutes of toying with it, I have the feeling I won’t be able to work without it!"

Daily Cup of Geek: Inbox Spelled Backwards and How It Is Taking Email Forward

"Xobni is that 'something better' I’ve been dying for when it comes to email."

Three Clever Xobni Features (2/3): As-you-type Search

This is installment 2 of 3 blog entries about features in Xobni where I discuss well-implemented, clever ideas. None of these are Xobni-specific – you should be able to port these ideas to any web or desktop app.

Previously: Three Clever Xobni Features (1/3): Are you Happy?

Traditionally, you type in the query, hit Enter, and get the results. In Xobni, you start typing your query and we start showing you results as-you-type.



Outlook 2007 has a similar feature: When you type and pause for a bit, it starts a search in the background. But it's the same operation at the same speeds as their normal search. In contrast, our search indexes and data files are optimized for incremental search: We search for prefixes, not full words. This makes us much faster.



The next installment of this series appears on Monday, January 14. Subscribe to my RSS feed to get updates.

Launching Xobni Invites

Today we're launching Gmail-Style invites in Xobni.


If you have Xobni installed, you can send invites to your friends from within the application.


Read the coverage on TechCrunch, GigaOm, and our very own Xobni blog.

This starts an exciting new phase for Xobni where we're become available to more and more users. We're spreading email happiness. If you have Xobni installed, don't forget to invite your friends!

Update: Lifehacker: Supercharge Outlook with Xobni

Update 2: MIT Technology Review:: Yahoo's Plan for a Smarter In-Box : "Yahoo isn't alone in its desire to reshape e-mail."

Three Clever Xobni Features (1/3): "Are you Happy?"

This is installment 1 of 3 blog entries about features in Xobni where I discuss well-implemented, clever ideas. None of these are Xobni-specific – you should be able to port these ideas to any web or desktop app.

We're religious about user feedback at Xobni. We get dozens of emails every day and read every single one. If you uninstall us, we ask for comments around why you uninstalled and how we could improve. We've built tools to collect and summarize this data.

But most users aren't vocal about their needs. The average happy user is unlikely to email with small problems she might be seeing. We want their feedback, but can't just pop up a window with a survey every time you use the software.

That's why we built Are you Happy?: Instead of a popup, we add a little box on the bottom of the sidebar every couple of weeks and ask: "Are you happy?" There are two buttons, Yes and No, and an optional comment field.



This is the most lightweight method of collecting user feedback. Note that:

1. We're not popping up an annoying window.
2. We ask a simple question.
3. There are only two options – "yes" and "no" - and no Send button.

If we introduce unpopular features or bugs, we know within a few days. This feature was inspired by a similar mechanism in the early days of Caribou.

Currently, 90% of our users answer "Yes".

The next installment of this series appears on Thursday, January 10. Subscribe to my RSS feed to get updates.

The French Invade Xobni

(This happened almost a month ago, but I haven't had time to write about it)

Matt mentioned that there would be "some French bloggers" visiting "later tonight". That sounded pretty innocent, but I had no idea that there would be so many of them.


Xobni still lacks the advanced conference room facilities of larger companies, but we do have a big-ass plasma screen and some leather couches. Thus, we packed our visitors into our "living room" and gave them the Xobni demo, followed by an hour-long Q&A session and some beers at the pub.


It turns out these guys were French entrepreneurs and bloggers on a week-long study trip to Silicon Valley. Jeremy Fain had organized for them to visit places such as Stanford, the San Francisco City Council, Microsoft, Google, eBay, Twitter and Xobni, all packed into a tight schedule.


I only wish this kind of trip had existed when I was back in Zurich - or that I would've had the idea to organize one.

Xobni Preferred and the Holiday Homepage

A little more than a week ago, we started sending out hundreds of invites every day to people who had signed up for the Beta on our page some time ago.

But what if you didn't sign up and want to get the Xobni Beta now? If you want to help promote Xobni, you can sign up for Xobni Preferred and you'll get an invite within a day.

In other news, I love our new homepage! It's so beatiful, doesn't feature cliche girl with headset, and mentions "reindeer-fast search", Xobni's most popular feature.

Xobnis Love Diet Dr. Pepper

Tuesday morning:



Wednesday morning:



Is this just a fad or a trend?

The Pirate Lab

Ryan writes on the Xobni blog:

One morning after some deep meditation, the Xobni team woke up and realized that not everyone uses Xobni on the same Dell Inspirons and IBM ThinkPads that we all use. Matt’s head almost exploded from this realization. True story.

We knew that testing had to be done on the machines our users were actually using. This involves more than simply doing testing on virtual machines, which we have used since day 1. Instead we needed computers that have all the pre-configured bloatware, special packs of Microsoft Office, extra restore partitions, and all of the rest of that great stuff that slows down your computer to a crawl.

They also got an EZ-Bake oven. I'm confident that it, too, will improve Xobni's software quality on exotic configurations.

Giants vs. Sprinters

This is a crosspost of an article I wrote for Swiss Entrepreneurship blog Synetgies.

Most revolutionary new technology products and Internet services come from a handful of large companies and small startups. What's the secret sauce?

Successful and profitable large companies such as Apple and Google invent and produce such products as the iPod, the iPhone, Google Maps, and Gmail. In contrast, startups have developed products and services such as Google Search (back when Google was a startup), Hotmail, PayPal, YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter.

Users and the press rave about these products, and they have generated large valuations and profits. How does this kind of product innovation happen?

In this article, I'll contrast product development at large and small companies. I've experienced product development at Google (where I worked on Gmail and some unmentionable projects), Yahoo (where I interned at the end of the last bubble). I'm currently working on my startup, Xobni, where my role involves development as well as setting engineering and product priorities. We're a small team of 10 people and are building new ways to search and navigate your email. Thus, I've seen both ends of the spectrum.

Between the two extremes of small and large companies, there are a few common denominators:

• Both types of companies start with good people who are smart, well-educated, and passionate.


• They provide good tools: High-end workstations, great infrastructure, and good benefits. For example, Google will pay employees for health insurance, serve free food and drinks, coupons towards buying hybrids, gym memberships, and the like.


• They set a culture that is centered on engineers. Engineering and is the scarce resource, as it hard to find excellent engineers who can create great products. Openly or covertly, PR, Marketing, Sales, and HR are seen as second-rate citizens. This is most clear at Google, where engineering is kept on the main campus, but HR and PR are located in "Siberia": office buildings so far away that employees have to use bikes and scooters to commute to meetings.

Most people think of "innovation" as "ideas". But there's no lack of good ideas. At Xobni, we have an internal Wiki page with hundreds of product ideas. At Google, there's the ideas mailing list on which you can find thousands of employee-submitted proposals for new features and new products. I'm sure that Microsoft has an equivalent tool. But anyone who has added to that Wiki, or written to the ideas list knows that they are the place that ideas go to die.

What really counts is execution: At large companies, the ideas that survive have a strong proponent who will get support for the idea, find colleagues to work on it with, defend it in meetings, and launch it to a public. This is what happened at Gmail: Paul Buchheit started working on a webmail client, found others to work with, defended it against VPs who said that an ad-supported model would never work, and managers who said that it is prone to extinction because of Microsoft's control of JavaScript. At startups you'll find the same process (but less meetings): Xobni's most popular feature is search, but it was two of us who took it from a feature added as an afterthought one of the core pieces of our functionality.

Yet, there are many differences. Technology giants and startups both have their own set of advantages that play in their favor when executing against ideas:

Large technology companies

• Resources: As the name says, large companies have tons of people. Once management is convinced of the viability of a project, they can put people, infrastructure, and money to work to make the idea become reality. Giants move slowly, but once they do, the earth starts shaking.


• Experienced management: In Silicon Valley, senior managers at large companies typically have startup experience. They started or joined small companies that got bought or went public. They know how to manage innovation and push interesting projects forward.


• Instant credibility: When Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo launches a new product, the world listens. If a startup had released Google's phone SDK, there would not have been weeks of Google phone speculation in the press, weeks before launch. Consumers will feel safe buying new Apple products when they're launched, because they would know where to buy and what level of quality to expect. Startups have to build a really good product and build it from the start, build press relationships, and resort to guerilla marketing as needed.

Startups

• Focus, clear priorities: You'll never see a company as focused on progress as a startup. At Xobni, the number one priority is to get high-quality software out the door. There's only this one project: There are no distractions, no talks to attend, no other projects for engineers to switch to. We're all sprinting towards a clear goal.


• Aligned incentives: At startups, employees have significant amount of stock in the company, and their financial future is highly correlated with the success of the company. Thus, there is only one controlling variable: Their contribution to the product. If they can add or improve features, they will. On the other hand, large corporations attract resume stampers who are sometimes guided by self-interest: Their priority is to rise in the ranks, not contribute to overall success.


• No lockstep development: Startups have small numbers of people working on small products. Large companies work on large products with lots of people. These people require coordination and planning. For example, I've heard that the feature sets of Microsoft's Office suite are planned out two releases in advance, with two years between each release. This means that a product manager on Word knows what features the product will have in 2011. If you're an engineer at Microsoft and have an idea, it may not get executed upon until four years from now! In addition, there's the burden of reverse compatibility: Every new feature must be compatible with versions of the software that are decades old.

In summary, we explored differences in how startups and large companies run innovation and product development. There are some commonalities - great people, focus on engineering, and good tools - but startups have large advantages because they are more focused and have no existing customers, products, and profit lines to look after.

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If you liked this article, you will also like Career Advice for High Achievers.

The Xobni Office, Thoughts on Startup Office Space

In mid-May this year, we moved from Adam's apartment into Xobni's now offices at Sutter and Kearney in downtown San Francisco. Xobni was 4 people. Starting Monday, we'll be 9.

Matt looked at dozens of offices. We looked at cheap places, expensive places, places in the Mission, Soma, downtown, and elsewhere. We had nicknames for our options - "Osgood", "Howard", "the dog place", and "the hot girl place" (a building populated by PR and advertising agencies). We went with "the Craigslist place", which was in fact one of the first we looked at. I think we chose well.



You're in a small startup and need to find office space for the team. What should you look for? I'm for inexpensive office space that works. No private offices, no prime office space, no pretentious architects or sixty story buildings.

Note that I won't be talking about how to find a broker, a lawyer, or negotiate with the landlord. Joel can tell you all you need to know about that.

Location, Location, Location

The first rule in real estate also applies to startup offices. You need to be in a great location. At Xobni, we have found that being in San Francisco is invaluable for hiring. Many promising candidates want to be in the city, not an office park in Silicon Valley. Some already live in the city and commute every day via car, Google shuttle, or CalTrain at the expense of 2 to 3 hours per day.

You want to be close to public transportation. The financial district and parts of SOMA are ideal because they're close to Bart, Muni, and the bus system. Parking is expensive but available. (We use the Sutter/Stockton garage.)

You also want to be close to the city center. We were two blocks away from the TechCrunch40 conference where we launched. Same for Web 2.0.

Here's the view from our window.

Eating and Drinking

We typically order in food for lunch and go out for dinner even though we have a fully stocked fridge and snack cabinet. You want to be in a place where this is possible without excessive travel; the hours after dinner are the most productive hours for writing code.

Our lunch options are quite extensive: burgers, salads, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Hawaiian barbecue, crepes, burritos, pasta - you name it. Three of the four surrounding blocks seem to be dedicated to the purpose of feeding office workers. Dinner options are limited by the fact that everything in the financial district closes at 5 pm; you’ll find us at one of a handful of restaurants, Chipotle, the Westfield mall, or the Metreon.

We're also very happy to have a 24-hour 7-11 downstairs, and a Walgreens around the corner to cover our convenience shopping needs. When I need to step out for a bit, I usually grab a Naked juice downstairs and take a walk around the block. Being in the city is hard to beat.

Prime Office Space? Nope

When we were shopping for office space, we looked at a lot of fancy commercial real estate. But as a startup, you won't need fancy Class A space. Marble floors, and monumental glass-and-steel architecture won't make your startup more successful. Paul Graham says: "Professional means doing good work, not elevators and glass walls."

At Xobni, we went for office space with character. Our building was built in 1904, with all the charm of that era. It did come with one luxury, though: prewired Cat 5 Ethernet. The Scribd guys downstairs had to duct tape cable to the floor.

Layout

People have very strong opinions about what office space layouts should look like. Joel, for example, is a strong proponent of private offices. I think private offices are well-intentioned but go overboard.

You probably know that open layouts should be avoided. While everyone in the same room fosters communication, you'll find that you can't focus on complicated tasks because everyone interrupts everyone else all the time.

My experience with cubicles is slightly better. Google's building 41, where I spent all of my Mountain View time, is one big cubicle farm. While there are fewer interruptions, the noise level is still unbearable; cubicles don't filter sound well enough. I also found that Google's compression ratios are unwise. Productivity suffers when you squeeze together with 3 people in the space for 1 person.

We have rooms for 3-4 people each. This is about the size of an engineering subteam will have. Being around people who are all working on the same thing encourages communication about the right things, but keeps interruptions down. I put my 49ers cap and headphones on when I don’t want to be interrupted.



In addition to the offices, we have a central conference room for formal meetings. We also have a quiet nap room with a comfy couch. Taking naps at the workplace sounds unprofessional, but it does make everyone more productive. Adam, for some reason, seems to have missed the memo about the nap room.



There's also a "living room" with nice leather couches. We hold daily meetings with the entire team here. The huge plasma screen shows current bugs and work items, and stats about installs, beta signups, and plus support tickets.

Decoration and Furniture

We didn't get Class A space, but we did spend lots of time decorating our digs. We put opaque glass panes in a wall next to the living room to bring in more light. We painted our walls in Xobni colors, and put up blik wall decals. We recently gave everyone a $100 decoration budget for their personal workspaces. We have yet to see the results, but I'm sure at least one of the Xobnis will get something completely inappropriate.



You only have one back and if you spend a lot of time in a chair, it better be a nice one. That's why we spend money on Aerons, which we buy used from Craigslist. Everything else is Ikea. Everyone gets two desks (Mikael, $69.99) and drawers (Andy, $29.99). Two mikaels per person is a bit too large for our rooms, and we might need to move to a different desk setup when space starts running out.

Developers get three monitors, so some have remarked that our office looks like a Dell commercial. We need to call them up and renegotiate our deal on those LCDs.



I'm very happy with our office. We have room for about 9 more people, which should last for a while. The only item on my wishlist for the next office is a shower.

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Thanks to Adam Smith for looking over an earlier draft of this.

If you liked this, you might enjoy: Photo Story: The Days Before the Xobni Launch.