Mailbird - aiming to tame e-mails, the necessary evil, for Windows users
They say find happiness in little things and life will be more beautiful. When at work, most of us find this little joy at the sight of ‘Inbox (0)’. Such a bliss, isn’t it? We have all heard or said, “I spent x hours and cleared my inbox, finally!” The sad part is that this small joy stays for a little time. Before we know, we find ourselves swamped in e-mails again.
E-mails, you necessary evil! The irony is that we needed e-mails in first place to sort out all our communication, now e-mail needs application to sort them. One of the most innovative communication means for today’s modern work force, has become misused and stressful.
Mac has got its Sparrow to make things a little easy for its users but Windows’ users are still looking out for a comparable solution. Andrea Loubier, is trying to build ‘Mailbird’ for them, a lightweight email application for Windows users. In the serenity of exotic Bali, Indonesia, the Mailbird team is aiming to build a world class product for billions of Windows users. Though they are not the only ones trying to do so. Inky, Thunderbird, Postbox and MailPilot are some of the other players present in the global market.
Andrea shares what is Mailbird all about and why it stand apart from the competition - “Mailbird is fast, keeps your inbox under control so you hit Inbox Zero more frequently with the many information overload management shortcuts to help you fly through your inbox. We are building an email application that we hope drives and motivates users to change email habits so they spend less time getting lost in their email inboxes, and more time doing things, changing the world, and enjoying life. Our features beat our competitors in terms of productivity and being able to reach inbox zero faster such as many shortcuts, quick compose, in-line reply, and we are the only desktop email app with an email productivity dashboard that improves email habits and efficiencies.”
Figuring out who would be the ideal Mailbird user was a pain. Being too similar to Sparrow for Mac, deciding on a solid business model and how to create a better product in an oversaturated market that is targeted and better for users did not come easy too. “Thunderbird announced ceasing feature development and Sparrow was acquired by Google, thus also ceasing additional development, came as an opportunity for us,” says Andrea. She believes that the challenges and the opportunities are all a part of the learning and fun of being involved in a startup.
Mailbird has figured its target market now and they are concentrating on 18-32 year old Windows OS users who have multiple email accounts and receive a lot of emails, thus needing a better and faster email application to handle the current growing problem today of information overload in e-mails leading to stress.
They offer a free stripped down lightweight version for basic emailing, a yearly subscription plan for single licenses and multiple licenses for small teams. Currently in beta, Mailbird is developing multi account support, Wingman productivity dashboard and a platform for innovating the email experience that allows building a community around online collaboration and communication tools with third party developers. To scale up and fasten the pace even more, they are actively looking for their first round of investment.
