I had to write about tonight’s announcement because it is a little bit nostalgic for me – tonight we launched our Salesforce extension, which is a premium service that connects Xobni (and Outlook) to Salesforce.com
I’m proud of the team for launching three business models in the last 4 months (if you didn’t see the other business models, check them out here and here). We spent the first three years of the company putting together the vision, conceiving a product people would use on a daily basis, raising the money to build the product, hiring the team to build the product, and getting that product into the hands of 3 million people. It is exciting to finally be at the point where Xobni is making money. I never thought it would take so long.
Tonight’s announcement is the first monetization our web services extensions (although for the next few months during the beta period, we won’t be charging for it, so get it now salesforce users!). This is cool (1) because we’ve been excited to monetize our web services extensions since we added the first free ones: linkedin, facebook and hoovers. But this is even more exciting (2) because rarely do things from your early business plans make it to fruition, but this did. I dug up our old business summary from 2006 (which I won’t share in its entirety here), but here are some of our early thoughts:
Xobni Relationships will be adopted by power networkers and salespeople. It will become part of their relationship management tool set. A professional version will contain all the functionality of Xobni , plus advanced features such as integration into salesforce.com. Our enterprise product will contain all of the above and aggregation of a group’s data. With salesforce.com integration, a sales manager can view the aggregated sales activity of his team as a feed in his Xobni sidebar.
And while I’m at it, here is the conclusion of the business summary that does a good job encapsulating Xobni’s vision still today
Email is the internet’s last bastion of underused data. Google organized all of the web’s information by making search work well. But there is more information in email than on the web. How many kilobytes of web page data did you produce in your life? Far less than the megabytes of email you’ve written. *Even though there is more information in email, it is underutilized.*
An email also contains richer information than a web page. It contains usage, trend, relationship, and time data which extends beyond the email’s content.
Xobni organizes and displays this data in useful ways.
Fortunately for Adam and I, I didn’t post a lot of the stuff from the original business plan that was far from being accurate. Especially the parts about when we would launch stuff. Boy were we off on that.
Update: While I was writing this post, our launch got picked up by MG at Techcrunch. Read more here