Featured Startup Pitch: TMail21 – Collaborate though an 'email-like' interface to increase productivity

TMail screen1

COMPANY: TMail21

ELEVATOR PITCH

An email-like service to increase productivity.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

The product is an email-like app/service that massively increases collaborative productivity. The customers are teams, groups and businesses that are heavily reliant on email for communication and collaboration.

With TMail, these businesses can increase their collaborative productivity dramatically (70-80 percent improvement for many use cases). They can do this in Intra-B, B2B and B2C contexts. Their onboarding and training overhead will be low, because TMail retains the email metaphor to the greatest extent possible. Finally, TMail interoperates with email in the sense that users can send TMails to email addresses.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

The main competitor could be considered to be email itself. Our goal is not to replace email completely. However, it could be considered as ‘stripping use cases out of email’.

In the sense that they both go after the same ‘corporate communication/productivity’ dollars, Slack could be considered a competitor. But really they deal with synchronous messaging (i.e. chat) while we deal with asynchronous messaging (mail-like). We wrote a blog article on how they are complementary: https://tmail21.com/blog/tracked-mail-and-chat-a-match-made-in-heaven/.

With respect to email, TMail is fundamentally a lot more productive than email

Some specific elements that make this so are:

1) Every TMail (the equivalent of an email thread) has an auto-generated friendly, tracking number. This allows TMails to be tied into the broader enterprise ecosystem including chat, spreadsheet, databases, text messaging etc.

2) In addition to attachments TMail supports the concept of Sections. These are tightly bound to the thread (like attachments) but are updateable like shared documents.

3) TMail threads are coherent and linear and comprehensible, unlike email threads which are difficult to follow because of missing messages,

4) TMails allow lightweight processes to be created and executed right within your mail. For example, an employee onboarding process, a simple support ticket process, a contract collaboration process, a product deployment process, a blog distribution process. TMail processes are designed to fill the lacunae between app-based processes.

5) Just like email it supports Intra-B, B2B, B2C and C2C communication and collaboration

6) It has massively reduced spam compared to email.

7) TMail allows certified mail to be sent that certifies not only the time, sender, recipient, but the content itself.

8) TMail has a built-in Kanban-based message triage facility that allows whole threads to be dealt with, with a single click.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

Ranjit Notani is the founder and CEO of TMail21. He was the co-founder of One Network, a B2B collaboration company. This company has grown from scratch into the tens of millions revenue range. It is also profitable. He has over 20 years’ experience in B2B and Intra-B collaboration.

Before One Network he was a fellow at i2 Technologies. He championed and drove the development of the company’s first B2B collaboration product in the nineties. This product was eventually spun off into (what is now) a public company, e2open.

Notani has over 10 patents. He got his bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and his master’s degree from Purdue University.

At this point, the CTO and other co-founder will remain anonymous.

BUSINESS MODEL

There is an Individual account which is currently free. There is a business account which has two tiers, Starter and Pro. Starter is $7/user/month (first three users free). Pro is $12/user/month with a free trial. Enterprise is coming soon.