Featured Startup Pitch: AgilePad’s text-based project management software is built to bring a new level of simplicity to the market

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ELEVATOR PITCH

AgilePad is project management as collaborative plain text. No longer fight complex workflows and dialogs, but manage your projects as quickly as you can type, copy, and paste.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

Our company is called Unfuddle and we create project management software and tools which help users bring their projects to life.

Our latest product is called AgilePad, which is a distraction-free project management platform designed to help software developers and managers organize projects of any size. The feedback we have received over the years has helped us to shape Unfuddle, but one common theme that has always stood out is the need for simplicity. Lots of our customers—including ourselves—needed a way to manage cross functional teams without the encumbrance of traditional agile-based management tools.

So we created AgilePad in response to that. We created something that was lightweight, simple, and nearly frictionless for anyone to get started in managing projects and teams. It’s perfect for anyone managing a project or multiple projects, themselves or teams of people, or for organizations looking to synchronize their cross-functional departments and teams.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

My business partner David Croswell and I started our entrepreneurial ventures straight out of college. We were involved in a number of venture backed startups, but we became disillusioned by the investment atmosphere. In some of our ventures, both David and I found ourselves too occupied with managing our software development tool chain. Unfuddle actually started out as a way for us to manage our tool chain, which had become increasingly more complex as time went on. Although we initially developed Unfuddle for ourselves, we offered it for others to use, and it became a part of their tool chain as well. It has grown in the past ten years to have tens of thousands of customers of its own. The success of Unfuddle has given us the flexibility to put new products out in the market, products like AgilePad.

MARKETING/PROMOTION STRATEGY

Obviously we’re leveraging our Unfuddle customer relationships as a major part of our marketing strategy. Ten years of customers have given us a community that we have been careful to nurture and grow, so we don’t take it lightly that we have tens of thousands of people that follow what we do. We also look for PR opportunities through standard practices like persistent engagement with media, and we’ve even gone so far as to simply email an influencer to let them know about AgilePad and how it might help them. The real secret isn’t getting people to find you—it’s getting them to trust you enough to become a customer. We believe that trust is a necessary component of building long-term relationships.

MARKET OPPORTUNITY

There’s no doubt that the portfolio and project management (PPM) space is highly competitive. When we started ten years ago, there were only a handful of players. These days, it’s a crowded space, but understandably so. Gartner Research estimated that the industry’s market size was $14 billion USD in 2013, and that collaborative workspaces were predicted to be one of the fastest growing segments of the PPM market. The competition is quite fierce, but it seems that there’s enough pie to go around.

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HOW WE’RE DIFFERENT

Uncommonly good customer service, and listening to our customers in order to prioritize and drive development of our products. What we care about is what helps our customers to achieve more for themselves. In whatever we build, we try to remove the barriers that keep people from realizing their goals. We’ve done that with Unfuddle, and now we continue in that mission with AgilePad.

BUSINESS MODEL

AgilePad’s subscription model is a flat rate of $5 USD per month for premium membership. But anyone can sign up and use its free features. In fact, there are probably a number of people who can get away entirely with running their projects in AgilePad without the need for a premium subscription.

CURRENT NEEDS

More customers, regardless of whether they are premium subscribers or not, is our main goal. We just want to see people come into our system, and really find the value in AgilePad like we have. We’re seeing people manage their cross-functional teams, or manage their social media editorial calendars. We have people using it as a project dashboard alongside other tools they use. People are using AgilePad in ways we didn’t even think, and that’s a pretty good sign that you’ve got something special. We may be a little biased, but we use AgilePad to manage practically everything we do.