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Ask HN: Email Software for the Enterprise

1 points by tmpk ↗ HN
Email overload is a nightmare. Corporate email software (e.g. MS Exchange-Outlook) does a mediocre job of organizing large volumes of email. I have an idea for creating an email server-client suite that would automatically organize your email. But even if I create something that beats Exchange-Outlook hands down, most large companies probably won't buy their email software from a young startup. And a small company won't have much of an email overload problem.

My current plan is to sell to startups, and hope that some of these will grow to be large companies, and thus large customers. Once I have a few major customers, my startup will have the legitimacy to be able to sell software to the likes of GE. Any thoughts on this plan?

Has anyone here been successful in selling software to enterprise customers? If yes, how did you overcome the 'startup legitimacy' issue?

Is there anyone here who works in the IT department for a medium or large sized company, and has bought software from a startup? What would be your major concerns about buying software from a startup?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

PS: I have already thought about creating email software for the consumer market, but my ideas about self-organizing email would work much better in the context of corporate email.

3 comments

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run4yourlives
I think your idea is doomed, even if you achieve technical nirvana in email delivery. Here's why:

1. You will not beat MS in the exchange market. "Everyone" uses office, therefore everyone has the outlook client, it's a short hop to installing Exchange, and it can scale right up to enterprise size adequately enough that you'll never be able to touch it. You can see how IBM and Novell have both been destroyed in this market if you're interested in the battle you face.

EDIT: Corporations will not even talk to you, because honestly, email is a problem that is already solved for 99% of them. Additionally, if they're big, it is much easier for them to just go with the flow and use the common system - no one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for using exchange. Look at Symantec, many people have them beat in the AV game, but they own the mid level market.

2. On the startup end, you're competing with free software and hosted solutions. If startups aren't comfortable with gmail or similar, odds are they just stick with their domain host's offering and use the local client of their choice.

I suppose there could be a very real market for a hosted email service that gives the flexibility of gmail with the comfort of a paid, secure service. I think though that it would be very difficult to firstly find this market, and second present an offering that is tempting enough for them to switch.

Honestly, don't waste your time on this one... the work required just to meet the minimum expectations is so vast it isn't worth it.

tmpk
Thanks for your comments.

Companies like Zimbra and PostPath have achieved some success in competing with MS Exchange. Why do you think building an email server like Exchange is too much of a technical challenge?

Also, my idea is not to build yet another email delivery solution, you are right that problem is 99% solved. But an office worker receives literally thousands (counting mailing lists) of emails a day. Even with folders and rules, there is a lot of human effort required to sort through all this email. That seems like a real pain point to me.

run4yourlives
I wasn't suggesting that it was a technical issue at all really. It would be a difficult task, but certainly not out of reach for many people I know, so I wouldn't suggest that it would be out of your reach either.

The problem would be selling it.

The issue with your second observation is that while it is true, the work is distributed, thus isn't a source of pain to the company - they entity you're trying to sell to.

There are plenty of GTD tools out there, but this doesn't have anything to do with email.