Conquering the Inbox

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Alex Moore, the founder and CEO of Baydin. Baydin, which means “foretelling the future through magic” in Burmese, is the company that brought Boomerang for Gmail and the Email Game into the lives of all of us who struggle every day to fight back the incessant flow of email into our inboxes. Alex’s motivation for starting the company was motivated by a predicament that many students and professionals face: every day, he would go into his office and sit down at his desk ready for a day of work, only to find himself still dealing with emails even two or three hours after arriving. The deluge is constant, and it’s easy to become overwhelmed or lose track of important emails. The products that his company has created are designed to make the process of dealing with emails as painless, efficient, and fun as possible.

Alex never thought much about entrepreneurship until his fifth year at MIT, when he was pursuing his Master’s degree. One weekend that year, the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity hosted an event in a mansion that was more or less an entrepreneurship boot camp. Most of the 40 or so people there had never even thought about starting a company; the culture at MIT then was very focused on getting a job with a big company. But at the end of the camp, which essentially consisted of “make up an idea and think about how to execute it”, the people leading the camp told all those present that all they needed to start a company were these very same ideas that they came up with that weekend. And now, 8 of the 40 that were present are still entrepreneurs in some capacity. Alex is one of them.

Most had never even thought about starting a company – but at the end of the camp (which consisted of ‘make up an idea, think about how to execute it’) they said, look, you don’t need much to start a company, just these ideas. Now, 8 of the 40 that were there are still in entrepreneurship

At the time of his first real exposure to the idea of starting his own company, Alex still didn’t think too much of it – he had a job lined up, and was already set to start his career. After graduating, he started work at Analog Devices, and was rising fast. By year three, though, he was starting to notice a real problem. Every day he would get in to work, and 2.5 hours later, he would find himself still in Outlook dealing with emails. Between product releases, troubleshooting, and general work-related communication, it became overwhelming, and he was worried that as he stayed in the company and rose higher, 2.5 hours might not be where it stopped.

A great idea for a business comes from having a great problem to solve, and this was definitely a problem. At the time, Alex had no kids and no mortgage – as he puts it, his only liabilities were his two pet rats, and he could scrounge food out of a dumpster for them. There opportunity was there; it was time. In 2009, Alex left his job and started Baydin.

When I asked Alex about how optimistic he was from the outset, about building a successful product and raising funding, he told me that he wasn’t too worried – with a great product, a solid market, and hard work, he felt that things would be alright. But early on, he learned that life sometimes isn’t as meritocratic as it should be. Baydin’s first product, Unsearch, provided users with automatic access to relevant emails and documents when replying to an email, without any explicit searching. It was a great idea with a lot of potential for success, but he soon found that access to high-level privileges by IT departments was hard to gain by three guys in a garage. Those kinds of relationships were a prerequisite to the product’s success, and they didn’t have them. Xerox came out with a similar product a year later, and Xerox’s pre-existing relationships immediately created more interest among CIOs and IT professionals than Baydin had been able to generate.

But, as Alex says, sometimes startups will survive like cockroaches, and his company kept going. His team changed, though it stayed small, and they moved on to the next wave of email-related products: Boomerang for Gmail and the Email Game. Today, these are the company’s main products – and they are amazing.

Boomerang for Gmail is a service seamlessly integrated into Gmail that allows users to “boomerang” outgoing or incoming messages into their inbox at a specified time. This is incredibly useful in a variety of contexts. For example, when scheduling a meeting or asking somebody for feedback, sometimes they will never get back to you, and it can be difficult to remember to follow up. Boomerang has an option to boomerang the message only if the email is never replied to, or whether or not there is a reply. This also comes in handy when there are emails you want to deal with at a certain point, but not right now – instead of letting them build up as unread emails in your inbox, they come back to your inbox at precisely the time you specify. Boomerang also has other useful features, such as the ability to send mail later and specify what should happen when a message is boomeranged.

It is customizable, extremely user-friendly, and has become such an intrinsic part of so many people’s systems of dealing with email (including my own) that when Baydin exited the beta and started charging for the service, people were ready to pay the $5/month without hesitation.

The Email Game is another successful product that is both functional and fun. The name explains it all: it turns your inbox into a game, rewarding you points for responding quickly and detracting points for when you skip a message or take too long, forcing you to be extremely efficient in getting to Inbox Zero. Of course, Boomerang is also integrated into the game, so you can go back to messages later if you don’t want to deal with them at the time.

Clearly the path to launching a company, raising funding, and making successful products was not without challenges. Alex, like many other successful entrepreneurs, took on the risks of leaving a stable job, starting a company, and evolving when first product didn’t work out. When Boomerang for Gmail launched, the service required access to Gmail account information, and even though they took every possible security measure, Alex said that he still had nightmares every night that a day would come when they got hacked. But they were very, very careful, and set up a system such with the highest level of security (integrating Google’s standard secure API and no passwords stored anywhere), and their dedication and precautions paid off: that day never came.

I would encourage readers to try Baydin’s products; I personally feel that they really change the way people handle email, and can help you become much more organized and effective if used consistently. And also, take inspiration from Alex when creating your own products: create something that solves a problem you have, and a problem that other people probably have too, and you could end up changing the way people do things every day of their lives, just like Baydin has.