On Friday, May 7, we held our first FedEx Day.

What is FedEx day? It was created by the software company Atlassian a few years ago. Modeled after Google’s 20% time, Atlassian chose to set aside one day where every member of their team worked on whatever they chose, but they had to ship something at the end of that one day (hence the FedEx day name).

Everyone on the OtherInbox team (executives, managers, developers, marketing team, etc) worked to deliver something useful in one day. The team was free to work on any project and were encouraged to work outside of their normal job roles. Some worked on tools to help make future development for OtherInbox easier. Others created enhancements to user-facing content.

Here’s a quick run-down of what we delivered for our FedEx Day projects:

• The creation of a tool designed to use the “power of the masses” to help us find and identify senders we should be organizing with our Organizer products. If several of our users all choose to organize messages from a new online store, we want to be aware of that and start organizing those messages for everyone as well.
• Refactoring of the Organizer for Yahoo! Mail codebase, breaking down a monolithic application into smaller modules, making it easier to maintain.
• A set of tools to streamline the deployment of Organizer for Yahoo! Mail. This makes future development of Organizer for Yahoo! Mail faster and more efficient.
• Investigation of the scan algorithms used on Yahoo! Mail accounts, uncovering ways to make them more efficient and cost effective.
• Creation of a product specification for a new product that scans a user’s email account and allows users to easily unsubscribe from newsletters with just a few clicks.
• Creation of a communication guide on how to have a uniform voice and style for our messaging that we can used for emails, notifications and our website.
• The introduction of A/B split testing to the OtherInbox website to evaluate new designs and messaging.

All in all, it was an overwhelming success and everybody had fun as well. We plan to have more FedEx Days in the very near future.

Do you have a suggestion for something you would like to see the OtherInbox deliver in a single day? Please leave a comment below with your suggestions.

Due to overwhelming popular demand, we got a whole new shipment of our fabulous T-Shirts, all in black. 

 

Hint: If you want to see the "I've fallen and I can't get up" video, click here. You won't regret it.

Wow, has it really been a year since we launched into beta at TechCrunch50 in September, 2008?

It was a lot of fun to attend TechCrunch50 2009 as an exhibitor and attendee this time, and not have the pressure of presenting. It's still an incredible networking event and I really enjoy seeing the company pitches. TechCrunch was very generous to invite their alumni companies back and to give us space in the demo pit.

The skinny

So what's happened since then? We came out of beta and launched three new products – our Premium service, Gmail integration, and Yahoo! Mail integration. Partnering with Yahoo! Mail has helped us to reach a critical milestone of 100,000 users! We have a strong upgrade rate to the Premium service and a very high retention rate.

What do we need to improve? We've had some growing pains as we've scaled the service. We are implementing some major database improvements this week that we think will address a problem that made our website slow to use and also slowed down the frequency at which we check Yahoo! Mail and Gmail accounts. We also need to improve the way our IMAP server works and fix some bugs that have been lingering.

1. We need to make things faster.
2. We need to make things more reliable.

You can expect to see some big improvements in October!

SXSW

Well, we launched to the public at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) in March 2009 and at the same time released our Gmail Organizer. SXSW was a LOT of fun! If you didn’t come by our booth to hang out with the OtherInbox Team, try to win a mailbox full of cash, or get the chance to take a picture with Mr. Spam, you missed out! We had a blast spreading the excitement about our launch; we even have the pictures to prove it! Most importantly, we enjoyed meeting many of our beta users in person!

Yahoo! Mail Automatic Organizer

Yahoo! Mail is the largest email provider in the world and has always been an innovator – so of course we had our eye on them. When Yahoo! introduced their Applications platform, we jumped at the opportunity and fortunately they were already familiar with us because of TechCrunch50. In June we launched the Automatic Organizer beta in Yahoo! Mail and in September opened it up to every Yahoo! Mail user in the United States.

Click here to try it out on your Yahoo! Mail account!

Gmail

We released our Gmail Organizer in March and then got straight to work on the Yahoo! Mail Organizer. Now we're taking another look at Gmail and identifying how we can improve it. Please read this blog post for more details and add your comments!

Giving back to our Community

We're proud to live in Austin, Texas and we give back to our community by volunteering and supporting local causes. This year we helped the Austin Entrepreneur's Foundation to paint a local school and packed bags at Meals on Wheels. We also host the local Austin on Rails user group meetings at our office once a month.

What a team. We're hiring!

None of these successes would be possible without an amazing team.  The OtherInbox Team is a group of talented individuals who are dedicated, high-spirited, and enjoy working together. They are absolute rockstars. We all work hard but we have fun doing it. We are also looking to expand, so if you know anyone who enjoys a fun and flexible startup environment and values a sense of community, check out the open job positions!

What's next?

• We're working to make our Yahoo! Mail Automatic Organizer faster and smarter
• We're upgrading our premium website to make it faster
• We're adding more calendar functionality
• We're looking at how we might integrate with Google Wave
• What else? Give us your suggestion here

Thank you

I want to sincerely say thank you for believing in OtherInbox and supporting us over the past year. A year from now I hope to be celebrating our 1 million user milestone!

Joshua Baer
Founder & CEO

We need your help growing our fan base on Facebook.  We have almost
3,000 followers on Twitter but only 372 followers on Facebook.  Now how
are we supposed to save the world from email overload with only 372
people following us on Facebook?!

As an incentive to follow
us, and to help us get other followers, we are going to be giving away
one free premium account per week to one of our Facebook friends!  We
will also have t-shirt giveways, contests, and much more!

If you
retweet this message, we will enter you in to win a free premium
upgrade.  If you already have a year of premium service, we will add an
additional year to your contract!

Thank you for helping us continue to grow.  We are ready to take on email overload around the world! Ready, set, RT!

Follow us on
Facebook!

We had a great time at SXSWi this year!  There were lots of fun activities and we even introduced our Super Hero Mr. Spam.  Thanks to everyone who took the time to signup at our booth or at home.  We also want to thank all our current beta testers for stopping by or sending us tweets and emails about how OIB has helped eliminate your email overload.

OtherInbox takes pride on our commitment to all of our users, both new and early beta testers.  We encourage your feedback and comments on our blog, Twitter, Facebook, and especially on help.oib.com.

We would also like to encourage our Super Users to share your tips and tricks with all of our new users.  Please send us your blogs, screencasts, and reviews! OtherInbox would not be half the company we are if it were not for all of you and your continued support of our services.  Cheers to all of you!

Well, maybe not for everything, but it sure is making a difference in the lives of thousands of our users. OtherInbox uses social media to not only educate people on the benefits of getting control of their email again, but also to listen to what people have done with OtherInbox on their own. We have an active Twitter community that you can follow @otherinbox. We also use Facebook to connect to users, communicate tips and new features, and gather suggestions and ideas. Some OtherInbox beta testers have found ways to market their talents, organize their small business email, search for wedding gowns, and even assist in developing websites like in this comment from @hadees: “@otherinbox I use it when I’m developing websites so I can sign up lots of test users each with their own unique email address.”

Even the community on our support site is encouraged and active in giving advice on new uses or product enhancements. We develop our product roadmap based on user feedback as much as possible. OtherInbox is a startup with two employees who serve as full time community specialists. We work with our community on a daily basis to find what they find useful in our product and how they are using OIB. We will even be posting t-shirt ideas that were provided by our users for our SXSW launch in March. Some companies pretend to listen to what their communities say. Others, like OtherInbox, rely on the input of the community to make the best product possible.

Although OtherInbox is currently freezing beta invites while we make some improvements, we have had many people reach out and ask for a beta invite. We are working to complete these improvements as quickly as possible to ensure that everyone is cured of email overload. We might not have the answers to solving the economic crisis (although Washington should consider opening an OtherInbox for suggestions), but according to our users, we have found the answer to fighting spam and gaining control of your inbox again.

We give a special thanks to our active community for your constant feedback and support. Ideas, comments, questions, tips, and concerns are always encouraged!

My name is Leah Chaney and I’m your new OtherInbox Community Manager. I’m looking forward to focusing on the community of OtherInbox users.

OtherInbox is dedicated to listening to our community and I encourage you to follow us on Twitter, check us out on Facebook, and read our blog.

If you have technical questions or suggestions, please visit our support site, and one of our team members or someone from our user community will be eager to help you. You can also contribute to the community by sharing ideas or starting a discussion. I am very passionate about community involvement and the power of user suggestions. Please stay tuned for new and exciting enhancements to your OtherInbox account. I look forward to working for you!

Please help us welcome another OtherInbox baby — Mikaela Vail Baer. She was born on election day which has already set high expectations for her political career. We’re not quite sure, but Mikaela may be the first person to have a Facebook and Twitter account while in-utero!

Forbes magazine ranked Austin the best Bang for the Buck in the country, with San Antonio number 2 and both Dallas and Houston in the top 10. With a low cost of living, strong job market and low inflation, Texas is looking very attractive!

Not only that, but Austin is also the city with “the highest percentage of bloggers and digeratti“.

If you’re living in the bay area or NYC you might want to take a look at opportunities in Austin!