FounderBuzz

Transcript by Speechpad

Scott: Hi, this is Scott with FounderBuzz, and today we're hearing from Josh Baer, founder and CEO of OtherInbox. He does a nice job walking us through his company that is just starting to move from a traditional software, web-based software, to a mobile application. He talks a little bit about how they're planning on promoting that. If you've got some software that you're looking to make into a mobile app and you're wondering how to promote that, this might give you a little bit of insights into how another company is going to be doing that. Hope you enjoy the interview and would love to hear your feedback.

Josh: Hi, my name is Josh Baer, and OtherInbox is for anybody that gets too much email. It's a free service that makes your existing Yahoo mail or Gmail account better by automatically finding all the emails that aren't from real people, like receipts from Amazon, social networking messages like new friends from Facebook, and even newsletters and things like that.

This isn't a spam filter. This is all stuff that you actually checked the box and said, "No, I want this." But they can still really overwhelm you. What OtherInbox does, without you doing anything different, is it creates a number of different folders and automatically files those for you. So, instead of your inbox being full, you've got a shopping folder, a social networking folder, a news folder, and other things to make it easier to find the messages you want without having them clutter up your inbox and making you miss an important email from a real person.

Finally, to also help make sure you don't miss anything in your OtherInbox, we send you a daily digest every morning. So, every morning you get an email that says here's everything that came in the day before, and you can scan that really quickly to make sure that you don't miss anything.

Right now, we've had a great success just with our normal email product, and we've got more than a half a million people using it. We've got partnerships with Yahoo and with Google that have helped us to drive a lot of traffic. We've got some great word of mouth and Twitter traffic.

Of course, everything's going mobile. More and more people read their email on mobile. They're accessing the Internet from mobile. Some people don't even have a computer. They just get to the Internet through mobile. Of course, we want to figure out how do we make OtherInbox organizer just as useful on your mobile device as it is in your regular inbox.

Our solution there is really to look at mobile search, making it really easy to find a specific message that you're looking for very quickly. If you've ever been on your smart phone and you're trying to find something, just actually typing a small search phrase can be hard. Half the time when I do it, it auto corrects it into something else and then doesn't find the right thing. Then when it does give you search results, a lot of times it gives you so many results that, it'd be okay on a desktop, but on your mobile phone, once you get past five or six results, you're scrolling through a lot of stuff.

So what we're trying to do is make it so that you can very easily and quickly find that one email you're looking for without ever typing any search phrases, but just by tapping a few times on icons to drill down into the messages you want. We're already organizing your messages by what types of things they are and where they come from, whether they're receipts or newsletters or coupons or shopping or social networking. So we make it really easy to drill down to the category you want and find just one specific email and open it. Find an attachment you might need, find a meeting invite that you might be going to, find a photo that someone sent you. If you're in a store and you're shopping, you'll be able to find a coupon that showed up in your email. All these types of things that you can do very quickly without having to go through the tedious kind of search process on your phone.

Of course, building a mobile app doesn't make anybody download it. We're fortunate that we a large user base to work with. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to tell our existing customers about it, right? We've got a half a million people that we can send an email to, twit a tweet about, do other things to get it in front of them and get them using it themselves. Hopefully, doing that will start to get some traffic within the Apple iTunes store and some ranking there. We'll get them to write reviews about us to help push up our rankings. We'll also, of course, be pushing the PR engine on it. We'll be doing our best to get some trade club articles and large media outlets where they can drive a lot of traffic to the site and get some initial users on top of it.

Finally, the other thing that we're thinking a lot about is we want this app to have curb appeal. We want it to be that when you're using the app, that somebody sees you using it and says, "Wow, what's that? How'd you do that so fast?" Then that will cause natural word of mouth to get people talking about it as well.

With that said, we don't think that we've got it all figured out or anything. Mobile marketing is definitely something that's new and there are a lot of challenges to it. It's still, I think, more of an art than a science. We're going to try a lot of things and fail quickly and learn as we go.