Status of SaneBox

On By The SaneBox GangIn SaneBox

In my on-going attempt to live my startup life out loud, here is the status of SaneBox.com

SaneBox was started on 2/20/2010.

It automatically files unimportant emails into a @SaneLater folder so your Inbox is free of distractions.

It does this with global rules and a statistical analysis of your email history and your relationships with other social networks.  Training is as easy as moving an email from the wrong folder to the correct one. It has an @SaneBlackHole folder for training emails to trash and folders for deferring emails. It can also discern up to 5 levels of importance and file accordingly. It can report every week on how you are doing with your email.

Training an email to SaneBlackHole will train that contact to be filtered into your Trash folder. If the email is new (less than 7 days old), this email will stay in your SaneBlackHole folder for 7 days. Thus allowing you time to review to make sure you have not created an accidental training.
Important. If that email was received 7 days ago and you move it to SaneBlackHole, it will automatically be filtered to your Trash folder that day.

Milestones:

1 month to first private beta user.

6 months to first direct free bundled competition: Google Priority Inbox

8 months to public release on gmail and google apps.

Now: (11 Months later)

Since going public (users having to pay after the initial 30 day trial) we are converting at 11.33%.  So we get 11 paying customers for every 100 trails.  People tell me that this is good, but I still reach out to the other 89 users every time to see how we failed them. I will blog about why people quit SaneBox separately.

We have been adding features and improving accuracy and scaling and now have aworking beta to provide SaneBox for ALL IMAP servers: yahoo.com, me.com, exchange, dovecot, you name it.  This involves taking user passwords so we have upped the overall security of everything including encrypting those passwords and all authorization credentials with a key that has to be typed in by hand.  If someone were to steal the code AND the database, they still would not have access to those passwords.  If you want in on the beta, email me: roseman dash beta at sanebox dot com.

The website was running a bounce rate of 62% so I hired Performable to put together some new landing pages and they are in the midst of A/B testing to bring those numbers under control.  I’ll blog about this effort separately.  What do you think of the website?  My team hates the font.

I am installing 2 new blades with 24 cores and 128GB of RAM each which will 5x our current capacity.

So far our traffic has been generated 100% virally. It’s time to start paying for key words.

That’s it for now.  I’m off with my wife for a kidless, not-on-call, 4 nights and 5 days, beach vacation tomorrow. It’s supposed to start snowing again here in Boston at 9AM. Our plane takes off at 8:45AM.  Wish us luck.