Zendit

The landing page is live! We have started a waiting list for interested users giving away 1 year of premium membership to all who subscribe. We announced the page only in our personal social media accounts and we reached a good number of interactions. So far we have 60 people who subscribe on the first day and we will continue the pre-launch campaign until the end of November.

Any ideas on how to get more traffic and exposure?

While we continue to develop the product, we are struggling to find the best way to gain brand awareness and find those early adopters that are willing to try the product as soon as we launch. An idea that came up was to build a landing page were people could leave their emails and request access to be the first ones to be notified. But how should we market this landing page? Where will users find us to register in the first place? How can we great traffic and hype before our launch?

All these questions keep us awake by night! Any recommendations would be highly recommended!

After the beta stage, it was time to continue developing the product for the open launch at the end of the year. Since we are self-taught programmers, we had to learn every aspect of building a business online. The team spent 3 weeks taking Udemy courses related to ReactJs, UI/UX design, AWS, and DevOps. We spend a combined amount of 35 dollars and we learned so much we can't even put it in words.

• We discovered that making an "exclusive inbox" for their most important contacts was not going to work. People still needed to go back to their regular inbox to verify they haven't received a new email. At this point, we were making them work more than before. The new version would have both, the "chat" view and their regular inbox.

• The product had to be a hybrid. Making it "too chatty" would destroy the essence of email and become too informal. But making it too formal would damage the "chat experience" we offered. We agreed on a hybrid approach that would make users experience email as a conversation but with user experience, they are used to.

• One of the features that users loved the most was the files organized by contact. They liked the easy access and search features we offered.

• Most users complain about tasks. Emails, in their core, are a "When, what, how, and who". Emails communicate an intention, that generally ends up being a task to do. We got an idea of adding task management to the product, where people could assign emails to tasks and visualize them in a"Trello-like" board.

• Students and Millenials came out of nowhere! They were not even a persona when we started the product, but all of them loved the idea of making the email look like a chat. They can organize emails by their classes, professors, and job applications. Apparently, this generation really hates email!! Making email look like messaging fits perfectly with the apps they grew up with.

• People in the VC and Private equity were not that interested since they already use a CRM. Partners only care about finding the best deals and not how much time they are saving from their Analysts.

With the MVP ready, we started to look for testers. We gave the product to 45 people we knew, ranging from students to executives in different industries. We onboard and interviewed all of them via Zoom in order to see their reactions, impressions, and critiques. Users loved the idea behind the product but it wasn't quite there yet. We recorded every call, and wrote down key words that repeated. The problem we faced was that our users and uses cases were so different, that feedback was all over the place. Either way, we gather amazing insights, had great fun and learned a lot during process.

It took us 6 weeks and countless all-nighters, but we finally completed our MVP! While we working, the world was suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic. The lockdowns, restrictions, and confinement gave us the perfect space, time, and focus to work on our project. The MVP was very basic. It simply connected to your email account, and let the user import its most important contacts and create a separate inbox, similar to Whatsapp, where the user could see all of the conversation histories as a chat and had a centralized files tab for easy access.

It was time to find some users to test our product and gather feedback. Since everyone uses email, we struggle to find the best starting point and use case for our product.

We decided to start with the FFF's and move from there.

We believe in a world where people regain control of their email.
A world where your inbox is based on building relationships rather than filtering spam. Where people spend less time writing emails and more time getting things done.

To become a brand that new generations entering the email space identify with. A product that adapts to the way people work and let them focus on what really matters to them. An email revolution that spreads through the world one email at a time.

Our goal, simply put, is to create the best email experience ever.

I had an idea, now I needed a team. That's when I contacted one of my childhood friends, Roberto, currently graduating from Notre Dame as a data scientist, in order to share my idea and get his feedback. Since I come from a business background, I knew that having a tech co-founder was a must. Roberto shared my vision and joined the team.

He later introduced me to James, a serial entrepreneur, and his former roommate. After a few calls, Zendit was born.

While working in the venture capital space, I noticed how painful and time-consuming managing emails is. Furthermore, keeping track of all of the startups that I contacted - with all of their respective files and notes - was near impossible. I knew there had to be a better way to consolidate information and make email less of a pain for the corporate setting.

That's when it hit me.

Why isn't email look more like Whatsapp/ iMessage rather than a never-ending stream of unconnected messages??