A new (ad)venture of mine - reform of email communication for organizations

The beauty of a mind that is restless and constantly looking for new ventures, is that it comes across many interesting possibilities. It is almost like a fountain always flowing with ideas and new paths to explore.

But until time and effort have been invested into an idea, that idea is only an idea and not tangible and remains unmanifested. One has to evaluate which ideas merit time to explore and even the time and money to develop a minimum viable product (MVP).

In January of this year, one of those ideas made a lot of sense to me and after some evaluation (mostly common sense and gut feeling) came into fruition. The idea that I was exploring was to create a service that will help companies streamline their email communication.

Communication is an integral element in society. There are different kinds of communication, but the one line of communication that requires the most attention, for an organization, is the one with its customers.

Email Communication for Organizations

When you come to think of it, you will undoubtedly see that a lot of companies have created products to support email communication, and have provided various solutions for how to best handle and organize the incoming and outgoing flow of emails. However, many of those approaches are for use in the personal email space. I believe that the real need for reform of email organization lies with the company/team space and requires a collaborative approach when working with emails.

Inspired by this thought, I’ve started my sixth startup called – Helpmonks. The motto of Helpmonks is; “Keeping communication streamlined“.

What this means is that with Helpmonks we are trying to help organizations streamline email communications with their customers. Many people still rely heavily on email to get and stay in contact with companies. In fact, most customers expect an email address to which they can address their concerns and questions. Therefore, it is important that this experience be as straight forward as possible for the customer. Unfortunately, keeping a team on the same page is a challenging issue. Many questions come up, such as: Should we create a shared inbox? What do we do with answered emails? How can we track emails? Has someone replied to this inquiry?

I believe that with Helpmonks we have come up with a strong solution to the above questions. Helpmonks is a hosted application that sits between you and your client and is completely invisible (Helpmonks is also available for on-premise installation). Your clients won’t notice a difference and will continue to send their emails to whichever email address of yours they do now as you will simply forward all emails arriving at your support@domain.com, for example, or sales@domain.com, address to Helpmonks. Helpmonks will then email your team members when a new message or reply has arrived, as well as take care of background organization tasks (create a user record, archive the message, etc.).

Additionally, Helpmonks will come with a workflow engine that will let you automate tasks such as assigning emails to team members, filtering messages and more. Last but not least, the application will let you set a reminder for any message, manually or through a workflow, to ensure that you never miss replying in a timely manner to your most important emails. Have an SLA with a company? Helpmonks can recognize incoming emails from customers of a company with an current SLA and automatically set reminders and assignees based on your configurations.

Helpmonks is currently in beta and I invite you to sign up today to check it out.

Helpmonks is a separate company and independent of my other current company Razuna.