Communication Platform For All Your Needs

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Mailbird is beautifully designed communication tool that brings speed and productivity right to your inbox. Here is our interview with Andrea Loubier, CEO of Mailbird:

Q: Mailbird helps people manage emails better, could you tell us your startup story?

A: Email has always been a hot topic of frustration in the office among my colleagues, friends and family. The problems we have with email are vast, and many of us have formed bad habits with email in that we don’t know how to properly manage our inboxes. Instead we say, “oh I have too much email” or “I cannot get any work done because I have so many emails to reply to” and so forth. My co-founder was attending a tech entrepreneur event in Bali, Indonesia. There he found many people on Mac who were using Sparrow to manage their email. When looking at email client alternatives on for Windows, there was nothing like Sparrow – which offered a simple, clean and fast interface to manage your Gmail email accounts from a native application.

So this is where the idea and opportunity for Mailbird came about, we all had the pain points of email frustrations, we had an entrepreneur meetup in Bali that showed us the opportunity for a great email client for Windows and our third co-founder, a hard core developer that was passionate about building a fix for email.

We decided to bootstrap and start this business from Bali, which had an increasing entrepreneurial community growing.

Q: What was crucial for your success?

A: The people. We have 3 of us who are all dedicated and driven people who worked relentlessly to execute fast and bring a much better, faster, beautiful and adapted email management software for Windows users around the world. I think my co-founders are some of the most brilliant people I’ve had the opportunity to meet. They are smart, creative, tech savvy and have the same fire inside as I do to build something great that will help many people around the world.

Customize your email signature for every email identities

Q: Is it difficult to manage remote team?

A: Not at all, but again it has to start with hiring the right people. Remote working is an awesome new phenomenon that technology has given us the freedom to do. However, it only works when you hire the right people who have the same drive and dedication as you do to building and growing the business. Someone who isn’t motivated by a high salary, but rather someone who enjoys the thrill of challenging business and technological challenges that we can creatively work together on, to solve the problem with email in our case. In addition to this, there are many challenges as your startup begins to grow so in this case you have to plan and prepare for some of these growing pains when working with remote teams.

Despite the benefits of remote working, we still 100% encourage remote teams to physically work together at least 2x/year. There is something that you cannot replace with technology, when working in the same room with the same energy as your whole team who are working towards one goal. Also, as our team continues to grow we’ve introduced time and productivity management tools like Time Doctor. Additionally Asana is our task management tool of choice, also integrated with Mailbird, and crucial for the success our remote working setup. These tools allow for all of us to stay motivated, work fast and hold each other accountable for our commitments to the company. Finally, it is so crucial to give feedback to team members so they can continue to grow into their roles as experts and to stay motivated.

I love our team. I wouldn’t trade them for any other team in the world. We are all very close, we have all gone through a lot of ups and downs together through our startup journey. It’s awesome.
By the way, we are always looking for hard working and creatively driven people to join our team. We list job openings on our website, so check it out.

Mailbird apps-Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Contacts Manager, Asana, Google Drive, Calendar, Veeting and more.

Q: What advice would you give to future entrepreneurs?

A: Find the right people to work with your team, people that will significantly contribute to the growth of your startup and people who you would actually enjoy working with. Most of all, to operate in lean startup mode to execute fast and iterate faster to adapt to your potential customer needs and to start talking with your potential customers as early as possible – afterall building a business is approx. 90% about building relationships with people: your customers, your business partners, potential investors and new stellar team members.

Q: Do you have any new features in the pipeline? What can we expect from you in next six months?

A: We are hoping to complete all feature development for Mailbird in 2015. We are at a stage now where we are growing, and cannot accommodate every need and request of customer, and are instead focusing on our end goal and how to get there fast. Our goal is to build the best all-in-one communication hub with email, messaging, calendars, video meetings and task management…this is where the future of all our business communication is going. The next things in the pipeline based on priority will be Unified inbox/folders, contacts sync, filtering and smart folders, import feature to help you easily move from one email client to Mailbird, native calendar support, exchange server support, extra email security and Wingman – email management productivity booster.

Since we launched Mailbird 2.0 – the response has been incredibly engaging and we are excited to continue delivering an awesome solution for the modern age of innovative business, productivity and communication needs. This is the world we live in today – choose Mailbird to help you adjust to the technology driven wave of business communication. It’s important, as I firmly believe that communication tools help us build relationships that matter both personally and for business. This is why we are extremely excited to move into our next endeavor of Mailbird for teams and businesses.

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