LifeDev

Earlier this week I was contacted by the guys at BlueTie to check out their ad-free web-based email and calendar collaboration solution for businesses. It’s a pretty slick thing, especially since their free accounts don’t have any ads. Anywho, I struck up a conversation with Martin Edic (his official title is “Manager, Marketing Communications and PR”), and he agreed to do an email interview. BlueTie is quite innovative in many of their approaches to email hosting, and I think all of us creative, idea-laden folks can appreciate that.

1. What initially motivated you guys to start developing BlueTie?

We started in 1999 with the belief that small businesses should have access to big business technology without the cost and complexity of Microsoft Exchange. We developed the first Web-based alternative to Exchange in 2001. Since then we’ve been constantly refining the product while lowering costs and increasing the feature set and storage per user. We’re now at the point where our free version is the leading online business email, calendaring and collaboration product. It includes 5 Gigabytes of storage per user, custom domain name support, and standard-based sharing.

2. Did you face any big roadblocks along the way? If so, how did you overcome them?

The first big challenge was educating small to mid-sized businesses about hosted email and collaboration- what it is, why they’d want it and how they’d benefit from having it. Big businesses with Exchange or Lotus understood the usefulness, SMBs simply didn’t have the knowledge. The second challenge was achieving economies of scale so we could bring costs down while scaling to millions of users and billions of messages each month. In order to accomplish this we relied heavily on open source code, and are big believers in the open source model. We also had to build datacenters, and dramatically improve the architecture of our hardware and software to handle the load. Our latest version is now able to achieve faster performance on the Web than Outlook does on the desktop, which we view as a major milestone.

3. BlueTie’s free account without ads is a pretty interesting concept. Can you explain a little about it and how you managed to pull that one off?

We did research and determined that placing ads in a business application would not generate enough revenue to be a viable business. On top of that, business users don’t want the distraction and privacy invasion that comes with advertising. Also, even if you tie ads to the context of an incoming email, for example, that context isn’t relevant to the recipient’s intent- it’s associated with a message sent to them so its not relevant. Simply put, users don’t click them and if they do it’s a curiosity click. They have no intent to purchase, unlike someone doing a search on Google. This dramatically reduces the revenue potential of contextual ads in email. The challenge was to find a way to monetize the application, without advertising. More importantly, we want our users to view the partner relationships we have built as features, not advertising. This is extremely important to us, and reflected in how we choose and integrate partners.

The key to making our model work is the nature of the application. People use BlueTie to plan, organize and communicate. The average user has their BlueTie account open for 4.6 hours per day- its a tool. We realized that if we could extend the functionality of the application by building in useful services provided by partners we could generate revenue and improve the user experience. So you will be able to book travel in your BlueTie application when you schedule a trip in your Calendar. Via a partnership with Orbitz, all the travel booking can take place without leaving your planning environment. Our partner earns revenue from the booking which they share with us.

We’re gradually adding other services, based on how well they integrate with the user experience within BlueTie. We’ll have fax capability with eFax, newsletter campaign management with Constant Contact, the ability to order office supplies, manage purchasing, buy gifts for birthdays, holidays and scheduled events in the calendar, and other features as we add partners. The user can always choose to not use the service and they’ll never see ads.

4. What was the best way to co-ordinate the different people developing and working on BlueTie?

Obviously, we eat our own dog food and rely heavily on our own application. It has worked very well for us with projects as complex as this one. Our sales and business development groups rely on it to do scheduling. This became even more critical with people spread across multiple locations and travel. Our engineering, IT Operations and QA groups use BlueTie to solve problems quickly with shared files, email, and instant messaging. We use the BlueTie application to manage everything we do here- scheduling meetings, communication, file sharing. We used all of it in this project.

5. I’m sure you came up with lots of ideas on how to develop this product over time. One of the biggest problems developers face is deciding which features to add or leave. Can you give us a little insight into your process of choosing which ideas you implement, and which you leave for another day?

We start with customer input, which ironically many software developers leave out of their process,or at least leave until the very end. We have beta customers who participate in product planning and testing. The user is king. Beyond that we track against expected revenue. We are very disciplined about clearly articulating what the expected benefit our customers and BlueTie expect to receive. We are also big believers in simplicity. Rarely is the application with the most features the best.

6. How much does your user’s feedback dictate the future of BlueTie and advancements made on the product?

As I noted above, the end user is King (or Queen). We all use the BlueTie application and we’re not all techies, so there is a lot of internal critique to go with the beta testers’ input.

Thanks again Martin and the rest of BlueTie!