Startup Profile: The OtherInBox
October 29, 2008
Based in Austin, Texas and lead by Joshua Baer and Mike Subelsky, the OtherInBox is an angel-backed company that offers a new way to manage email overload. You probably have an “other inbox” already, and it’s probably a Yahoo or Gmail account that you give out because you don’t want receipts, newsletters, social networking notifications and spam to clutter your main email. OtherInbox introduces a clever twist. Instead of just having a single email address such as johnsmith23@gmail.com, each user gets assigned their own domain name such as johnsmith.otherinbox.com or a vanity domain like johnsmith.com. Any address @johnsmith.com goes to your OtherInbox, so you can easily give a different email address to every website. For instance, Amazon gets amazon@johnsmith.com and Facebook gets facebook@johnsmith.com. Without having to set up any folders or rules, your email gets organized so that it’s easy to jump right to the messages you care about. If a website sells your email address to spammers, you’ll be able to tell and can BLOCK it with a single click.
Q: Why did you start the company?
A: OtherInbox changes some fundamental assumptions about email. Traditional email programs expect me to read every single message. OtherInbox starts off by assuming that I am going to get more email than I have time to read. Having one email address is designed for an Internet where I can trust every website that I give it to. But we all know that some websites that I think I can trust will actually send me spam. Traditional email assumes each message is sent by a person and that I need to read it. OtherInbox knows that most of the emails are not from real people and does something smart with the message so that I don’t have to deal with it.
Q: What was your least favorite job?
A: Wow, I’ve been so fortunate to work for myself since I was in college - my first company that I sold a couple of years ago was a “dorm room dot com” that I started while attending Carnegie Mellon University. Beyond that, I have worked with so many great people along the way. So, I have to say that nothing comes to mind as a bad job - not even sacking groceries as a kid growing up in Nashua, New Hampshire (it was a really good gig to have a young teenager!)
Q: What is unique about your company’s culture?
A: Keep it lean. We believe in hiring the best of the best employees to focus on the core aspects of our business and outsourcing non-core functions whenever possible. This results in a smaller, leaner team of higher quality individuals. Everyone here is performing a critical role and has an important voice in our community. Cutting edge technology. We’re built on Ruby on Rails and hosted on Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3. Our front-end is built in the SproutCore Javascript MVC framework. We’re in the process of switching from Subversion to Git. We believe in open source technology. Best place for Ruby on Rails developers.
We’re building the best place for Ruby on Rails developers to work in Austin. In addition to great people and a great work environment, competitive salary and first-class benefits - OtherInbox also believes in personal and professional development. We host the monthly Austin On Rails user grou p and sponsor the annual Lone Star Ruby Conference. Each summer, we send every developer to RailsConf in Portland. The big picture. And we also realize that we’re part of a bigger community and need to do our part. We donate 1% of our profits to charity and match employee donations. Together, we donate 1% of our working time to charity as well (which works out to one day per quarter). We do our part for Austin, TX and for our planet.
Q: What are your goals for the company?
A: The happiest customers. The happiest employees. The biggest profits. 1 million users by the end of 2009.
- Don’t make a human read a message that a computer can read instead
- Don’t try to make a computer read a message that only a human can read correctly
- The consumer is always in control
- Be Transparent
- Make email fun again
OtherInbox is currently in private beta, but made its public debut at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco in early September 2008. If you would like to signup to participate in the private beta, we’ve created an exclusive invite just for the Texas Startup Blog readers, so please go to http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/texasstartupblog as there are only 50 invites available.
Where is your startup based? Austin, TX, USA
Name Joshua Baer
Title: Founder and CEO
Phone (512) 857-7325
Blog URL: http://blog.otherinbox.com/
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.joshuabaer.info/
Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/otherinbox
Company: OtherInbox
Web Site: http://www.otherinbox.com
Company Founded: 1 January 2008
Key Executive: Mike Subelsky, Co-founder and Hacker
Funding to Date: We have a handful of Angel Investors, including the founder and CEO, Josh Baer. Baer does plan to seek VC funding through a Series A in late 2008.
Number of Employees: 16
