One of the craziest things to surface from our beta program has been the incredible interest in the Xobni Rankings. Xobni Insight assigns a number to each of your contacts based on the amount of mail traffic that you send and receive from them and the ratio of incoming and outgoing messages. Fred Wilson has totally enjoyed Xobni Rankings. I’ve heard of at least 5 offices that are playing the “Who’s your number one?” game!

We also didn’t realize how much a company must change to support lots of users. Addressing support and feedback emails has become a top priority in our company and a major time sink. Luckily we now have a few people and the right technology to assure that user support issues are addressed in a timely fashion and user feedback is put into our feature request system. Having this valuable data helps us prioritize our development efforts as we continue to iterate and improve Xobni Insight. Thank you for your feedback, beta users!

Our team took last weekend off, which is a rarity for us. It was well deserved following the hard work it took to push out the beta for TechCrunch40.

We try to respond to beta feedback emails quickly, but over the weekend we realized that we were getting behind. Today the whole team hunkered down in our conference room for 3 hours and processed over 300 support and feedback emails. Usually we are all working in our own domains for most of the day; it was really fun to have everyone together for a few hours working together. Yay team!

From left to right: Bryan, Adam,Tim, Gabor, La Donna, Greg, Matt (cameraman- not shown)

Yesterday was an amazing day. I can’t begin to explain how thrilling it is to have happy users after a year and a half of hard work.

Yesterday we did a sneak-peak early beta. We allowed anyone who visited our web site between 9AM and 9PM PST to download Xobni Insight. Our goal was to engage the earliest of early adopters and all the people following the TechCrunch40 conference.

We were amazed by the response; we got a ton of downloads. From real estate brokers to professors to journalists to software engineers to IT managers to sales people – we’ve engaged a diverse group of users. We’re listening to them and improving our software in real time.

Why the 12 hour window? We have a small team and we needed to slow the rapid growth of our install base so that we can respond to feedback and still have time to iterate on the product. Our primary goal is to make Xobni Insight ready for public beta as soon as possible.

We are now operating an invitation-only beta of Xobni Insight. If you didn’t get a chance to download it yesterday, you can sign-up for an invitation at: www.xobni.com/download

A few great snippets from the yesterday’s press …..

“Xobni is One Impressive Email Tool” – Ed Kohler, Technology Evangelist

“It’s safe to say that we are both blown away” – Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

“Email company Xobni launches, may steal Techcrunch prize” – Matt Marshall, Venture Beat

“Xobni and Orgoo – weird names, useful applications” – Dan Farber, ZDNet

I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time on email today. Here is my mail traffic graph courtesy of Xobni Analytics. As you can see, I have my work cut out for me:

Oh Matt, you look so sexy in those slacks:

Photos from Techcrunch 40

Like what you see? Please vote for us!

Gabor is documenting some initial press coverage on our launch: Xobni TechCrunch Launch Coverage

The whole team is thrilled by the response so far!

Right now Adam and Matt are on stage at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, sharing our vision of email happiness with the world.

Our product is called Xobni Insight - it allows you to organize, search, and navigate your email so that you have the information you need to make better decisions faster.

• Lightning fast search – the email or person you’re looking for appears as you type.
• Email Analytics – rankings, graphs, and statistics detailing how you and your contacts use email
• Navigate your inbox by people – discover email’s social network
• Threaded conversations – email how it was meant to be read, with conversations in context
• Quick attachment discovery – historical attachments available instantly without searching
• Phone numbers extracted from emails – contact details pop into the sidebar – never search for phone numbers again

Xobni Insight is an invitation-only beta and available only for Microsoft Outlook users. We plan to expand to other platforms soon.

We are incredibly excited to help a huge number of people who feel overwhelmed and frustrated by an ever expanding inbox. We’ve said from the beginning that we want to help you “take back your inbox”; we’re glad the day is finally here.

Xobni Insight is available for download at www.xobni.com/download for a limited early beta.

Our product video can be viewed in high quality at www.xobni.com/learnmore or in the YouTube video below.

The official Xobni media alert can be found at www.xobni.com/press

We have the best and most dedicated team at Xobni. The team has worked hard and accomplished a lot and is excited for the next chapter in the Xobni story. I think we are going to run on adrenaline for a few days, and then take a long weekend to catch up on some much needed rest.

Thanks Adam, Matt, Gabor, Greg, Bryan and La Donna

We are also thankful for the help of some additional people that made this product launch possible: Jey Kottalam, Timo Hetzel, Tim Bishop, Lori Love, Jorge Medina, Arlene Morlue, Ron Lute, David Pitman, Jeffery Warren, and Winnie Teichmann

We have arrived! And the world of email will never be the same. After one and a half years of hard work, Xobni will finally launch.

Tomorrow morning at 9 am, we will be launching Xobni Insight at TechCrunch 40.

If you’re physically there, the Xobni version of Steve Jobs, the charismatic Matt Brezina, will be presenting to an enchanted audience. For the last few days, we’ve had him run up and down flights of stairs while reciting the presentation script. This should get him used to the adrenaline.

We’ve been working very hard on this product. We hope you’ll like it. We will launch our new website and you’ll be able to download Xobni Insight at 9am Tuesday. Y’all better be refreshing your browsers on Tuesday morning.

- Adam, Matt, Gabor, Greg, La Donna, and Bryan

Anybody who has been involved in a startup will tell you that people are the most important factor in a startup’s success. At Xobni, we couldn’t agree more. We have been selective in putting together our team of intelligent, hard working, and fun people. The investors and advisors who have contributed their financial support and seasoned experience to help grow Xobni are another important part of that team.

We raised a seed round from Y Combinator in the spring of 2006. Last fall we raised a round of convertible debt from a few angels and this spring we raised our Series A round.

We’re honored to have some top-tier investors on our team, and until now only a few have been announced; here is the full list. We appreciate their support.

Atomico Investments
Paul Buchheit
Ron Conway and Baseline Ventures
Gabor Cselle
First Round Capital
Paul Graham
Saar Gur
Khosla Ventures
Tom Pinckney
Ariel Poler
Y Combinator