May 5th, 2009

One User Per Week

Posted by Matt Brezina

Ever since we started Xobni, one of the things I’ve enjoyed more than anything else is conversations with our users. I’ve always enjoyed talking to users about how they use email, how they keep track of their email relationships, how they use Xobni, and how we can improve Xobni to better meet their needs. When I say “talk” to users, I don’t mean exchanging emails, or reading survey responses, or even doing formal user studies – instead I mean spending time, talking on the phone, and getting to know the person behind the inbox.

Where do our users work? What is the hardest thing about using email at their job? And how is Xobni impacting their life?

So, I’ve decided to spend 20-30 minutes on the phone with one user per week. I’m not going to have a rigid format for the discussion, but this will be formalizing something I already do every week.

I’m going to write one blog post each week about the person I met, what they do for a living, how Xobni solves their needs, and how Xobni can be improved to make their email life even better.

I’m hoping I can get each person to send me a picture of them and a link to their blog, company website or twitter page they would like me to share with the Xobni community. I’m also going to send off a couple Xobni tshirts to everyone I talk to – so they can share Xobni with their friends and coworkers.

I believe by setting aside time to talk with one user per week I can help extend Xobni’s mission of email happiness.

Are you interested in being one of the first Xobni users featured in One User Per Week? Comment on this blog post. We’ll reach out to you to set up a time for a call. I’m looking forward to our phone call.

Note: when you submit a comment to the xobni blog, you will be asked for your email address. Your email address will not be posted publicly on the blog. Then we’ll contact you by email to get your phone number and schedule a phone call.

30 Responses

I’d be interested in helping out with this. I’m avoiding posting my phone number here, so feel free to email me. Thanks for such a great product.

Adam Brock, on May 5th, 2009 at 8:47 pm

oh, yes adam, you brought up a great point. When you comment on our blog only the Xobni team will see your email address – it won’t be shown to all visitors to our blog. Then we’ll reach out to you by email, get your phone number, and set up a time for a call. Looking forward to talking with you Adam!

Matt, on May 5th, 2009 at 8:59 pm

I have been using Xobni for over a year now, and i love it. I work for an international adventure travel company. As the Director of Operations and the defacto “IT Guy” I get a lot of emails a day. Due to my lack of internet connectivity on a regular basis I like Outlook for all its features. Xobni has done an amazing job filling in the holes that Outlook has made. I especially like the attachment area that allows me to find a contact that i know sent me the attachment and the look for the one I need.

I would be more than happy to talk to you about the way we use Xobni as a small business and definitely have some suggestions for improvement. For example I send a lot of group emails. Yet when i call up a contact in Xobni to see their response to me I have everyone’s response to this email. In my situation the guides on my list do not email each other they email me directly. So in this case it would be better to have these emails sorted by contact.

Regardless Xobni is a great product and I love using it each day and would love to help support the project any way I can. Please let me know if there is anything we can do.

Koni

Koni Konigsberg, on May 5th, 2009 at 11:29 pm

Wow… I wish I had discovered you earlier! It was “love at first sight.” Xobni is a wonderful tool for tracking my business and personal correspondence. You have developed a one-of-a-kind plug-in that I will continue to recommend, without hesitation, to my friends, family, and clients! Xobni is a professional organizer’s dream-come-true!

Michelle @ [ real neat ], on May 5th, 2009 at 11:35 pm

Hello Matt,

I work for a large ‘Internet’ company. I am using Outlook and Xobni with IMAP4 to the Unix Mail System of our company. As the rest of my company, outside of Engineering & Support, is on Exchange I am more or less forced to use Microsoft Outlook to be connect to the Exchange Company Calendaring. The Xobni plug is a welcome addition to Outlook. The only thing that I still need is an additional plugin to use for automatic dailing my VOIP phone. There is no integration with Xobni on that. I would be handy that Xobni can also control from within Outlook a VOIP phone and it also dials straight the Office/Mobile/Home number displayed in Xobni. It saves on having two plugin to get certain things done in an easy way.

I would love to see that MS Outlook had those Xobni enhancements native build-in to make it a modern and complete Email/RSS/Web-widget Client. That I assume remains a MS wish (and keeps you in business with this tool ;-) )

Brgds,

Bas.

Bas van der Wiel, on May 6th, 2009 at 3:17 am

Love to help you out… I use Xobni and recommended it to all my colleagues… The one enterprise 2.0 tool that’s truly adopted here …:)

Tom

Tom Kronenburg, on May 6th, 2009 at 5:42 am

I’d love to chat with you guys – I’ve been using Xobni since January last year and have recommended it to dozens of people. It’s fantastic. I do think there are some areas that could be improved though so would love to talk.

James Brown, on May 6th, 2009 at 7:30 am

Have been using for a almost 5 months now!!Fantastic product!!Waiting for the Xobni on my Iphone :-) )

Wud luv to chat with you guys!!

Vikram

Vikram, on May 6th, 2009 at 8:18 am

Hi,
I started using Xobni about a year ago. I have clients from all over the world and this program helps organize and maintain a continuity with them. Question or fear I have is, how big can Outlook 2007 get before it is a problem. I have started to delete emails as I don’t know this question. Maybe others have the same fears. Xobni works off having lots of saved emails, so maybe come commentary on this would be good. Give us users a sense of security of how huge it could get but still be managed.
Thanks for the program, wishing you guys and gals all success,
JS

Jhampa, on May 6th, 2009 at 9:40 am

Hi,
I do use Xobni but I have one big issue with it and that is when I select an email from myself I most often want to see info on the user the email is sent to. Another thing is when an email have several recepients I sometimes would find it useful to access info on the other email addresses.

Jimmy

Jimmy Bergmark, on May 6th, 2009 at 4:25 pm

I’ve been using Xobni again, after some intial teething problems with a previous version, alongside ClearContext and Outlook to great effect.
More than happy to be involved if your contacts stretch across “the pond”.

Jon, on May 7th, 2009 at 3:59 am

Hi,
Are you working/thinking about OS X version of xobni?
bye

Pedram, on May 7th, 2009 at 4:53 am

I love Xobni! What I’ve found surprisingly useful is the Facebook and LinkeIn integration (I guess part of that is also that I’ve found Facebook surprisingly useful for someone who is well past my college years.). I’d love a chance to chat about the product; keep up the good work.

Jake Hoban, on May 7th, 2009 at 3:56 pm

I am the CTO/COO of a large asset manager and use your product everyday to fill in the gaps and improve upon the built in Windows Search. I have ben using it since the private beta and it is a great tool to improve productivity. The only gripe is that at our shop we don’t like users running Outlook in cached mode, so that has prevented me from recommending to all my users since I am one of the few that runs in cached mode.

Michael

Michael Pusateri, on May 9th, 2009 at 4:09 pm

Great example of using two-way conversations to enable a product feedback loop with your customers! Thank you! I especially like your Facebook integration.

Michael Walsh, on May 11th, 2009 at 11:48 am

i don’t know how i lived without this product….it is amazing. I have been an Outlook user for about 10 years and your software has made my life easier and my workflow so much more productive. I have about 5000 emails in my inbox (yes, i know it needs to be cleaned out) and with Xobni, I have easy access to all those emails plus one-stop shopping for contact information. Be delighted to share with you my thoughts and ideas for enhancements.

Sue R., on May 11th, 2009 at 9:10 pm

This is a good product, and the mobile feature would be wonderful. However, as you probably heard before, there are concerns of privacy and accuracy with the product and 3rd party plug-ins.
Thanks
Mohammad

Mohammad, on May 12th, 2009 at 6:15 am

I have been a user since the Wired Magazine article and it has really changed the way I work with email. A fantastic tool. I am working with abot 5Gb of email over 5 PST files and it makes a huge difference when looking for obscure references

Rob Stonehouse, on May 12th, 2009 at 3:36 pm

Great tool! The LinkedIn and facebook assets are cool and I found them useful in building up my presence in LinkedIn (and its quick and easy). Would be happy to help — I’ve asked my students to pilot it too.

What I really love about the customer-a-week process you are embarking on is how forward thinking it is. I really like the work of Scott Cook at Intuit and he has built this type of interaction into parts of his company and wrote a challenging thought piece about it in Harvard Business Review (The Contribution Revolution, October Issue, 2008). While never an easy process to manage, I think that relatively young and growing companies like Xobni are best able to build this type of interactivity into their operating dna.

Look forward to seeing more about your user-contribution successes, Mason

Mason Carpenter, on May 12th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

Would love to talk with you about OEM integration. Possible? Likely?

Regina Mullen, on May 13th, 2009 at 1:13 am

I work for a manufacture, with a very busy call center. Our CSRs generally get 50-200 emails a day. Most of them have been running xobni for 8-10 months. Our Outlook configuration includes many addons, and xobni seems to be the only one that doesn’t give me a daily fight.

Ralph, on May 13th, 2009 at 8:41 am

I really need a Mac Version ;)

Tom, on May 13th, 2009 at 9:58 am

Love the product….would love to chat and share.

Joel, on May 23rd, 2009 at 12:52 am

Love Xobni… gotta get that SQLite engine to point its DB where *I* say… :)

Ben, on May 24th, 2009 at 6:39 pm

Thank you building Xobni! I have been using Xobni since October 2008. To be precise, from the time I joined my current employer. The first thing that struck me here was the email deluge. It was so easy to lose track of mails, which resulted in important work getting delayed. Outlook rules didnt quite cut it for me and a Google search landed me with Xobni. Never looked back again!

Narayan, on June 19th, 2009 at 5:40 am

I’d be interested…I work in higher education, which seems to be a different use than most people commenting above. Feel free to get in contact with me!

Sarah, on June 24th, 2009 at 1:04 pm

Will love to an interview.. I use Xobni for indexing, searching and also to do analytic stuff if a customer or partner has issues with response times etc, I can easily look this up via Xobni.

It is lightning fast and does the job perfectly. I just realize that on an average month I receive around 1400 e-mails, so indexing and search is definitely a must!

Jens, on July 8th, 2009 at 10:24 am

[...] keep on meeting cool people doing these One User Per Week interviews. James was no [...]

Xobni Blog: James Brown (Sales) – One User Per Week, on August 3rd, 2009 at 9:19 pm

Hi, I have been using Xobni for a long long time now (about one year) and I have to say, this is a fantastic product. Just installed 1.8. Keep up the good work guys!!

Uday Shankar, on August 11th, 2009 at 2:40 am

[...] We continue to stay focused on individual users.  I try to do one phone call per week with a user.  It resulted in a good blog series. [...]

No one cares about your stupid little startup – 5 tips to make them care | The Blog Of Matt Brezina, on December 3rd, 2009 at 1:47 pm

Leave a Reply

What is Xobni?

Learn more about Xobni, the free Outlook plugin. Free Download

What is Xobni?

Xobni is a free plug-in for Outlook that saves you time finding email, contact info & attachments.

Free Download

Follow Xobni on the Web

Xobni on Facebook

Subscribe to the Xobni Blog