Lessons in PR (Why I chose not to court Techcrunch)

I recently launched Mailmanagr.com out into the wild to let people kick it around and run it through it’s paces. I’ve wondered if I could have gotten featured on Techcrunch (I suspect not), or made it to the front page of digg.com (again, probably not), but in the end, I just decided not to even put any effort into it, it’s not worth the hassle.

Techcrunch

Techcrunch is well known for their coverage of web startups, web technology, and twitter’s perpetual downtime (couldn’t resist). It’s also fairly well known that they like to have exclusives on stories, and get the inside scoop. They do an excellent job of covering the web community, from “Yet another annoying social network”, to really innovative tools that are aggregating conversations, and breaking down walled gardens. I read them multiple times a day, and this post is in no way meant as a slam against them.

On one hand, Mailmanagr falls into their area of interest. On the other hand, it completely doesn’t.

Mailmanagr is a web-app (well, loosely — it’s more of an e-mail app), but it’s not being built with hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment capital (it would probably be prettier if it was). There isn’t really a Hollywood story behind it, the idea just came from my own personal realization that I’d like to have a product like Basecamp that had mail integration (and then finding out that I’m not alone in the 37signals customer forums).

I built it slowly, started out with a handful of features and about a dozen users and allowed pretty much anyone in on “the beta” that asked to be included. Users were helpful and supportive, and seemed to genuinely appreciate what was shaping up. Growth has been modest since the “official” release of Mailmanagr; I feel good about the numbers, and it appears that people are finding real value in the product.

There’s no glamorous future for Mailmanagr, as well. I’m committed to it, and have some really great ideas for future development (watch the Mailmanagr Blog for latest developments. I’m going to start charging a very modest fee ($5 per month) for some of the advanced features, leaving a free plan for everyone else. I see my prospects for acquisition (not that that was ever a goal here) are nil because Mailmanagr is completely dependent upon a product developed by another company. What I’m hoping is that Mailmanagr becomes a useful tool for Basecamp users everywhere, and that I can make a little revenue from it in order to get it paying for itself.

Getting the word out

But getting the word out is still important to me. My biggest concern is not that the entire tech community become aware of Mailmanagr, but rather that any Basecamp user who has felt the pain of a client that sends everything over e-mail, or any Basecamp user that remembers a todo they need to add for their team when all they have is their cell phone knows about Mailmanagr. I’ve heard from a few people that they loved everything about Basecamp, but wish that it had the e-mail features of Highrise, and as such, had disqualified it from their list of potentials. If I help that segment of people out as well, all the better.

37signals has been amazingly helpful and supportive. They initially announced the idea on their product blog which drove a number of “early adopters” over to Mailmanagr (before it was even Mailmanagr). When I was done with my “version 1″ release, they again blogged about it at their product blog, and ran it prominently in a “summary post” on Signal vs. Noise. I saw great increases in traffic after those posts. I’ve subsequently contacted a couple of other blogs that, as web professional myself, I read regularly. Web Worker Daily today ran a piece about Mailmanagr.

The future

I’m looking for more outlets to evangelize the benefits (and existence) of Mailmanagr. I can’t wait for the newly announced 37signals affiliate program to reach Canada; I’ll be giving away free Mailmanagr (pro) accounts to those who sign up through my referral link.

I have yet to implement a very important feature (to me), payment — that’s going to come hand-in-hand with a major feature that will be available for pro customers; hopefully something else that eases another problem I’ve seen reported by some Basecamp customers. Look for that in the coming weeks.

Aside from that all, I think there’s some really interesting territory being explored here. A number of products already integrate with Basecamp on some level (and with products like Basecamp), but I think there can be a lot more done in the integration space. Simply importing a list of projects of clients is only scratching the surface. I’d like to challenge some of those other products to dig deeper and see if they can’t integrate more fully to improve workflow, centralize information, and generally improve user experience.