Nicely done. Two concerns: 1) exposure to breakage when Gmail changes, 2) potential introduction of protection against invasive integration.
Google has three options: 1) turn a blind eye, 2) block deep integration (same game AOL played with AIM), or 3) introduce client-side integration API. #1 is temporary. #2 is nightmare for Streak. #3 requires strategy change by Google.
[update] Rapport doesn't have this problem because they are using Outlook PIA to work directly with Outlook object model.
This is great timing! We just hired a customer support person this week, and we started using HelpScout.net, but we aren't finding that it's very polished.
We're going to give Streak a shot, and hopefully give you some good feedback.
P.S. You are missing a question mark on your home page: "Want to know where the customer is in the sales pipeline."
OH please tell us how it turns out. It's one thing for me to take a stroll through myself and another thing for someone with a running business to actually try it out with real data and clients and use cases. This looks simple, and I LOVE simple. I'd rather work with something simple and a few features than something complex with a lot of features. Features are useless if I'm afraid of them or have to educate myself to learn them.
We've been using Streak to help with hiring, fundraising, and business development at MixRank. It works really well. I'd highly recommend it to anyone that needs to stay on top of their email.
I've been trying to manage customers with emails for a while. What a nightmare. This looks like a great product. But, I'm not sure I'm willing to share all my emails.
I think a good work around would be to create a gmail account specifically for handling client stuff. Or you guys could offer email address which are already gmail integrated.
Just some notes. Great product, props from Canada :D
But please, please start charging for your product. I don't want this product to disappear in a year when you run out of funding and still don't have a sustainable business model.
The nice thing about the CRM market is people expect to pay for this kind of software, so charging is definitely on our path. Just want to get things solid first. We'll always have a free tier, but ya, going out of business and disappearing is not part of the plan.
It would be great to have this free for individuals - so that they can see if they love it or not. Either make it completely free for them, or free for 2-3 micro-funnels, or free for managing ~250 leads (like highrise).
After that it would be ideal to charge a little ($5/month) for the next 2-3 users, and more for larger teams. Ofcourse, give more features as the team sizes grow.
Already got my support and deployments team using Streak and its been an amazing experience! Constantly adding new features and making our lives easier.
This looks extremely cool, and I'm really tempted!
In light of recent things like Path etc. (and without insinuating anything!) - could you clarify what information is sent via Streak's servers, if any?
Security and Trade Secrets are my major concern as well. Meta data could mean "gmail message ID", but it could also mean "all header info, including message title & users emailed." Of course, that's in addition to the value of the additional data (box title, notes, "deal size") that streak is being used for.
Privacy policies are not very comforting on their own... Heck, "everyone" has one! I might suggest some more details, perhaps on your website, to satisfy wavering customers. So far there isn't much to make a businessperson feel comfortable.
Looks nice! But I can't watch any of the videos because clicking on the play button (in the lightbox) closes the lightbox :-) I'm on Safari 5.1.3 on OS X.
I'm using FireFox 10.0.2 on Windows 7 and nothing loads in the lightbox when I click a video link...just white and empty. The video works fine in Chrome though.
I've used google apps/gmail for years, in my large previous organization and currently in our 100+ organization. Obviously you know this, but this type of "glue" is great - I'm glad you guys took advantage of this. I am in the market place daily, there is NOTHING that compares to this so far. I am excited to see where you take this!
We do play nice with Rapportive usually, but ya difficult to test all different configurations. Will have to troubleshoot that with your specific settings.
Minor copy edit on your splash page - there's a 't' on the end of 'messages' in this section:
Streak Plays Nice
Streak never alters any data in your Gmail. No extra labels, and no moving around your messagest. Streak adds a layer of organization on top of your email and stores this separately and securely in our own cloud.
You need chrome 15 or better for the extension to install. If you go go there and click on the install button without chrome 15, it generates a javascript exception with no visual or textual clues to the user that is going on. Person on chat was responsive.
Contextual gadgets are pretty limited. If you want to get started in Gmail the best way I recommend is to use James Yu's excellent Gmailr (https://github.com/jamesyu/gmailr). We did some prototyping with that. Since then we've taken that core code and rewrote 90% of it to fit our needs and make our own platform.
+1. I would love to develop some customizations on top of GMail, but haven't seen a good explanation of how to do it (yet). Maybe I just haven't looked closely enough...but is this something Google actively encourages or something you have to mangle with a plugin like greasemonkey?
This looks incredibly useful and well designed. I've shown my CEO; perhaps we'll be incorporating Streak soon. Two copy niggles:
"Streak is great for sales, but did you know you can also use it for: hiring candidates, handling email support, organizing dealflow, fundraising and organizing your personal projects."
This is a question - add a question mark to the end (bonus, invented by Dr. Evil)
"We put indicators right in your inbox to show you which emails have to do with which deals you are working on."
Awkward / run-on. Try - We added email indicators showing you the association to the deals on which you are working. (remove the wordy noun modifiers and prepositional phrases)
nice product. Just out of curiosity, how exactly do you attach your app to Gmail? The way I imagine it: basically, this is just a big javascript application which inserts itself inside the gmail view using DOM manipulation?
Looks cool - although my cynical assumption is that this product a) would work great in demos with a simple number of folders,etc and b) will be bitch to maintain given when Google changes the UI or generated code / structure.
Having looked at the gmail generated source there isn't a human generated component so something trivial like $('#button_bar').appendChild(..) doesn't work requiring more clever approaches (and perhaps the streak guys are insanely clever). If I had the time I'd pick apart the extension source to see how streak works.
Trust me, it took a little while but we've been able to tame the beast known as Gmail's DOM. We have some pretty sophisticated infrastructure to handle the different versions and updates to Gmail.
co-founder of streak here: streak works with both google apps and non apps accounts. We've noticed some of our early users using it for non business purposes as well (task management, event planning, etc).
I'm using it today for both and i like it.also, im blown away with snippets. the shortcuts to access them is genius too. i've now begun to remove clippings and other add-ons that i've used for this specific feature.
Something I've been thinking I should do, but never got round to. Good idea, will give it a spin. BTW, I was thinking about working on this because a number of Mortgage Brokers I have interacted with in the past have all been using gmail and they all seem to be in desperate need of a CRM solution that integrates with gmail. So, there, a segment for you to target.
BTW, found a typo on the main page -- "messagest".
This looks really useful, but some parts of a pipeline I might need external people (who are probably not using gmail) to action/move items along a pipeline.
It might be cool if you could generate a URL for a pipeline for someone so they can collaborate (change statuses/comment) without needing to use gmail. Although I haven't really thought of all the consequences of this.
I understand the sentiment, but it can't work that way. What you're authorizing for access is an anonymous unsigned Chrome extension, not the website streak.com. If they allowed the extension to define its own name so that you'd see "streak.com", then you'd see malware masquerading as safe-sounding names in the authorization dialog.
Wow. This is really great. We are just at a point where we consider switching away from Lighthouse for bug tracking. Do you provide - or plan to provide - an api, so it's possible to integrate with other systems?
Congratulations to the streak.com team. This is a great product.
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This brings another point: There is a need for a better business email application that is as easy to use as Gmail, but is not owned by any of the big 4 (MS, G, APPL, Y!).
This looks very promising... I've been looking for a CRM solution for my company for awhile. Question: is there a way to set up a gmail filter to add existing client e-mails and contacts into a box?
We don't go into it much on the homepage but we think Streak really does well here. You can share a sales pipeline to specific people or to your entire domain and you can assign leads to different team members.
There's a small demo of how sharing works at the end of the bug tracking demo video.
I use Streak as a "Personal Salesforce". It has been incredibly useful because it helps me stay on top of 30 different conversations in 5 different contexts.
Great product. But I personally prefer to use my inbox for handling mail only and not get it in the mix of other processes like hiring, bug tracking etc...
100% of your sales, support, and bug tracking information will be reflected in the email inbox of your employees.
If you're not hosting your own email servers, all that information is available to some 3rd party.
These companies have contracts in place preventing them from abusing the potential information they can gain, and they usually have a lot more to loose from violating it than what they could gain from cheating like this.
> and they usually have a lot more to loose from violating it than what they could gain from cheating like this.
No they don't. That's the problem.
Apparently there are not a lot of folks here who have spent time on the other side of the acquisition table: They're confusing a gentlemenly game where people play by the rules with a streetfight.
I was looking for a similar comment. Not just from an acquisition standpoint, but having all that information right where Google can look at it doesn't sound smart just from a common-sense standpoint.
They would have to play their hand at behind the scenes knowledge of your actual figures somewhat openly for this to work. That would be disastrous for them.
signed up, and been loving it! for now no slow downs of gmail. Is there any way to group boxes together? I created one box per client for some of my clients thinking i would put each issue in there and then figured out that i would have to create a box for each issue. so how do i group boxes, eg those belonging to the same project?
I disabled 3rd party cookies when the whole Google/Safari flap arose recently and was wondering if I might be missing anything. In this case the app just doesn't work so that's pretty obvious. I'm wondering if I'm experiencing any other harder to discern problems?
Are 3rd party cookies really required to deliver this sort of app or is it just easier? I suppose otherwise session IDs would need to go in the URL or POST variables.
Google has three options: 1) turn a blind eye, 2) block deep integration (same game AOL played with AIM), or 3) introduce client-side integration API. #1 is temporary. #2 is nightmare for Streak. #3 requires strategy change by Google.
[update] Rapport doesn't have this problem because they are using Outlook PIA to work directly with Outlook object model.