This week’s elevator pitch comes from Relenta, a SaaS email-centric contact and task management platform. The pitch was concise and explained the product well but should have indicated more clearly how Relenta’s business model is viable (a.k.a. how they are going to make money).
Relenta is an all-in-one email/customer relationship management/group calendar/mailing list management/task management application that displays activity in a chronological stream for users. Relenta’s CRM doesn’t seem to be offering different services than other big name CRMs, such as Salesforce, Zoho or SugarCRM, but Relenta’s all-in-one package offers several different types of software in one application. Small businesses who are trying to cut costs (though in this economy, all businesses are being mindful of software expenses) could find this product particularly useful. Relenta’s monthly rate is $25 per user with an allowance of 2500 contacts per user. Users can also add contacts for an additional fee.
It appears that customers are satisfied with Relenta’s product from its customer feedback site. And like we predicted, most of Relenta’s customer base draws from small businesses. Relenta’s price seems right nd customers (many of who used Salesforce previously) feel that Relenta’s customer service rivals those of the bigger CRM providers.
It’s tough to tell whether Relenta’s product will take off in a sea of similar applications but its always fun to root for the underdog.
Here are some screenshots of the system:
Can we please try to avoid so much wonderment about business models? If a service like this can get traction, it can easily make money.
Wow – up until Relenta, I wasn’t able to email my employees nor share files with them… this solves the problem I never had…
And traction we get. We grew 500% in 2008 with no advertising.
@timtobe We will be adding an intra-user chat very soon. We already have the ability to add internal comment threads to emails.
“We grew 500% in 2008 with no advertising.”
From 10 users to 50, from 20 to 100?
On one hand, it doesn’t matter too much, on the other hand, email is such a crucial component of a company that I’d like to understand better how big the company is and how many users it handles.
In fact, Relenta is handicapping itself by not having a free version. 14 day trial? C’mon!
Wow! Looks like they took your advice. They have a free 14 day trial now.
I meant that free trials are dumb. They force a decision on the service providers timeline, not the customers. 99 times out of 100, the timing is wrong.
@pwb If somebody is serious, 14 days is enough. We used to have a 30 day trial and found that people tend to procrastinate less when we reduced it to 14.
I actually feel good about it because it gives you a little push to get started on solving the chicken-and-egg problem, finding time to free up time.
Huh?
“You can also choose our free plan which includes 1 user, 100 MB storage, and 100 contacts.”
This is a quote from Relenta pricing page.
From this page?
http://www.rele...om/pricing.html
This week’s?
http://pitches....tch/207-relenta
this was 3 weeks ago.
“Pitch Posted: January 20, 2009″
Whats your point?
They have a free 1-user version you just have to look under the paying plans table it’s a small-ish link
Wait, doesn’t Gmail already do this?
Isn’t Gmail free?
Relenta is a CRM with built-in email client that is shared my multiple users.
Gmail is just another single-user webmail, really.
The difference is night and day.
Thanks @Chris. Your comment gave me an idea to write a blog post “Top 10 reasons why Relenta is better than Gmail” (as well as Highrise and Salesforce for that matter).
BTW did you know that according to Google, “Gmail sucks” 50% more than “Outlook sucks”? 3.1 million search results vs 2.2 million.
I don’t know exactly why but I seem to like the UI.
Download Video throws AJAX exception “There was a problem during AJAX-request. Please try again”
- Nishant
http://www.rele.../customers.html
“Here’s a quick list of what I looked at: FreeCRM, BroswerCRM, JobBlogs, iContact, Joyent, HyperOffice, Webex (WebOffice), vTiger, ZoHo, Zimbra, Chaos Intellect, StreetSmart, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, Google’s CRM (Etelos), SalesForce, Infusionsoft, and a few others. 17 different trials ranging from 14 to 30 days…In the end, Relenta has won out.”
Nice quote. Go Relenta!
That UI is pretty close to Joyent’s Connector. The Relenta people seem comfortable with borrowing or being heavily influenced.
Everyone should be.
Agreed!
We use Gmail for Domains with Contacts Shared. I can’t believe this company could compete with that offering.
Gmail also has built-in documents sharing, and chat and works with Salesforce as well.
Agree, the UI looks ripped from Joyent.
We’ve used Relenta for over a year now with great success. We appreciate the ability to collaborate effectively across the team and with the customer.
Relenta continues to add functionality that helps us find, get, and keep our most valuable customers through one SaaS offering vs having to use x number of tools.
Rock on Relenta!
Kind of looks like a rip off of 37 Signals, but with email.
@dan we switched from 37 signals to relenta precisely because theres no email in highrise and i recomend you do the same lifes too short for copy paste.
who cares who copied who its a silly debate
now i have a better tool all that matters to me!
peace
who cares who copied who its a silly debate
if theirs a better tool thats all that matters to me!
peace
Just did a live demo with Dmitri yesterday. Great product, solid technology, a couple key differentiators from their competitors.
dude, you’re giving basically no info with your comment other than you did a live demo. If you did a live demo, then add *why* it is a “great product, solid technology, a couple of key differentiators…”
Please, FreeCRM.com has been around since 2003 and is free for UNLIMITED number of users.
Also it’s got about 300 features, it is soooo much better than anything else out there for free.
Check it: http://www.FreeCRM.com
Wow, 300 features. I am impressed!
I just did the FreeCRM tour. It does have a lot of functionality, but I can see why it’s free. The user interface looks like it was designed by a color blind team of programmers. You couldn’t PAY ME to use software that ugly. When will people learn that charts are better without the chartjunk. If they put some polish into the interface, they might actually BE ABLE TO CHARGE MONEY (deservedly) for what they’ve obviously put a lot of work into.
Free is NOT better (unless you’re a masochist and enjoy the pain that cheaply-made crap brings).
Small start ups like this can never have the attention and commitment of small businesses without offering a free version. Do these people understand “freemium”, the most basic business model concept?
Do it Relenta. Offer a bare bone free package if you want to survive in this market.
@Mary, we do! http://www.rele...om/pricing.html
I’m new to Relenta, but I’m already finding the time/value worth it managing home/ home based business/ and other blogging/volunteering ventures. I see great potential for small businesses and momventures. I have to look at productivity as a value and Relenta beats anything I’ve seen so far. Customer service is awesome! I’ll pay for that any day!
We use Relenta at Paymo.biz for customer support for over a year now, it’s pretty good and worth the money. I’ve looked at a couple of small biz crm’s and this seemed the most straight forward option at the time. keep up the good work Relenta.
This looks very similar to Sproutit’s Mailroom. I wonder how Mailroom is doing these days? We used Mailroom long ago but when our needs got more complex, we switched to Autotask (a salesforce-like SaaS CRM that is built for IT companies).
It seems that Relenta has started on the right foot with having the concept of contacts and companies built in. My advice would be to focus on how to interact with the many other systems out there that people already use. Maybe you can be a great email processing add-on for Salesforce, Autotask or SugarCRM? Maybe you could be a great service to handle sales@, support@ and jobs@ for thousands of small businesses. You would be surprised at the strange ways that small businesses deal with general email addresses like these. I bet many people are sending them to gmail boxes – Relenta could be a better answer to this problem.
Just don’t assume that everyone at the company will be using Relenta and make it easy to shoot off emails to others within the company that are not using Relenta and gracefully deal with replies.
I’ll definitely take a closer look at Relenta.
What technology do they use : PHP ,.NET or Java ( or python ,ruby etc) on the server side ?
We use Relenta for sales and I have to say it has been hands down one of the best moves I have made. (I used pipelinedeals before)
Michael Arrington, o dono do TechCrunch, um dos maiores blogs da web, resolveu dar um tempo da internet. O blog, que traz informações sobre tecnologia e empreendedorismo, continuará sendo atualizado, porém sem a presença de Arrington. O motivo? Os visitantes do site começaram a fazer ameaças ao cara.
Isso é muito bom saber, obrigado por compartilhar. O que tem isto a ver com Relenta, exactamente?
Relenta is showing a lot of promise. Dmitri is an action-oriented leader who is attentive to the needs of his customers and potential customers alike. I look forward to contributing to his growing success with Relenta.
@pwb, @timtobe, @Frank, @Heather, @Hercules, Rodney Loges, @jack, @Jared, @Linda S, @Jan, @Larry Velez, @William Davidson, @Scott Gardner: Thanks so much for your comments and encouragement!
@pwb, @Mary, we are already rethinking our approach to the existing free service, free trial length and conditions, as well as graduated pricing. Would love to connect with you directly to discuss, please get in touch with me. Email dmitri (at) relenta or http://twitter.com/relenta Thanks!
@RV we use PHP mostly, some modules are Java. OS: Red Hat Enterprise. Webserver: nginx + fasctgi
@Larry Velez:
> Maybe you can be a great email processing
> add-on for Salesforce, Autotask or SugarCRM?
No way! Relenta replaces Salesforce and SugarCRM which are too complex for small organization and actually impede productivity instead of enhancing it.
> Maybe you could be a great service to handle
> sales@, support@ and jobs@ for thousands of small
> businesses. I bet many people are sending them to
> gmail boxes – Relenta could be a better answer to
> this problem.
Relenta already is exactly that answer. That’s what we do:
http://demo.relenta.com
Username: demo
Password: demo
> You would be surprised at the strange ways that
> small businesses deal with general email addresses
> like these.
I talk to small businesses all day, every day and nothings surprises me anymore. Really.
I’ll be sticking with highrise. Although I do think highrise should return the favor and copy a couple things from Relenta. Integrating email would be nice.
At first glance I almost thought relenta was a rebranded version of highrise but then it hit me – highrise is much better done.
Of course, everyone’s comments reflect their personal needs and how well a particular product fill it.
Relenta may not do enough for your needs and it is possible that it may do too much. However, speaking objectively, Relenta does something that VERY few crm-style product do: It seamlessly incorporates email into the customer management process and provides a record of those communications.
If this process is important to you as a small business operator, I maintain no one does it better.
Nope, Salesforce/gmail is soooo far from seamless they should be embarrassed to call it an integration. Sure, the Bcc to your SaaS CRM in order to attach email communication to a contact is acceptable, but I expect my web app crm to create a contact if one doesn’t exist. Why can’t Salesforce do this when Highrise and HeapCRM do it beautifully?
With that said, incorporating a well-executed Bcc process is worthy of applause, but it certainly isn’t as seamless as having the email client built into the app. It may seem like an unreasonable criticism, but you need to experience the liberation of the Relenta process before you can dismiss this point.
Web based CRM products that offer a sync to a client side email client, while functional in some cases, overlook the fact that one of the best reasons to use a web based app is that ability to access your data and use email from anywhere. Besides, we’re getting right back to that seamless operation argument again.
SugarCRM, close, no cigar. Nice integrated email client, IMAP works most good enough, but it’s too much complexity and too high a cost for John Q. Entrepreneur. Yes, there’s a free version, but if you run a catering business you should be spending your time prepping food or making sales calls and not tweaking the php installation on your web host.
All is not perfect, my needs are reflected in this review as well and I can no longer live/work without conversation view in my email. So, I too, wait and frequently check the Relenta site for news I fear will never come.
Hmm, maybe there is a software engineer somewhere that will consider adopting a CRM project that will seamlessly integrate with a popular web based email service for their 20% time.
@Martin, thanks! “I can no longer live/work without conversation view in my email” – is that what you’re referring to as news you will fear will never come? If so don’t fear
Please get in touch with me directly. Thanks.
Ha! I have just been sent a link to this thread, from one of my somewhat relenta-phobic colleagues, upon whom I have recently “dumped” Relenta…
He sent me the link, with a “see, I told you so, there are other people out there who don’t see the value of Relenta either” kinda message, and here are some excerpts of my reply to him:
My FIRST choice was to go with 37Signals HighRise (we’ve been Premium users of BaseCamp for 3+ years, and we like the functinality very much for internal / vendor liason) but for a number of reasons I decided that it “just didn’t cut it”
First and foremost, there is no, nor does there appeared to be any pipeline, for integrating e-mail directly into HR. we are having enough complications just with dealing with the e-mails, comments, follow-ups and action points, without adding a (unreliable manual) extra operation.
About 18 months ago we had an aborted attempt at using SproutIt, which had a superb interface, and does have many things going for it, although it had a very low adoption rate with our staff.
Eventually we stumbled onto Relenta, and we have progressively rolled it out to different parts of the company, at first purely internally for customer care and sales, lately to about half of our sales Agents, and soon we will be integrating our secondary office into this as well.
In its current state, Relenta is not 100% perfect our uses, like with any programme we have to accept it will never be quite as “perfect” as we might want it to be. But it is the simple cleanest, most logical and holistic approach to getting our group of people to work together and improve our customer service experience that I have yet found.
Ultimately, from my perspective there is no substantial difference in the way that this works when compared to HighRise (IF it had mail integration) SproutIt or a Gmail mash-up…
What IS different, is that 90% of our users have adopted it with minimal explanation, AND ARE USING IT daily… in a small business such as ours, this is a critical thing.
also, I have to say that the customer care from the team at Relenta has pretty much taken my breath away ( obviously they are using their own product!) and have always been very keen to help us, explain and listen to our wish list for added functionality we’d like to see in the future.
As much as I am an enormous fan of 37Signals, ( and a big customer of theirs to boot!) I’ve never had the same service from them.
Every company is different, and has different demands, but to this company and with our demands, Relenta is the best service we have found.
Relenta may be the underdog, but often they are the ones you have to watch out for!
Thanks Krien.
37signals changed the way we all think about the software, no question about it. Like true revolutionaries, they are extremists. Good for Relenta, not so good for 37signals. When 37signals comes up in conversations 9 times out of 10 I hear the same thing, “great product(s) but not flexible enough for me.” A good example of simplicity taken too far.
To be fair, my statistics is naturally skewed, because I don’t get to talk to those customers who are satisfied, and of course they must be the majority.
Long story short, 37signals, thank you for creating the market for the rest of us. You are my heroes!
What this looks like is an “overlay” of new organizational logic on top of a traditional email application. I’m not surprised by Krien’s story of rapid uptake pecause its positioned simply as a more functional email experience instead of an entirely separate CRM app. Learning a new app requires users to develop new mental models to reflect the data model of the app, and I like that the data model presented to the user here is essentially email!
Q dub, thanks! A very astute observation! Maybe you can be our evangelist?
http://jobs.37s...s.com/jobs/4844
looks good and fresh app
Hi
I tried using Relenta but somehow was not too satisfied with the product for our need, though I have to admit in terms of the overall User Inteface it was amongst one of the cleanest that I have seen.
My big grudge though is that when I tried to cancel my subscription there is no way to do it automatically. Ultimately I had to send an email to your customer support and I am hoping that’d work.
I think in the none of us should put in our Credit Card numbers on the sites that does not allow automatic cancellation of subscription.
Akshay
I wrote to Relenta and they cancelled my account swiftly so no problems there as well
We added the ability to cancel your account without having to contact helpdesk
We’re picky, and we’re impressed with Relenta on two levels:
1) It meets the needs of our clients; and
2) It meets our needs.
Priacta — my company — does “productivity training 2.0″ (http://www.priacta.com ). We put people in control of their work in a
day, and we train specifically for the productivity tools they use. Most tools just don’t cut it. Relenta makes the grade.
Sales/CRM needs good workflow and task management! Emails represent tasks, and properly-managed tasks turn leads and plans into results. Sadly, most CRM systems treat tasks as an afterthought. Most aren’t flexible enough for high-output approaches like GTD (”Getting Things Done” by David Allen) or our TRO (”Total, Relaxed Organization”). FreeCRM suffers from this problem. That’s not a little thing! Without it, those next actions become an ugly, stressful bottleneck.
We’ve looked at Salesforce, SugarCRM, vTiger, InfusionSoft, and many others which we agree are either “too complex for small organization and actually impede productivity,” or they have maddeningly poor integration with other tools, or they are too pricey (SalesForce, InfusionSoft) or buggy (InfusionSoft). Oprius is nice but single-user and proud of it.
Bottom line: Relenta looks like the only show on the block for high-productivity, small-to-medium business CRM. Multi-user, handles a
GTD approach, supports campaigns with basic business process automation (InfusionSoft’s claim to fame), and the company is highly responsive. Worth a solid look.
Kevin Crenshaw
Productivity/Leadership Coach, Priacta, Inc.
Dmitri, will Relenta offer api or things like force.com in the future?
We already have an API; yes to platform in the near future.
We’ve been running Relenta since October 2008. We’re the group who tried these [quoted above]: FreeCRM, BroswerCRM, JobBlogs, iContact, Joyent, HyperOffice, Webex (WebOffice), vTiger, ZoHo, Zimbra, Chaos Intellect, StreetSmart, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, Google’s CRM (Etelos), SalesForce, Infusionsoft, and a few others. 17 different trials ranging from 14 to 30 days.
Relenta IS the cleanest and nicest solution to group productivity and CRMing. We looked at ALL others in the space.
Client service from Dimitri and his team is outstanding!
I’m happy to act as a reference for Relenta–for anyone still unconvinced.
Sounds great but I can’t believe how old-fashioned I must be. How can everyone trust their sensitive business data to another company. Can’t we host this ourselves?
We’ve been running Erply.com since Januar 2009. Its so simple and helpful solution, consisting all small business needs. CRM, sales, invoicing are all fully integrated toghether. Also, POS, document management is involved.
Really clean and sleek user interface makes its really fun to use. http://www.erply.com
A, ive found that they are a Swiss company, so security is a plus;-)