Basic stuff.

And that’s the thing… an elegantly designed tool to do a job that needs to be done. Bottle openers anyone?

Thanks, Inkling.

Agreed, this story sounds like a repeat, “we needed something so we built it”. I didn’t make it sound like a Summer blockbuster. I just wrote it up how it went down, and told Leena the same thing.

I didn’t mean to give the impression that our “old product” never took off. We’ve been earning a living for 3.5 years on our prediction market product without raising any investment capital (apart from our seed money from Ycombinator that was spent on rent and food in 3 months) and continue to do so. I’m not sure I do self-promotion right, it feels like bragging, but I think our client list (http://inklingm...m/homes/company) speaks pretty well that our Inkling has and is doing pretty well for itself. And we continue to improve it every day.

The inspiration for tgethr came from a lot of places that I’ll probably share even more about soon. One of which was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and his reference of the town of Rosetto. The story of Rosetto got me in huge way. I felt I should be communicating with my friends and family so much more than I was with 140 char Tweets and my random missives on Tumblr.

On top of that we brought in a kick ass fellow to the Inkling team (Javan Makhmali) around Oct 2008, and we found ourselves (this includes Adam, my cofounder) wanting to include him in more and more email communications regarding support, customer conversations, ideas being thrown around, etc. We also started using Tender (http://tenderapp.com) and Hoptoad (http://hoptaodapp.com) and found the need for private discussions around the information coming from those great tools as well.

So I spent a great deal of time scouring for tools that would fit our needs. We wanted dead simple stuff. But we NEED security because of the nature of that “old product”. We aren’t comfortable sending a lot of communication we have about our business around on tools that are going to just shoot the messages around over unencrypted email. Anyways, failing to find a tool that fit us, we took a crack at seeing if we could make something secure and that we’d get into a groove with. We abandon complicated tools very quickly.

So far so good. We like using it a ton. I’ve got 18 of my own groups goin. I have parts of my family talking now over email who usually only talk to each other once every other year, because tgethr doesn’t force them to learn something new. And most importantly, I have this safe way to send encrypted messages to my team at Inkling that I can find later, or easily find conversations Inkling is having with our prediction market customers that I would like to be aware of.

I have a hard time comparing it with Google Wave, because I haven’t used it, it’s just on a video. It looks like it’s got a lot of stuff which is going to be great for some folks. But from the looks of it so far, it’s got a ton of things I don’t need or want. I know I’m really not going to want people to see me type (I like to edit). And can I use Mail.app with it using encrypted messages? No idea.

Tgethr isn’t going to be for everyone. But we as a small business that worries about things like SSL and wants simple things, we like it a lot.

Sorry, couldn’t resist

We use Email Center Pro (www.emailcenterpro.com), which is a more robust web app for team collaboration, sharing and assigning emails, adding internal notes to threads, etc. But it is definitely more focused on customer service email than internal collaboration.