Email is still one of the most monetizable category in Enterprise space and Google Apps provides an apt platform for startups to build interesting services around the same. Grexit, Delhi based startup lets you do a very simple thing with your Google apps account – share email with colleagues.
The pain point that Grexit is solving is the amount of information (knowledge) that is stored in discussion threads and practically no way to share the same within an organizational context.
Couple of use cases (from Grexit’ blog) that clearly demonstrates the need
- You posted a question to a few of your colleagues. You got some responses, and after a few emails on the thread, you got your answer. This answer might be of relevance to many other people at your workplace who might have the same question that you had.
- You are working on a project and using email heavily to discuss key matters on the project. A new member joins the team, and needs to have access to all these email threads.
- You found a link on the internet that you think your colleagues can use. You forward this to your immediate peers over email, but do not want to send it to everyone as they might not need it immediately, and might consider the email to be spam.
GrexIt solves this problem by letting you add content from your inbox to an online repository, which anyone from your workplace in need of information can access (search). Effectively, GrexIt is a very simple tool to let out knowledge that might be trapped inside your email inbox, and open it up to a wider audience which might need it.
A very useful idea, though the biggest challenge in adoption would be privacy of the emails. Not just ACL (i.e. Access Control List) ensuring some emails are read only by ‘Project Managers of X Group Only’, but these emails are stored in Grexit servers (can only be accessed by your Google Apps ids), which many of us wouldn’t be so comfortable with.
Do give Grexit a spin – it surely is an interesting product and I’d expect the team to launch something similar for Zoho apps as well. Grexit has recently added IMAP support, and plans to expand to other services like Outlook, Thunderbird and any desktop client that supports extension.
Update: Here is a feature suggestion to the team. None of what Grexit does in its current form has actionable component. Why not create a ToDO list of emails that users share, in short make it more useful for a normal email user?
Watch this demo video
Recommended Read: How to Handle Email Overload? | 5 Basic Email Etiquettes for Entrepreneurs
