E-mail overload is the fashion statement of our times. Everyone seems to be working overtime, yet unable to deal with all the emails in the mailbox. So much so for the email traffic that startups have now developed products especially catering to the email ecosystem.
Products ranging from making email look beautiful to scheduling and tracking the sent messages all exist. But the UnPluggd startup Paceable has a taken a different approach to email conversation which are aplenty in the organizations by creating a customer relationship management tool within Gmail using a simple Chrome extension.
Paceable (earlier called MailSyncr) integrates directly with Gmail and helps team members view each others activity on a thread, assign emails to each other and share notes & email templates.
The duo behind FoodKhoj, Swetansu Mohapatra and Pradeep Kumar launched Paceable at the previous UnPluggd event in Bangalore. The idea came out during their days at FoodKhoj when they would get support emails from people which were later forwarded to the respective team members for follow up. But there was a lack of transparency and they were not able to track things like who had taken up the follow-up task. So the idea of a real time activity tool in the form of Paceable was born. To service not only their own needs but that of the other organizations facing the same problem.
Paceable is being incubated as a part of the Startup Chile program and in simple terms is a productivity app for email for teams which work in collaboration.
It adds a small private window within GMail for team to collaborate and chat. Anytime a mail has multiple team members copied on to a thread, the private window is used for the interaction between them. The private window serves as an outlet for the team members to interact and view activity of other team members. Apart from that it serves the purpose of chatting, adding notes, scheduling reminders in the context of the email thread going on. All of this gets stored for future reference when the team revisits that email thread they can see the conversation around it.
Currently the team at Paceable have 70 businesses on board which are typically small and medium enterprises using their product. In terms of demographic breakdown 70% of the users are based in the US and most are a part of the media industry. The pricing for Paceable is free for the first 14 days of trial and thereon costs $4.95/user/month.
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Users can expect the next iteration of the product in March along with the long term goal of supporting other email clients. After using the service for most parts of the past week. A tool such as Paceable does fit the workflow. What remains to be seen how enticing choice is it for the users.
