Here’s a little background behind what started us going on Sproutit.com and Mailroom:

At my last job, I helped run a small business called Nisus Software. We sold a word processor for writers on the Mac platform. It’s a small market, but Nisus had some really dedicated users and with all the complaining I used to do about Word, it was fun to finally build a word processor that really worked the way a good word processor should.

But I digress. The simple fact is, we received a lot of email. In fact, two of our eight people – Dave and Mark – spent most of their day just answering email. I also spent a few hours a day answering email as well.

After a while, I got really frustrated with this. Dave, Mark and I loved working in a small business because there are so many exciting things you get to do; planning new products, improving the support site, launching new marketing ploys. But instead, we spent our days answering email.

As much as we all loved interacting with our customers, email is mind numbing and, quite frankly, it kept us from doing other things that were more fun.

So I started looking for ways to spend less time on email. I looked at Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and a bunch of others, but none of them really fit the bill. Some of them cost too much, others would have actually made email more work than it already was. Many were both expensive and more work.

“What a waste,” I thought. And then I went back to answering more email.

Now, go forward a year and some change to when Peter, Chris and I were looking to start Sproutit.com. We talked to over 30 different small businesses not unlike Nisus. To our surprise we found that this email thing was not an uncommon problem. In fact, more than 90% of the companies we talked to brought this up as an issue.

With those kinds of results, we knew we had found our calling. And that is how the idea for Mailroom was born.

Anyway, the point of this story is that there are a lot of fun, exciting, and glamorous things about running your own small business. Email is not one of them.

We didn’t create Mailroom to save you time on email. We created Mailroom so you could spend more time doing what you love.