February 2006 Archives

We worked hard for eight months to launch Mailroom. We did it all so that we could get our first customers and…to find out where we went wrong.

You see, no one should expect to get everything right on the first try. We could try. We could spend months or years even trying to get everything just the way we think it should be…our service, our support, our software. But we might still not really get what our customers want.

Instead, we launched Mailroom as soon as we could and started collecting a lot of feedback. Now we know some areas that we really need to get busy working on and other areas we would have put some more time into, but we found out our customers were not really that interested in them.

Our job for the next six months will basically be to perfect our systems. Not just Mailroom, but the stuff around it to-from our support page to our marketing message-to reflect all the feedback we have received from our customers, the press, and other important people.

BONUS LINK: Matt at 37signals made this point about getting things wrong well in his recent post Is Getting Real Dangerous?

Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software today write a bit about their hiring process at his company FogCreek. It’s interesting to read how they go about it, trying to find only the best.

Our process is not quite this developed, but we do have a process for hiring that is becoming longer and more involved each time we do it. I find that every time I hire someone I get more and more selected. Joel explained why he spends so much time to hire only superstars and I agree:

when you hire superstars you make a lot of money in terms of revenue-per-employee. That means we can have cushy private offices and high-end workstations and Aeron chairs without running out of money.

When we were at DEMO, a lot of people were surprised to hear that we moved our management team to Prague and hired a development team in the US. One VC was obviously really turned off by that, in fact…”wouldn’t it be cheaper for you to do it the other way around like everyone else?,” he said.

Actually, no. A really good quality developer, PR person, whatever, is more expensive but they can be orders of magnitude more productive also. They are really hard to find, but when you get a person like this, they can really make your company go.

One of my goals with Sproutit is to hire only the superstar, super-productive people as long as we can. They may be harder to find and they may be expensive, but in the end the quality of their work will pay off in the end.

Bonus Thought: If you are into getting things done with small teams, you can only do it with superstar teams. Think about it.

Small and simple. That is how IT should be for small business according to Charles Jolley.

It’s been about two weeks now and the response has been great. In fact, we have so many accounts now, we are adding a second, much larger server to speed things up and to accommodate more accounts.

Also, last Friday we rolled out our first set of changes in response to some of your requests. Probably the most important change is that we fixed a bug that has been effecting some users of IE and FireFox. If you’ve clicked on a button to tag an item, send a reply, or even report a bug and Mailroom just scrolled to the top of the screen but never did anything else, then this means you.

It turns out our new design triggered an obscure bug in the very latest versions of FireFox and IE that caused this problem. We even had to hire one of the top CSS experts to help us figure this out. Anyway, it’s fixed now and everything else works, so go give Mailroom a look.

The other feature we’ve added was requested by several of you, including Brian at SolutionWatch. Now you can set your default From: address in emails that you send. This way your customers will never see Sproutit or Mailroom at all when the correspond with you.

To use this feature, just click on “preferences” then “Email” and you can enter your preferred email address there. If you do use this feature, be sure the From: address you choose also feeds into Mailroom. Otherwise, Mailroom will not receive replies you receive back from your customers.

There is more on the way in the coming weeks. We plan to start rolling out new features and improvements regularly, so stay tuned!

Peter Gohman, our Director of Ops, gives us a Mailroom update. BWAHAHA!!!

There is something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for a while. In fact, its a big part of why I personally wanted to do Sproutit. I’ve never been able to express it well enough before, but after some feedback I’ve had since DEMO, I think I finally have the words. So here goes…

Here is the simple fact: business software costs too much for small business. And there is nothing the big software companies can do to fix it. They can’t drop the enough features, they can’t reduce the price enough. That’s because it’s not so much the cost of the software that is the problem—its the cost of maintenance.

We got a nice mention by Paul Taylor in the Financial Times today. (As did our friends at iotum). Woo-hoo!

Mailroom from Sproutit (www.sproutit.com) aims to deliver similar productivity gains to small businesses deluged with e-mail. The web-based e-mail management software package automatically sorts and routes incoming e-mail and also suggests responses that are then reviewed by a human being.

Sproutit’s mailroom automatically tracks all the correspondence between a business and a customer, delivering one element of big business customer relationship management to small companies.

Full article: A showcase for the coolest gadgets

I found a fun little site today just poking around on Google. It is called AlexaDex and it is the online website stock market game. Check us out, here

If there aren’t many shares remaining,...sorry…I bought them. : )

A few days ago, I was approached by Alex Muse about helping him with a new project, PodServe. This is part of the Big In Japan Toolbox, a company that he is actively involved in.

He wanted me to place a pitch podcast onto a new public podcast (a podcast that anyone can contribute to). SO, I did. You heard it on Living the Dream a few days ago. I also decided to place the Living the Dream podcast on the PodServe site, too. Right here.

I have been amazed at the rate at which the number of subscribers has grown. I am curious to see if it will double by next week.

Not really, but hard at work and tired, our DoO sleeps….zzzz….zzzz

Just a quick pitch that I was asked to give about our company.

A few years ago, when I started my first company, the standard question from investors and others was “what is Microsoft decides to compete with you?” This time around its different: “what if Google decides to compete with you?”

A few weeks ago, Google announced the beta of Gmail for your domain, today they opened the beta of Google Pages. Yes, if you are thinking about getting into Web 2.0, Google is probably doing something similar and you’d better be ready to explain how you are different.

So, how do you compete? Like most big companies, Google will need to target their products at a wide possible audience to get enough users. If you are starting a new Web 2.0 company, the best strategy is to focus on providing better tools for a specific niche. Google may add some features to target your niche, but it will generally not be cost effective for them to build a brand focused on your specific customers because they have too many other people to please.

For example, Mailroom is already being compared to Gmail for your domain. But our tools are focused on the small business. More specifically, Mailroom is focused on answering sales and support email only for small businesses.

Sure, both Mailroom and Gmail (and Outlook and Hotmail and Yahoo) handle email. But only Mailroom learns the answers to your those 10 or 15 questions you get time and again and suggests those replies automatically. That feature alone can save you hours a day when answering sales and support email.

Another strategy we use to compete with Gmail is to cooperate. We can make Gmail more useful.

For example, Gmail is designed for personal email, Mailroom is designed for sales and support email. You can setup Gmail to forward your sales and support email to Mailroom, leaving your personal email where it belongs. This leaves your Gmail inbox free of the volumes of sales and support email that can make it hard to find personal messages you really need to deal with.

I think there are two big points to take away from all of this:

First, competition is not all bad. It proves that your idea is good enough for others to want to pursue it also. After all, a company as respected as Google thinks your idea is interesting enough to compete with you. So we should all learn to embrace competition and roll with it.

Second, business strategy is like rock, paper, scissors: big smashes little, but focus can outrun the big. So throw the right sign when it comes your turn to play.

Well, I really couldn’t think of anything useful to say today, except that ‘I didn’t have anything useful to say.’

Yahoo Photos was launched at DEMO and we had a chance to chat with the man, Will Aldrich.

When I first received an email from my CEO, Charles this morning, I thought, “now they are coming and knocking at our door.” Until, I read my morning blog posts and found that Alec Saunders (fellow we met at DEMO), received the same email. You can check his comments out at the Saunderslog.

Do you think that these folks actually help raise money? Seems that their business model is based up the business plan of you have to spend money to make money. Just the idea that Alec called them a “Silicon Valley equivalent of the Nigerian Banking email.”

Well, even though most of you are enthralled in the Olympics, I thought that I would keep you abreast of our soccer games. Tonight, it was tough playing after having two weeks off in the states. Fortunately, I have had a chance to run a couple of times since the last game.

Tonight…We won!!!! I honestly don’t know the score, but it was higher than the other team’s by a couple of goals. i only had one goal tonight, but about 5 assists. Peter had a hat trick tonight, all of which, were in a row. Go Peter!

So, after a couple of weeks off, we ended up on a good note.

What is the number one reason that small businesses go out of business? No money. It seems so simple, yet it has been overlooked for years. Is it really that difficult? In my mind, NO!

Case in point. Your combined household income is $50k per year and your normal expenses are equal to $48k. Simple math tells us that you should have $2k left over at the end of the year.

Now, imagine if you will that someone in your family gets sick, you buy birthday presents for friends and family, you are hosting this year’s family Thanksgiving dinner, and your oldest son is learning to drive. All of this for $7k You find yourself needing more money than you earn. Or, as it is often referred, Living beyond your means. So, you raid your savings, put purchases on credit cards, etc…

NOW, imagine your business revenues are $200k per year yet your expenses equal $195k. So far so good. But, an opportunity arises and you need to hire a new person at about $50k/yr. Well, in this case you could…. raid your savings, put purchases on credit cards, etc… Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it.

You say that is basic, right? It is, but for some, it just doesn’t equate. Personal finance could never be the same as my business’s finance. Today, they are the one- in-the-same.

BOCTAOE.

How to use a simple financing strategy to extend your cash until the revenue comes. Warning: this example SHOULD be used at home and your small business.

Alec Saunders from iotum, posted this on his blog today.

I couldn’t figure out why the hot glue gun shorted out yesterday. Today, while downloading photos from my camera, I came across this…

You really need to click through to see the picture. Worth more than…at least 3 words. Oh, My, Goodness.

Alec Saunders from iotum had a very interesting post today about security in our phone conversations and using Skype.

Google News shows that an AP story, filed yesterday, on Skype and encryption is in virtually every newspaper in America this morning. The thrust of the story is that secure communication with Skype is easy, much easier than secure communication has been with any previous technology. And even if there are flaws, it could still stymie the NSA’s efforts to eavesdrop on conversations.

For more, click here.

Hello – allow me to introduce… myself.

Shanti Braford here. (my blog) I’ve been behind the scenes here at Sprout It working on a top-secret Ruby on Rails project that should be our 2nd integrated application in the Sprout It suite of web-based hosted apps for small businesses.

But that’s all going to change soon (not the secret part, at least not yet), as I am getting involved in Mailroom development / bug fixes / enhancements in a much bigger way here shortly.

Scott Barron has been doing an incredible job on Mailroom. He’s been working with and contributing to the core Ruby on Rails framework since the its early days on the scene. Needless to say, I’ve certainly learned a thing or two from Scott and look forward to working with him more in the future.

Ok, back on topic—BlogPolls!

The idea. BTW – if anyone knows Michael Arrington, see if he will plug this idea on TechChrunch because a week later we could have five Web 2.0 startups building BlogPolls ™, one will even have raised 2M in Venture Capital already. And yes, that’s all very much a good thing! =)

BlogPolls ™ would:

• be a web hosted service (nothing to install, of course)
• have a predefined list of common questions to ask your blog audience
• allow you to easily customize your poll form
• email you a summary of the results and responses
• provide nice, pretty color-coded graphs of the collected data (duh)
• be full of ajaxy goodness
• provide an API (we can wait for version 2 on this one)

• learn who your audience is—what their interests are, etc.
• provide demographic data to advertisers (ex: 80% of readers make $75k or more. w00t!)
• target your site content better and learn what they want to read about on your blog

So, any takers? If you build this, I can guarantee you at least one paying customer if the price is right.

Disclaimer: I have done 0 Google searches to actually see if, you know, maybe this already exists. That’s just how I roll.

DEMO floor discussion with Alec Saunders of iotum. A new startup out of Canada. We had a an amazing time getting to know the iotum team.

Many of us only know 2 kinds of finance, personal and corporate. You probably know personal finance through those burdensome student loans, credit cards and home equity loans. Corporate is most widely known through stocks and bonds that are traded in public markets like the NYSE, and NASDAQ, and large loans from huge banks. But, neither of these really help an entrepreneur. Or do they?

I am going to make a series of arguments over the next few weeks that the finance that a small business needs (entrepreneurial finance) is completely different than these two forms of finance yet, exactly the same.

As always, BOCTAOE

After many hours… I am back in Prague and one bag short.

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.�? — Colin Powell

Hmmm, does this quote bring the experience of preparing to present mailroom at DEMO to mind? Certainly lots of preparation and hard work went into the DEMO presentation. The Sproutit boys came well prepared to Santa Monica to do a pre-DEMO presentation in front of a small group before heading off to Phoenix for the big gig. They knew what they wanted to say, were well rehearsed, and had spent a lot of time and hard work getting their mailroom example up and running. Then came the technical difficulties—during the presentation in Santa Monica, the wireless internet in the building that had been running fine up until the start of the presentation became non-existent. The boys scrambled to find a working internet connection while the small audience waited, and waited. Fortunately, the quality of the product spoke through the technical difficulties, but the boys came out of the experience knowing that could not happen at DEMO. By the Wednesday DEMO, all the presentation glitches were fixed and the hard work paid off—the boys won the coveted DEMO-god award (like gold at the Olympics) and have a myriad of reporters calling.

Congratulations guys!

Greg from VentureVoice just posted his excellent podcast about DEMO. He caught up with both Sproutit and Sharpcast throughout the conference along with several VC’s and others. As usual, this is a great podcast with lots of interesting info on how both Sproutit and Sharpcast got started and why we moved to Prague. Check it out:

VentureVoice: Following entrepreneurs at DEMO 2006

Great friend, mentor and aspiring entrepreneur, Ed Aranda.

Despite our best efforts…something was bound to go wrong.

Brian Benzinger at SolutionWatch has the first in-depth review of Mailroom post launch:

Overall I find Sproutit Mailroom to be an excellent solution for email management. It is great to see a service such that targets small businesses to help save time with email so they can get back to doing what they want.

Read more at the SolutionWatch Mailroom Review

We left Prague for DEMO two weeks ago. A house sitter stayed at our flat most of the two weeks until this morning, when he left for work. This evening Peter arrived back, the first of us to make it all the way home.

About noon today, just a few hours before Peter got home, someone broke into our flat and stole our shared “company” computer, the Mac mini. That’s shocking since we are on the top floor, in a nice building, in a good neighborhood and the place was empty only for an afternoon.

Anyway, that’s not the real story. The really amazing thing is how little this loss has impacted our business.

A few years ago, while living in Paris and starting my second business, something similar happened. I lost both my computer and my backup drive along with several months of code. The loss to my business was so great that I had to return to the US a few months early.

How things have changed in a few years! Today we run everything on the web. We lost an important computer and all we had to do was switch to another one. Peter, Chris, and I had our daily conference tonight and, honestly, we were all much more worried about our follow up from DEMO than a measly theft.

Of course there are worse thing that can go wrong, but I’m struck by how much more resilient our business can be because most of our important business data is hosted on the web.

An interview from one of our beloved Sproutit team members, Sally Stewart, from the Pavillion floor at DEMO.

Right now is one of the most exciting part of the business for me.

Our business is about more than just providing a great service to small businesses, it about creating a system that can attract customers, get them using our product, and then keep them really happy by providing a good quality service.

To make this happen, a lot of pieces need to be in place. You need a product, obviously. You also need a marketing website, and a system for getting the word out about yourself to attract new people to your site. When people come to your site, you need to have something in place that will help them get started with your service, then start using it regularly, and finally pay you for it. Then you need some way of providing support to people once they become paying customers to make sure they stay happy.

Launching last Monday meant that we finally have all of these pieces in place. (Well, most of them anyway.) But that doesn’t mean they all work exactly the way we want them to. In fact, when we launched, I expected that things would not work perfectly. The point once, they worked well enough to get them off the ground.

The next few weeks, one of my biggest jobs is to examine each part of this system, and start looking for ways we can improve it. I’ll be posting more about this in the coming weeks. What did we get right? What can we do better? How will we change?

By Paul Gillin on Thursday Feb 9.

Given all the lip service being given to the small/medium business market, I was surprised there weren’t more products targeting those users. Nevertheless, there were three that caught my eye.

Read more here

Cathy Brooks is interviewed about her up and coming podcast series from the floor of the DEMO pavillion.

I am in NYC today on the round table at the Small Business Tech Summit at the Roosevelt Hotel on East 40th. Come on by if you want to chat. I’ll be there from about 1pm to 6pm.

They finally posted the video of our DEMO presentation online. Go to the DEMO – Sproutit.com and take a look. Give us feed back.

Wednesday, February 8, 2006 Interview with Charles Jolley, SproutIt.com by Benjamin Kuo.

My interview this morning is with Charles Jolley, co-founder of SproutIt.com. Sproutit is launched its product this Monday at DEMO, and is developing software for handling email for small companies. I spoke to Charles about the company.

Read more at SoCalTech.com.

Amazing awards ceremony last night. Top honors to 10 companies.

DEMO ended tonight with a bang. Actually, it ended with a dinner. But anyway, the purpose of that dinner was to hand out the DEMOgod awards. This award is given to the people who gave the best demos at the show.

And I’m proud to announce that we were one of them! Simply presenting a DEMO is a huge honor. It means beating out 1,500 companies with a better story, a better product, and a better plan. Among those 69 people who made it to demo, only 10 were awarded DEMOgod.

Buy really, this award goes to everyone at on the Sproutit team. Scott worked day and night to get our product ready, Andrew got up early to make sure our server was up and running, Sally and Lianne gave us some honest and crucial feedback, Topher put together a great brand to help everything hang together. And of course, Peter and Chris were great together as they narrated and performed the actual demo.

At the end of the demo today, I said the best thing about Mailroom is that we launched it two days ago. I was actually surprised at how many companies are here at DEMO just to show something that will launch in 3-6 months or longer.

It’s understandable of course since on of the big reasons companies apply for DEMO is to help secure funding. But still, I guess I expected more people to be launching their products for real here.

Anyway, we worked double time prepping for DEMO and preparing our product for launch at the same time and I am glad that we did. Our demo I think went pretty well, but the fact that people could go sign up for it right away made a big impact.

Reactions from our stage presentations from Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO and a chat with team member Sally Stewart.

“What Counts” blog early reactions to Mailroom:

Strong, clean interface. Tackling a critically important role, this product might have legs. Six minutes was too short a period of time to properly evaluate. With my clear interests in email I plan to spend much more time learning about this product. DEMO says there are no competitors, but this isn’t right by a long shot. There are a bunch of folks doing this and have been doing it for a while. (from Demo 2006 – Blogging Demo 2006)

From the Demo Blog, Keith Shaw said:

Sprout Systems is offering hosted e-mail management for small and midsize businesses. More impressive is the system’s ability to sort and organize a user’s e-mail and be able to prioritize important e-mails and send out quick and customized responses to e-mail queries. For the dozens of different inquiries that I get on a daily basis, using this would speed my resonses immensely, as well as provide personal answers instead of canned e-mail responses. I’ll definitely be checking them out later, especially since the company is offering a free account that covers 1,000 bundled e-mails per month (spam and viruses are blocked for free), with the ability to forward unlimited e-mail addresses to the Mailroom account. Higher volume options go up from there, with plans ranging from $19 up to $199 per month. (if you go over the number of messages you’re allotted, Sproutit charges $0.05 per message). (from Day 2 morning session highlights: DEMOletter)

Jeff Clavier got the first post out about our DEMO today. You can read it at:

Sprout Systems: announces MailRoom, a solution for small businesses to manage, prioritize and in some cases automatically reply, to the email they are receiving (stats mentioned is that SMBs spend up to 50% of their time answering). It is based on a Web-based UI that provides ready-made forms, email answers and workflows to speed up email management. This sounds interesting, but I am concerned about the scalability of the demo’ed solution to hundreds of emails, and thousands of contacts. (from Jeff Clavier’s Software Only: DEMO 2006: Day Two – Morning)

We finished the demo less than an hour ago and I just now got to the internet. I was rewriting my part literally up until this morning, but the whole thing went off without a hitch. There was a lot of energy in the audience. Our demo was simple and direct. No photos of babies, but we did feature the product and people seemed to like it.

I think we are going to get a lot of interest from this. Photos and video coming as soon as its available.

A few days ago I said one of the keys to a winning demo is to use babies. Well, we just saw the winner of the gratuitous baby award today when Riya showed their new image tagging technology.

Riya’s demo involved showing approximately 500 pictures of babies. Most of them of the CEO’s son. Beat that SharpCast.

Riya’s image tagging is actually pretty cool. I’m excited to go try it out at their booth later today.

It seems to be a theme this year to have web-based services that are able to learn to pick tags and other info out of our data. Riya does it with images, RawSugar can do it with websites, we do it with email.

Anyway, the demos are almost over for today and its back to the show floor to demo our product to unsuspecting journalists.

Bonus Link: We got a mention in on ZDNet today. You can track all our media mentions on our newsroom page

Amazing enough, there are still quite a few companies that are new search engines. Newer algorithms, defined and specific page searches.

Google works for me, but, who knows…maybe I need to get refined.

Gravee.com – search engine that pays both companies and users.

VSee – fast running video collaboration software. too bad it is only for windows.

more to come…

On the floor of DEMO. Some good companies. Hot and heavy in the middle of it all.

Here are just some of the demos that we saw this morning. Some really good. Others, as exciting as sliced bread in 2005.

The very first demo this year was by Moo Bella. They have a vending machine that mixes and makes your custom ice cream order. I think I would like to try it out. Of course, I do have a crazy sweet tooth.

Blurb.. simple and awesome book making software. I am just glad they have it available for the mac.

Bones in Motion. Great for runners, bikers and walkers. It uses GPS technology in your phone to track you run. It even adds stats and can transfer it to your website.

More to come….

First day of DEMO. Great introductions. Amazing Technologies. In the pavillion and ready to go.

Today was the technical rehearsal for our demo. You might call it the first demo of our demo at DEMO. (our DEMO demo demo?) It was fun to get up on the stage, practice and watch a few others practice as well. The stage is actually pretty big and very nicely lit up. It’s being run by the same people who setup all the tech for Macworld and other big Apple events.

Anyway, I’m learning what really goes into a good demo. Here are a few tricks I’ve noticed so far that separate the good demos from the bad:

1. Show something. Amazingly, a lot of the demos I saw were people who got up and talked about themselves and their product for a while. One group didn’t even actually show anything because their product is not easily shown on stage. My thought is, if you can’t do show and tell with your product on a stage in 6 minutes, why would you apply to a conference called ‘demo’?
2. Have a theme. One of the best demos I saw focused on ‘simplicity.’ Throughout the demo, he kept bringing that word up. It was very powerful. You only have six minutes. Pick one message to get across and stick with it. (ours is: Mailroom saves you time on your email)
3. Take a risk. Tech is in a way pretty cold, even to people who are really interested in it. The more you can humanize it, the warmer it becomes. One way to do this is to add some drama. Take a risk. Do something live on stage whose outcome you cannot predict. It works. People love it even if it doesn’t work out just right.
4. Use Babies and mothers. If you can’t take a risk, nothing else can humanize your demo more than mothers and babies. Tug at the heart strings. It may be a cheap trick but pictures of babies or stories involving your mother never fails.

So there you have it. The next time you present at DEMO, show your product, have a theme, take a risk, and, if you can, use babies. Now you to can be a DEMOgod.

In a few moments, we will have to unplug, pack up, and hit the road, bound for Phoenix. We have been looking forward to this day for over 4 months and we are as excited as can be.

The downside. After allowing in some folks yesterday and seeing the response, we really want to make sure their first 15 minutes is a great experience. While the anxiety is there and the responsibility of taking care of customers is at hand, this is what we live for. Well, vaya con dios and we’ll chat with you in a few.

PS – if you see a golden Dogde Caravan blazing through the dessert, that’s us. see you in Phoenix.

This is one of those cool moments that I live for in business:

We were down to the wire today, ready to invite some new users except for one missing feature: a welcome email. We want everyone to get one or two welcome emails when they create an account so they can see what Mailroom does, but we did not have an autoresponder setup yet and there wasn’t time to build the feature into Mailroom today.

Well we thought about it for a bit and then we thought: “well, why not use Mailroom?”

So, tonight, we sent emails to our mailing list inviting them to try Mailroom. For the last hour or so, we’ve had new accounts created at a rate of about two per minute. For each new account, they receive an email just a few minutes after login. They probably think its coming from an autoresponder, but it’s not—it’s coming from Peter.

Peter has been using Mailroom to reply to new account emails with our welcome message for the last hour. He only had to write it once and pick it from the list of saved replies a few times. After that, Mailroom just knew what to do. All Peter has to do is approve it.

It’s really beautiful to see this idea you’ve been dreaming of for the last 6 months come to life. It’s most gratifying for me, however, when it starts to solve real problems for us and others.

It’s been quiet on the blog today because we are really busy making the last preparations for Mailroom. If you are on our front page mailing list, you will be getting an invite from us soon to log in and give Mailroom an early look. Otherwise, you can try Mailroom on Monday when we open the main website up.

I want to take this moment in the ‘calm before the storm’ to thank everyone here who has worked so hard on getting this product out the door. You’ve taken a good idea and made a truly remarkable product. Thanks!

After a long day of meetings and presentations, we have begun giving some of our fans a sneak peek at Mailroom.

After 25 hours of travel from Prague to London to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Pasadena, we are rested and ready to go.

but we are also among the top ten downloaded interviews on Small Business Trends Radio for the month of January. Not bad. Its a start. Sally thinks all this press now is a good omen for DEMO…

While in our mid-Atlantic crossing, we received some great news. News about us, in fact.

Hot on the heels of our Forbes.com mention, Ken Yarmosh was the first media person to get a real tour of Mailroom. He wrote up his thoughts about it at Corante Web. Here what he thinks:

I expect Mailroom to be a huge success at DEMO and look forward to seeing what Sproutit tackles next. To keep track of what they are up to, tune into their blog

(I hope everyone else feels that way too, once they get to use it! :-)

He also interviewed me for his great website Technosight. You can read more about how Sproutit.com got started, a little more about Mailroom, and even a small screenshot to give you some idea of our brand new UI. (If you’ve been on a tour of Mailroom before, it looks very different now.) Check it out

Well, someone has to brag, so I might as well do it. We are waiting in the SFO lounge for our next leg to LAX. Open the laptop and hop online. What do we see but a fresh quote from our very own Charles Jolley on Forbes.com. What I like best is the referral to our team concept. While we make lots of decisions together, none of us can be involved in every decision. That just doesn’t make sense.

My advice is to have someone in your business whose primary job is to know at all times how much money you will need at least for the next year,” said Jolley. “This way, they can start the process of raising capital at least six months before you will need it without distracting you from your business.