Kyle
London startup Tray is an email companion app that pumps up the productivity of your email. Imagine if when you checked in on FourSquare, your email automatically started delivering your out of office notification. Then, after you checked back into the office your email was restored to normal. That would be amazing wouldn’t it? Well that’s just one of many, many functions that London startup Tray adds to your email.
The functionality that Tray adds to your email is really pretty incredible. You can set rules for email that go well beyond your current email client. For example you can tell Tray, if “John” emails me after 8pm send it to my mobile. You can tell Tray, if Mary, Mike or Stacy emails me a link to read, add it to Pocket so I can read it later. Another example of a very useful Tray rule is, if my email inbox gets too full, send an auto responder saying that it may take a while to get back to people.
Tray began as an idea to make group emailing easier. After talking to email users, Dom Lewis, Rich Waldron, and Ali Russell, the founders of Tray, they decided to make email much more powerful.
We got a chance to interview Dom Lewis about Tray and building a startup in London. Check out the interview below:
Tray connects to your email and allows you to hook up your inbox to your favourite web services and create powerful tasks to streamline the way you manage your inbox. It’s built around an analytics dashboard which gives you an insight into what’s actually going on in your email.Tray lets you do just about anything with your inbox, but here are a few examples –
When I get an email I want Tray to check my sales CRM to see if they are a “hot lead”. If my calendar says I am currently in a meeting, then get Tray to send me an SMS.
If I check in on foursquare away from the office i’d like Tray to trigger my out of office.
If my email load is currently very high, i’d like Tray to trigger an autoresponder telling people I may take a little while to respond.
There are 3 founders Dom Lewis (@domwlewis), Rich Waldron (@richwaldron) and Ali Russell (@alirussell).
Our CTO Ali graduated University with a masters in computer science and stayed to work with Tim Berners Lee on the Web Science initiative. He’s published research papers and spoken at conferences worldwide, he’s even made the odd special appearance at MIT.
Rich is our product guy. Rich studied business IT and joined his first start up as employee number 2. After helping them drive revenue and growing the team, he and Dom set up a publication that went to over 60k homes, coupled with an online deals and booking engine.
Dom studied politics and economics at University whilst running his daily deals website whatshotwhere. He left and set up a digital media agency where he won a number of exciting projects with international brands, the team there grew to 6 within 18 months.
We are currently based in London
London is a thriving young startup scene, it’s growing rapidly and has some great resources. We’ve enjoyed being part of the community and meeting up at popular events like Silicon Drinkabout
Tray was born out of frustration with managing our email. We started out working on a previous product that took the hassle out of group emails, it was through speaking to our users we began to understand how email affects everyone in their own individual ways.These conversations were pivotal in driving us towards a new solution, we wanted to find a way we could help people manage their inbox based on how they already work with the services they already use. Tray started out as a few simple tasks that we set up to speed up processes we carried out every day, it was from here we had the idea to turn this into a platform.
In a stationery shop! We don’t advocate this naming process as it involves a lot of aimless wandering around random venues and locations. Its the classic story of coming up with what you think is the perfect name only to find someone’s got it pointlessly parked. Suddenly Rich shouted TRAY – In Tray – Out Tray – TRAY.IO and we all loved it!
Most people’s inboxes are out of control and it’s costing businesses huge amounts of time and money with employees spending on average 50% of their day in their email. Tray is automating tasks that people shouldn’t have to do. For those who receive a slightly lower volume of email, there are still lots of actions and tasks they are performing manually in email that could be automated to save time, money and stress. In addition Tray also works to improve sales, customer care and engagement, so for business its about both saving money and making more.Tray can deliver time, cost and productivity gains in so many ways. A few examples:A designer who is receiving a number of the same attachments can set up a rule to automatically push them into dropbox and choose how they are stored.
Smarter out of office replies can ensure new enquiries are passed on to the correct people and customers engaged with immediately rather than receiving “sorry i’m on a beach”.
Pushing links into your “read it later app” can make your commute to work a lot more productive.
This list can go on for a long long time….
Being on an accelerator definitely helped us to access people we otherwise would have struggled to get access to. On the flip side when you are meeting so many people its so important to stay focussed on your product and not let the whole team be pulled all over the place.
We have loved being able to speak to Joel and the team at bufferapp. The way they’ve managed their product development and been so engaged with their user base has been awesome. We also had some really great advice from Blottr.com CEO Adam Baker. When you’re starting out it’s so key to have people with experience around you.
It’s all about pushing on with our beta, opening up to more and more users and just product, product, product. There’s massive excitement around what we are doing so its an awesome place to be.
