How to Differentiate Your SaaS Against the 800 Pound Gorilla
Olof Mathe is the co-founder and CEO of MixMax, a productivity tool for Gmail. MixMax lets you track emails, set up meetings, save time with email templates, and schedule emails to be sent later.
In 2011, Chanpory Rith was a UX designer working at Google. His job was to make the Gmail iOS app better. He proposed adding features like scheduling and email tracking to make Gmail more useful for businesses. But those features just weren't a priority for Gmail's broader user base.
Chanpory loved his job but hated the killer 2-hour commute. Eventually, he left Google and joined a local startup. That's where he met two guys who would later become his co-founders. Olof Mathe was a product manager and Brad Vogel was an engineer.
All three considered themselves communication geeks'. They would often talk about how difficult some of their tools were and brainstormed how to make better communication tools. And that's when Chanpory told them about the idea he'd had years ago to make email for work' better.
There was just one BIG problem. The email market was dominated by Gmail. And Google already had a consumer and a business version of Gmail. How could they possibly compete with Google?
They realized that the answer wasn't to compete with Google but to build a product that would make Gmail better. And that's what they set out to do with MixMax.
And their strategy paid off. In 5 years since they launched, they've grown MixMax to over 10,000 customers and generate around $5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Book Recommendation
- “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers” by Ben Horowitz