

Zenbox: Bushido Pivots From Cloud Platforms To Customer Data - sgrove
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/y-combinator-backed-bushido-pivots-from-cloud-platforms-to-customer-data/

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amirnathoo
Great pivot Sean: Zenbox has become critical for us in a very short space of
time.

We use it with Stripe, Mailchimp and Salesforce so when we received a support
email we can immediately see which plan the customer is on and the details of
their recent builds. That allows us to provide personalized support faster.

Request: it would be great to be able to color code emails in our support
inbox so we can see which ones are our Go Pro plan customers even before
opening them.

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sgrove
I really like this idea - making sales and support loads skimmable within
gmail with bins of customers based on the data from all your tools.

Love it!

~~~
kerryfalk
Turn it into a desktop app that works with Outlook and flavour of the month
ERP and you just killed Salesforce. Every sales rep, sales manager, and
marketer on the planet would love this.

Great work.

~~~
sgrove
Yeah, a few features around this (Desktop, etc.) would be great. Outlook is an
definite win, we just have to time it right.

~~~
j_s
FYI, the 'Oulook Social Connector' provides a framework already setup for
this, you'd just need to implement a provider.

[http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-
outlook/archive/2010/07/...](http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-
outlook/archive/2010/07/15/developing-a-provider-for-the-outlook-social-
connector-version-1-1.aspx)

~~~
sgrove
I had no idea about that - looks great. Thanks so much for the heads up, seems
like a much faster way to implement Zenbox-for-Outlook.

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ColinHayhurst
Grappling with customer data across multiple SaaS applications is a real pain
point. I've tried quite a few Google Chrome extensions that work with GMail to
help with this problem. None of them survived much more than a few days.

Zenbox by contrast has been useful every day since installing a few weeks ago.
Gmail is an essential tool for me in dealing with customers, so I'm there
every day, often multiple times. So being able to see relevant data in
Mailchimp for example, without leaving Gmail is a good time saver.

Now if could push data to MailChimp directly from Zenbox in Gmail, it would
then go from being a good-to-have to must-have app.

~~~
sgrove
I love this idea - All in due time, heh.

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sgrove
Bushido/Zenbox founder here - happy to discuss what went into this.

Clicky: <http://zenboxapp.com>

Zenbox feedback has been incredible, and we really appreciate everyone who's
helped us out. That includes many, many people on hn. And, of course feedback
welcome!

~~~
latortuga
I have multiple Stripe accounts for different products that my business sells
- is there any way to allow connecting multiple Stripe accounts to one zenbox?

Also it seems to simply not be working. Your demo worked great but I installed
the Chrome extension and I get no pop ups on the example email page or in the
welcome email you sent me (after running the curl command and getting a
Customer created message). I'm on Chromium on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit.

~~~
sgrove
No support for multiple Stripe accounts for our MVP, but it's easily something
we can accomodate - the UI would be the most difficult part. I'll reach out to
the Stripe folks and see how their OAuth support would be for this.

I'll follow up by email for the issue right now.

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swampthing
This is so killer... one of those "why doesn't this already exist" ideas and
great execution (been using it for a while now). A real game-changer with
regards to traditional CRM, which I've always hated.. Congrats to the team on
launching!

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JofArnold
I know Sean so I'm not without bias but that looks very useful; I feel this
pain daily as our relationships with our users are split over multiple
platforms and interacting with them requires an epic memory.

Great move, guys - we will be using it.

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anandkulkarni
We've been using this for a while and we love it. It solved some major
compatibility issues for us when we were all using different CRM tools. Can't
wait to see how it expands!

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coopr
Wishery, my previous startup, was trying to solve most of the same problems
that Zenbox is tackling - and they are doing an amazing job. Congrats on the
pivot!

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sgdesign
I think Zenbox is part of a trend of aggregating and consolidating data. It's
crazy how much information is duplicated and dispersed between all the
services we use, so I think it's great that some companies are starting to
bring everything together like this.

I'm curious to see where Zenbox will go, and hope I'll able to help them get
there!

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PStamatiou
Congrats guys! Sean gave us a demo of this at the last Stripe Hackathon..
definitely cool stuff.

~~~
sgrove
Akshay of Picplum gave us really amazing advice. After listening to him (and
furiously taking notes), it was no wonder that Picplum was such a joy to use.

Thanks for the help guys!

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Robin_Message
Isn't synchronicity in inventions amazing? I'm actually working on something
similar at <https://unifyo.com>, so it's exciting to see someone else's take
on the problem.

We're focusing more on the team side of things, to help people to discover
knowledge within organisations - so with Unifyo you can see what messages
anyone in your team have exchanged with a contact. We're also working on
closer integration with CRMs as that's where companies have this data already.

Anyway, may the best team win! Good luck to Bushido and congratulations on the
launch guys.

~~~
sgrove
Unifyo looks great - impressive design. Looking forward to seeing how you guys
progress. Might be worth a chat sometime, my emails in my profile.

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BryanB55
This is my first time hearing about Zenbox but wouldn't something like zendesk
or desk.com be able to accomplish the same thing if not better? I think I'd
rather use a helpdesk for this than gmail.

[edit] I guess there are some things like stripe integration that may not work
with a help desk. We actually use WHMCS.com for a saas and service/design
business and it works incredibly well. I think a lot of people overlook it. I
may write up a blog post soon on how we use it as a crm/help desk/billing
system.

~~~
sgrove
Zenbox just sits on top of all of your existing tools. You never give anything
up or change your behaviors in order to use it; we just make your existing
behavior must more efficient.

We actually work alongside Desk.com and Zendesk (and have integrations with
both!).

We tie together everything together and bring it with you wherever you are -
your blog, internal dashboard, email, etc. WHMCS is likely something we would
end up integrating with - you still use it for what it's best at, and Zenbox
shows all the info to you alongside all your other tools.

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pbiggar
Loving this. I just signed up and can see our Stripe data about customers when
they contact us. We're going to add custom data soon.

Feature request: Support for intercom.io.

~~~
sgrove
Thanks for the kind words!

We're big fans of Intercom and the team. I'll look into adding them as an
integration.

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Gaussian
We're stoked to get this going and dialed in with Stripe and some of own
customer service controls (free deals, unique discounts to single customers,
unsubscribers, etc.).

This addressed a sharp need for a lot of us--and there's little better than
doing that in a startup.

Good luck, Sean.

