
Show HN: Streak.com - Do sales, support and bug tracking all inside Gmail - alooPotato
http://www.streak.com
======
donpark
Nicely done. Two concerns: 1) exposure to breakage when Gmail changes, 2)
potential introduction of protection against invasive integration.

Google has three options: 1) turn a blind eye, 2) block deep integration (same
game AOL played with AIM), or 3) introduce client-side integration API. #1 is
temporary. #2 is nightmare for Streak. #3 requires strategy change by Google.

[update] Rapport doesn't have this problem because they are using Outlook PIA
to work directly with Outlook object model.

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andrewljohnson
This is great timing! We just hired a customer support person this week, and
we started using HelpScout.net, but we aren't finding that it's very polished.

We're going to give Streak a shot, and hopefully give you some good feedback.

P.S. You are missing a question mark on your home page: "Want to know where
the customer is in the sales pipeline."

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
OH please tell us how it turns out. It's one thing for me to take a stroll
through myself and another thing for someone with a running business to
actually try it out with real data and clients and use cases. This looks
simple, and I LOVE simple. I'd rather work with something simple and a few
features than something complex with a lot of features. Features are useless
if I'm afraid of them or have to educate myself to learn them.

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smilliken
We've been using Streak to help with hiring, fundraising, and business
development at MixRank. It works really well. I'd highly recommend it to
anyone that needs to stay on top of their email.

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toblender
I've been trying to manage customers with emails for a while. What a
nightmare. This looks like a great product. But, I'm not sure I'm willing to
share all my emails.

I think a good work around would be to create a gmail account specifically for
handling client stuff. Or you guys could offer email address which are already
gmail integrated.

Just some notes. Great product, props from Canada :D

~~~
alooPotato
Using streak in a shared gmail account is pretty popular and works great.

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PaulYoder
Exactly what I was looking for!

But please, please start charging for your product. I don't want this product
to disappear in a year when you run out of funding and still don't have a
sustainable business model.

~~~
alooPotato
Taking a quick poll here - how much would everyone be willing to pay for this?

~~~
vineet
It would be great to have this free for individuals - so that they can see if
they love it or not. Either make it completely free for them, or free for 2-3
micro-funnels, or free for managing ~250 leads (like highrise).

After that it would be ideal to charge a little ($5/month) for the next 2-3
users, and more for larger teams. Ofcourse, give more features as the team
sizes grow.

Note that your market is larger than a CRM.

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latifnanji
Already got my support and deployments team using Streak and its been an
amazing experience! Constantly adding new features and making our lives
easier.

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rokhayakebe
Finally, it looks like someone nailed it, or at least has a great start. We
want to work inside email, not launch a separate app.

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yurisagalov
Just started using it for our hiring funnel at AeroFS and I already love it.
Well done!

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TomAnthony
This looks extremely cool, and I'm really tempted!

In light of recent things like Path etc. (and without insinuating anything!) -
could you clarify what information is sent via Streak's servers, if any?

~~~
OmarIsmail
In order to use Streak you have to give oauth access to your inbox. We use
that data in order to link you to your emails from within Streak.

Specifically on Streak's servers we store message meta data but no email
contents.

~~~
Sonshii
Security and Trade Secrets are my major concern as well. Meta data could mean
"gmail message ID", but it could also mean "all header info, including message
title & users emailed." Of course, that's in addition to the value of the
additional data (box title, notes, "deal size") that streak is being used for.

Privacy policies are not very comforting on their own... Heck, "everyone" has
one! I might suggest some more details, perhaps on your website, to satisfy
wavering customers. So far there isn't much to make a businessperson feel
comfortable.

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revorad
Looks nice! But I can't watch any of the videos because clicking on the play
button (in the lightbox) closes the lightbox :-) I'm on Safari 5.1.3 on OS X.

~~~
coob
I have the same issue on Safari 5.2 on OS X 10.7

~~~
alooPotato
Apparently the youtube embed object takes a while to load on Safari, we're
looking into it....

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bkruse
I've used google apps/gmail for years, in my large previous organization and
currently in our 100+ organization. Obviously you know this, but this type of
"glue" is great - I'm glad you guys took advantage of this. I am in the market
place daily, there is NOTHING that compares to this so far. I am excited to
see where you take this!

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petenixey
I was literally thinking earlier today that I wish someone would write this
app.

Unfortunately it doesn't play well with Rapportive profiles for me (HD Beach
theme, comfortable sizing) - seems to be some jumping over each other.

I realise it must be very hard making bootstrap GMail addons play with each
other but it would be great to use the two together

~~~
OmarIsmail
We do play nice with Rapportive usually, but ya difficult to test all
different configurations. Will have to troubleshoot that with your specific
settings.

~~~
petenixey
I've also got boomerang in there too. You've got an heroic job on your hands
;)

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Lambent_Cactus
Really really cool.

Minor copy edit on your splash page - there's a 't' on the end of 'messages'
in this section:

Streak Plays Nice Streak never alters any data in your Gmail. No extra labels,
and no moving around your messagest. Streak adds a layer of organization on
top of your email and stores this separately and securely in our own cloud.

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brettpaden
You need chrome 15 or better for the extension to install. If you go go there
and click on the install button without chrome 15, it generates a javascript
exception with no visual or textual clues to the user that is going on. Person
on chat was responsive.

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Jun8
Can you provide some insight as to how this is implemented? Do you use
contextual gadgets?

~~~
OmarIsmail
Contextual gadgets are pretty limited. If you want to get started in Gmail the
best way I recommend is to use James Yu's excellent Gmailr
(<https://github.com/jamesyu/gmailr>). We did some prototyping with that.
Since then we've taken that core code and rewrote 90% of it to fit our needs
and make our own platform.

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xanadohnt
This looks incredibly useful and well designed. I've shown my CEO; perhaps
we'll be incorporating Streak soon. Two copy niggles:

"Streak is great for sales, but did you know you can also use it for: hiring
candidates, handling email support, organizing dealflow, fundraising and
organizing your personal projects."

This is a question - add a question mark to the end (bonus, invented by Dr.
Evil)

"We put indicators right in your inbox to show you which emails have to do
with which deals you are working on."

Awkward / run-on. Try - We added email indicators showing you the association
to the deals on which you are working. (remove the wordy noun modifiers and
prepositional phrases)

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firefoxman1
What a beautiful homepage. Professional and...just beautiful!

Would this be compatible with Fluent.io?

~~~
OmarIsmail
Fluent.io appears to be a different client to Gmail. Right now we only work
with Gmail's webclient.

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asifjamil
nice product. Just out of curiosity, how exactly do you attach your app to
Gmail? The way I imagine it: basically, this is just a big javascript
application which inserts itself inside the gmail view using DOM manipulation?

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harshaw
Looks cool - although my cynical assumption is that this product a) would work
great in demos with a simple number of folders,etc and b) will be bitch to
maintain given when Google changes the UI or generated code / structure.

Having looked at the gmail generated source there isn't a human generated
component so something trivial like $('#button_bar').appendChild(..) doesn't
work requiring more clever approaches (and perhaps the streak guys are
insanely clever). If I had the time I'd pick apart the extension source to see
how streak works.

~~~
OmarIsmail
Trust me, it took a little while but we've been able to tame the beast known
as Gmail's DOM. We have some pretty sophisticated infrastructure to handle the
different versions and updates to Gmail.

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temphn
Any plans for Salesforce integration? Can you use SF.com as a backend?

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zabeth24
I've used the Beta for a multi-user sales pipeline. Worked wonders!

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tathagatadg
Some dreams come true. Even when you are not hacking on them.

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zerop
Good work, but I think good for Google apps users (only?)....

~~~
alooPotato
co-founder of streak here: streak works with both google apps and non apps
accounts. We've noticed some of our early users using it for non business
purposes as well (task management, event planning, etc).

~~~
mike-cardwell
Exactly how did you "notice" this?

~~~
alooPotato
Our users told us. As we were building features, we'd email our users and ask
them for feedback.

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grok2
Something I've been thinking I should do, but never got round to. Good idea,
will give it a spin. BTW, I was thinking about working on this because a
number of Mortgage Brokers I have interacted with in the past have all been
using gmail and they all seem to be in desperate need of a CRM solution that
integrates with gmail. So, there, a segment for you to target.

BTW, found a typo on the main page -- "messagest".

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chrisfarms
This looks really useful, but some parts of a pipeline I might need external
people (who are probably not using gmail) to action/move items along a
pipeline.

It might be cool if you could generate a URL for a pipeline for someone so
they can collaborate (change statuses/comment) without needing to use gmail.
Although I haven't really thought of all the consequences of this.

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dataisfun
This is fantastic. Glad you guys came along. I was wondering why it took so
freaking long for something like this to show up.

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pastaking
This is awesome! Thanks for the great work.

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aschobel
Login screen is showing an odd domain name, apps.googleuserscontent.com, is
requesting authorization to my account.

    
    
      The site XXXXX.apps.googleusercontent.com is requesting access to your Google Account for the product(s) listed below

~~~
dangrossman
That's a Google domain, and the numbers represent a specific Chrome
extension... in this case, Streak.

~~~
aschobel
I realize it's a Google domain, but not a trusted Google domain.

If you look at do a search for "googleusercontent.com" it shows that it hosted
malware and some other nasty stuff.

    
    
      http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=googleusercontent.com/
    
    

If I'm on streak.com and try to login I would like to be authorizing
Streak.com

~~~
dangrossman
I understand the sentiment, but it can't work that way. What you're
authorizing for access is an anonymous unsigned Chrome extension, not the
website streak.com. If they allowed the extension to define its own name so
that you'd see "streak.com", then you'd see malware masquerading as safe-
sounding names in the authorization dialog.

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jayzee
Amazing work guys. Played with it a bit and looks really intuitive and easy to
use!

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hartcw
Looks impressive so far, I've basically been doing this kind of thing manually
in gmail using labels, for supporting Smart Shooter.

So its free for now whilst in beta, I just might be hooked by the time they
start to charge for it..

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troels
Wow. This is really great. We are just at a point where we consider switching
away from Lighthouse for bug tracking. Do you provide - or plan to provide -
an api, so it's possible to integrate with other systems?

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code_pockets
Congratulations to the streak.com team. This is a great product.

 __*

This brings another point: There is a need for a better business email
application that is as easy to use as Gmail, but is not owned by any of the
big 4 (MS, G, APPL, Y!).

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joshuareeves
Congrats on the launch! I love the UI and set-up process, it's very smooth.

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gee_totes
This looks very promising... I've been looking for a CRM solution for my
company for awhile. Question: is there a way to set up a gmail filter to add
existing client e-mails and contacts into a box?

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tomblomfield
This looks awesome - I'd love more information about how it works in a multi-
user environment.

For example, if 3 guys in my company do sales, how do we prevent everyone
contacting the same leads?

~~~
alooPotato
We don't go into it much on the homepage but we think Streak really does well
here. You can share a sales pipeline to specific people or to your entire
domain and you can assign leads to different team members.

There's a small demo of how sharing works at the end of the bug tracking demo
video.

~~~
Ecio78
and what about multiusers helpdesk?

~~~
alooPotato
We use it internally as a multi-user support tool but have a ton of new
support related features coming.

------
ajju
I use Streak as a "Personal Salesforce". It has been incredibly useful because
it helps me stay on top of 30 different conversations in 5 different contexts.

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halayli
Great product. But I personally prefer to use my inbox for handling mail only
and not get it in the mix of other processes like hiring, bug tracking etc...

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jpdoctor
Given that Google might acquire your company, why would you want to provide it
with 100% of your sales, support and bug tracking information?

~~~
Nitramp
100% of your sales, support, and bug tracking information will be reflected in
the email inbox of your employees.

If you're not hosting your own email servers, all that information is
available to some 3rd party.

These companies have contracts in place preventing them from abusing the
potential information they can gain, and they usually have a lot more to loose
from violating it than what they could gain from cheating like this.

~~~
jpdoctor
> _and they usually have a lot more to loose from violating it than what they
> could gain from cheating like this._

No they don't. That's the problem.

Apparently there are not a lot of folks here who have spent time on the other
side of the acquisition table: They're confusing a gentlemenly game where
people play by the rules with a streetfight.

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pencilcode
signed up, and been loving it! for now no slow downs of gmail. Is there any
way to group boxes together? I created one box per client for some of my
clients thinking i would put each issue in there and then figured out that i
would have to create a box for each issue. so how do i group boxes, eg those
belonging to the same project?

~~~
chrisfarms
Looks like you could create a Pipeline for each project, and then add the
boxes to the project pipeline.

It would be nice if you could save a pipeline setup so you don't have to
recreate the same stages every time you need a new project.

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pagehub
Looks cool, is it just for a single user or does it sync with everyone in your
organisation?

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bretr
This looks awesome, is it a Chrome plugin? Is there only Chrome support?

~~~
OmarIsmail
Right now we only support Chrome.

In the future we'll be in all the major browsers.

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auston
My question is: Are you guys a YC company? Because you should be!

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OoTheNigerian
I am having login problems. I am stuck on step 2.

~~~
alooPotato
If you're having problem, please goto gmail and Streak will ask you to sign in
there.

The usual culprit is third party cookies being disabled - we wrote a help
article here: <http://support.streak.com/customer/portal/articles/386931>

~~~
pbreit
I disabled 3rd party cookies when the whole Google/Safari flap arose recently
and was wondering if I might be missing anything. In this case the app just
doesn't work so that's pretty obvious. I'm wondering if I'm experiencing any
other harder to discern problems?

Are 3rd party cookies really required to deliver this sort of app or is it
just easier? I suppose otherwise session IDs would need to go in the URL or
POST variables.

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instakill
Looks great, but no FF 10 support?

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ramoq
Omar, this is fantastic. You rock

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FreshCode
What is the Streak.com stack?

