DokDok Supercharges Your Email Inbox

Yesterday, DokDok announced their first venture funding from Real Ventures. Prior to that DokDok was funded primarily through IRAP. The company was founded by Bruno Morency in 2008, but serious development started in Spring 2009. DokDok has gone through a lot of changes since then. In November 2008 there was a working proof-of-concept built on Thunderbird. The first build made available to early users was a desktop app, and in hindsight Bruno notes that it’s, “about as similar to our current product as a Neaderthal to modern man!”

Bruno identifies two major pivots for the company. The first one was in early 2010. Their focus was on building a document collaboration tool based on email attachments. A key feature was the ability to track modifications on local copies of attachments. If you attached a document to an email than later made changes to that document, it would trigger notifications to the other people who now had an outdated version. Bruno notes, “It seemed like an amazing idea but in practice it was pretty cumbersome and not that useful.”

DokDok dropped that effort and went to build something on the Google Apps Marketplace using the new Gmail contextual gadget. The focus at that point shifted to providing users with a personal tool for attachment versioning and comparison. And that’s where the company’s strategy is right now.

Bruno is now focused on building a public email API. For their Google Apps gadget they needed to extract data stuck deep in users’ email accounts. “IMAP is good if you want to build an email client, it’s hell if you want to do anything interesting based on the large quantity of information you have in your mailbox,” said Bruno. So they build their own REST API on top of IMAP and they’re now focused on making that API available to other developers. Bruno says, “It makes it amazingly easy to do things like automatically connecting threads and attachments to customers in your CRM or do more funky things like mapping your relationships based on email conversations.” They have some developers using the API now, and hope to make announcements soon.

DokDok’s vision is to empower developers to leverage email instead of trying to provide a better alternative for it. And as much as the media claims that “email is dead” it’s still the #1 tool used for communication.

The company is at an interesting stage. Having been around for 2+ years and having just received their first venture funding, a lot is going to happen quickly for DokDok. Looking back, we asked Bruno about lessons learned. He had two things to share:

(1) Don’t isolate yourself; and (2) Usability testing is very important and there’s no reason not to do it. As soon as Dominik joined me (first DokDok employee), we moved into an office at 2020 University with Syntenic. This has turned into what’s now RPM at 420 Guy. It’s hard to isolate one particular reason why but I know being in that office made a huge difference and increased the likelihood of success.

It also means getting involved in the local community. Fact is, chances of success for a startup are very low. Connecting with the local community will increase those chances a bit. More importantly, you’ll connect with people and discover other projects you can join when you eventually come to terms with the fact that yours isn’t going anywhere.

As for usability testing, I don’t care if the designer thinks what they did is the most intuitive UI ever. What do random users think? Get a couple people in front of your website or app, ask them to do a couple actions then look, listen and shut-up. You’ll learn a lot and that’s best way to refine user experience past initial drafts. The monthly usability fix event at Bolidea is great for that.

It hasn’t been an easy road for DokDok. Bruno says, “The toughest thing [so far] was to slowly but surely get people to listen and care about what we did … and conversely, us finding something people would listen and care about.”

And what about the fundraising experience and use of IRAP? Did a lack of investment earlier hamper DokDok?

Bruno: Angel or venture investment is often compared to rocket fuel that will accelerate whatever you’re doing now. Had we put such fuel in our previous iterations, we’d have probably crashed into a brick wall leaving few survivors Joking aside, IRAP and revenues from consulting contracts were a very good way to fund DokDok up to now and I’m very happy that’s what we did.

IRAP is a really good program. It’s certainly more difficult to get but it’s much better suited for startups than SRED. First, you know if and how much help you’re getting before the project starts. Then you claim their contribution on a monthly basis. That’s huge when you can’t pay full salaries for a year like you need to do to claim SRED credits on them.

As for SRED, I think the premise is good. There is a need for an incentive for companies to take on “risky” R&D projects regardless of Angel/VC funding. That being said I’ve seen too many companies with a business model that depended on offloading the biggest part of their developer’s salaries to the government year after year through debatable SRED claims. That’s a problem.

Maybe there should be a time-limit on eligibility for these credits. If after a few years, your company can’t generate enough cash to operate and innovate on its own, it’s not a business. Public funds shouldn’t be used to keep it from dying. That company probably employs a couple talented people and SRED credits getting cut could be the trigger they need to move to other companies with more potential.

Number one piece of advice for people thinking about launching a startup?

Bruno: Turning your idea into a product is hard. Turning that product into a business is even harder. No amount of daydreaming while sitting in a cube at your day job will get you any closer to that objective. Reduce your personal spending, get a part-time contract that will give you just enough to cover those bills then get out, start meeting people, ship something or join another startup.

So what’s ahead for the next 6 months?

Bruno: A year ago, many people responded to our pitch saying “email is dead”. That doesn’t happen anymore. We’re about to see an explosing of innovation both in email clients and in complementary apps leveraging email data. We’ll be hard at work dramatically accelerating the latter.

We’re also looking to add two more persons to our team DokDok, one for development and one for marketing. Anyone interested can contact me directly bruno@dokdok.com.

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