Write That Name is a useful application that automatically updates contacts in the Gmail address book. It recognizes the e-mail signatures, extracts and saves the information. It not only saves time but also helps in maintaining an updated and definite record. It is a great tool specially for those who gets tons of e-mail a day and spends even more time in updating their address books.Registering with Write That Name is very simple. You just need to sign up with them providing your e-mail address and rest of the tasks are their's. You can enable the service for each of you e-mail addresses. I understand the concept of this start-up but had some questions in mind. Then what? I contacted its founder Philippe Laval for a small interview and he has been very kind to spare some time for that. Catch it below:
Philippe, please introduce yourself to E-junkies.
Hi, my name’s Philippe Laval, I founded Kwaga two years ago with a simple idea in mind: help email users truly benefit from business data nested in the messages they receive. To do so, I leverage the experience I have in semantic technologies and actually strengthen it with a team of NLP (natural language processing) experts who have been enthusiastic about my idea. We’re now 10 people fully dedicated to make the email the productivity tool it once used to be. :-)
Well, WriteThat.Name is a perfect illustration of my goal: its keeps your address book up-to-date automatically!
Basically we recognize the signatures in the email you receive and either we create the contact when it isn't in your address book or we update the existing one with a new mobile number, for instance.
Sure, I got tired of searching in my mail account for the number to call from the can every time I was late. I thought there must be a way to automate this, and, voila, WriteThat.Name was born.
1) peace of mind - want to call one of your contacts while on the go? No problem: his/her contact details are available on your address book
2) peace of mind - remember that email you receive about Daryl’s new phone number? it’s already added to his contact details
3) peace of mind - we NEVER delete any information from your address book
I read WriteThat.Name's review on Killer Startups where they have raised a questions if 'WriteThat.Name' is worth its price tag. What do you have to say about it?
$20 box seems really low compared to the time spend searching for the right contact info. Compared this to the price of a virtual assistant: for $20 you can have a virtual assistant for one hour or WriteThat.Name for a full year. However, if you still think it’s too expensive, just refer your friends to us and we’ll give you a full month for every referral that signs-up to WriteThat.Name.
What was the major difficulty during the pre-launch phase of WriteThat.Name?
Getting the semantic just right so that it never gives you a bad number.
Share the best incident that you encountered on this journey from conceiving the idea till present.
Ah! excellent question! Creating a startup and working on the NEXT-BIG product is a fancy journey. I’d say that the worst thing is when you lose your focus, listening to external people’s advice. WriteThat.Name was the original idea I had when I created Kwaga. It took me 2 years and 4 other products to be developed and launched to finally do it. Mainly because external people didn’t believe it was an actual killer-product :-)But to be quite honest, it’s probably the journey that makes you stronger!
What methods you mostly rely on, for promoting your product?
Word-of-mouth and referrals.
What is your vision for 'WriteThat.Name' as a whole?
You deserve an email assistant.
Since you've recently started up your venture, one can look up to you for the best advice. What message do you have for them?
Philippe, thanks for sparing time to enlighten us with the concept of WriteThat.Name. It is a very useful application and I am sure it has a long way to go.
Check out WriteThat.Name.
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