As a Xobni user, who runs it constantly, I must say I don't find the product's prospects too great.
Most people I know who use Xobni get it because their Outlook is too old to have full text search. Sure, those graphs of when people email you are nice. So is the sometimes-working extraction of details from sigs. But they're not what you install Xobni for. Full text search is the killer feature.
As time goes on, newer versions of Outlook will be deployed. Outlook 2007 has been around for two years, Outlook 2010 is being released now. Large companies can use the newer products for no additional charge. Once they get round to doing so, Xombi's reason for being goes away.
I have been using it Xobni since it was in beta and most of the time I don't even have to search because of the way it organizes email and attachments. When I do search it is about 20 times better than outlook 2007's built in results and much more usable than windows desktop search 4. It plays much better with outlook than X1 or Google desktop search and frankly Microsoft has had years to make search not suck and they have again and again failed and have lost my trust.
So yeah, Xobni gets my 30 bucks plus much more from my clients. At the prices they are charging I won't think twice to get licenses for entire organizations. It won't even be a blip on most businesses IT budget and I think that's a really good place to be price wise.
EDIT: BTW - the auto complete for email addresses is fantastic and works really well. Have I reached fan boy status yet?
I'd be very surprised if they didn't properly survey their users to calculate the optimal price point. So the answer is because they'll sell more than twice as many copies at $30 as they would at $60.
I think that's slightly naive. The schoolbook graphs of price elasticity show that there's a single maximum, that can be reached simply by walking the curve. It tends not to work that way.
You also have to consider how people react on prices (if you sell the product for $30 in the first 6 months, then start selling it for $60, the first users won't get upset. If you do it the other way around, the loyal beta users who upgraded will feel ripped off).
People also don't tell the truth in surveys. They believe they will buy it at a specific price point, but in reality they don't. In survey mode people may think about what other software products cost, and think what they consider reasonable. When people have to actually make a purchase people have to pick between going to the movies or buying a software license. Wildly different results are to be expected.
I wonder what other people's experiences with surveys are, and how people go about picking a price. It's certainly a fascinating subject.
gizmo, you and the other guys (and girls) on here are all over the exact studies and discussions we had internally with respect to this product - i appreciate the discussion. Pricing and positioning this and future aspects of our business model has been my focus for the past 8 months.
The value of Xobni is built on two pillars: search and relationship management. This offering builds on that first pillar. Future offerings will build on the other pillar. We actually priced this offering below what we think was the optimal ARPU (average revenue per user). We did that for 3 reasons (1) we want a huge % of users on this paid product - upselling to future offerings will be one-click easy (2) we believe paying users are more evangelical (humans justify decisions they've already made) (3) as a business in our stage we believe it is less risky to monetize a larger user group at a lower ARPU than very few users at a higher ARPU
We are optimizing for the 2-5 year revenue scenario (not 6 month scenario) - in the not too distant future Xobni will be launching an enterprise offering, a blackberry application, and other premium offerings. I've been waiting a long time for this stage of building the business.
Assuming there are around 2 million active users (TC mentions a figure of 2 million downloads just last year) of Xobni, assuming a conversion rate of 1%, is 20k users that pay, which is over $500,000 in revenue. Nice change!
IMHO, outlook users would pay, considering Xobni makes their lives easier and the fact that the number of emails are increasing rapidly.
2 million active users? I think the video said 2 million downloads total, which would put the number of active users probably at 20% of that. Given that they have accepted 15 million or so in venture funding, it really is just change to them.
It's been 2 years since Xobni was released, 2 million was just last year, so the total number of downloads are higher. The percentage of active users, IMO, would be higher than 50% initially, then tapering off to say 20%.
> I have grave doubts as to whether users of a mail client will pay $30 for an add-on to improve the indigenous search, no matter how much better it is. People sometimes pay for additional functionality that they deem necessary, especially in specialised industries, but rarely for just an improvement of a built-in function. Witness the sudden death of any software competing with something newly built into an OS, even if it was superior.
I haven't used outlook in a few years, but when I was forced to use it, their search functionality was horrible and never got better. It's even worse if you have lots of mail in archives. I found it faster to just export the whole archive into the general purpose mbox format and use other mail clients to search for stuff. I'm guessing it's not as useful for individuals since they already use GMail or Yahoo Mail, but I'm sure companies who are reliant on Outlook will eat it up. $30 per seat at most companies is chump change when you consider the per seat license of Outlook is $300 and the damn Aeron chair they sit in is $1500.
> I am assuming Xobni offers a lot more than simply search right? If it's only search... what's there to stop Microsoft from building a better built-in search tool for Outlook? I often hear great things about Xobni, but I never got to try it due to I use a Mac. So could someone enlighten me on what else do they offer? Because it seems search is only feature I hear about...
I can't remember the name of the company, but there was another company that created a better search for Outlook, Microsoft bought them out, made the better search crappy again.
So my guess is that Microsoft has no incentive to make search good on desktops. Maybe in the future they'll buy out Xobni and then destroy their product so that Outlook search stays crappy.
EDIT: Why do users keep deleting their posts? that last post was written by Frocer.
I deleted my post because I thought it came across overly negative. I don't want to discourage people or sound like some grumpy douchebag. It's true I have my doubts about the market segment, but don't want to just pour cynicism on everything I see. So I deleted my post, too late!
By the way, Aerons are not the default chair at most companies , and I doubt Outlook costs $300 per seat. Search does suck though; I just didn't think it sucked enough to make it worth the bother. The founder says he's had 2 million downloads, though, so what do I know.
Most people I know who use Xobni get it because their Outlook is too old to have full text search. Sure, those graphs of when people email you are nice. So is the sometimes-working extraction of details from sigs. But they're not what you install Xobni for. Full text search is the killer feature.
As time goes on, newer versions of Outlook will be deployed. Outlook 2007 has been around for two years, Outlook 2010 is being released now. Large companies can use the newer products for no additional charge. Once they get round to doing so, Xombi's reason for being goes away.