While no one likes to advertise it, most of the successful companies are not successful because of their original idea, but because they were able to iterate and transform that idea into something that really resonated with customers. MangoSpring is no exception.

MangoSpring was founded in early 2007 based on the realization there wasn’t any good tool, besides email, to communicate and collaborate in teams/groups. Email (and by definition Exchange, Lotus Notes etc.), being a closed system, has some fatal flaws that make it a very inefficient choice for collaborating in teams/groups with colleagues. By some estimates approx. 42% of our daily time at work is spent reading/writing email.

In the early days of MangoSpring, we wanted to avoid the email glut and overcome some of the very basic collaboration problems with email by building a shared to-do-list and notes product called TaskBin. TaskBin  made it easy for our own team to share their tasks list, assign tasks to each other etc.. so that we were all on the same page, working efficiently, without requiring status meetings and status reports etc.

A month or two later we made this team collaboration tool available as a free product for anyone to use. To our surprise, in the first couple of weeks itself we had over 250 businesses and groups sign up (no advertising, no blogger outreach, no social media marketing etc.). We saw this as the first validation that there was a “real” need for a tool-set that allowed knowledge workers to collaborate better, especially in companies that are dispersed across geographies and time-zones (collaboration 1.0).

The next test for us was to see if people would pay for TaskBin. We did a survey of our member base and found that most were reluctant to pay.  When we pressed for a reason, it was most often reported that they wanted feature “XYZ” before they would consider paying for it.  So, that made us realize that although users found the tool valuable, we hadn’t built enough value for customers to pay for…which was consistent with our internal thinking.

Inspired by the success of TaskBin (now 13,600+ businesses and groups) and feedback from TaskBin customers, we set out to build a suite of collaboration and real-time communication tools that promoted “open, transparent and efficient communication” between knowledge workers at a company. Built on concepts that were fundamental to TaskBin (open communication and effortless sharing), MangoApps is that suite!

Internally, we have been using MangoApps for over 6 months now and have seen our email usage drop by 80-85% (we like to call MangoSpring an e-mail free zone).  We have also seen employee engagement increase by leaps and bounds, and awareness and co-ordination across time-zones improve dramatically.  As a company, we don’t have any status reports or status meetings, yet everyone is on the same page (35+ people located in two opposite time-zones).  Most of team members in Seattle and Pune have never met each other before, but they all feel like they know each other really well (thanks to the social communication paradigm of Engage). We as a team are more productive now than we have ever been, and I guess that’s because we don’t have to spend all our time doing e-mails or status reports/meetings (collaboration 2.0).

Even with the twist and turns of a severe recession,  we have stayed true to our vision and mission for the company. Here is our vision and mission statement from 2007:

Our Vision:

“The perfect communication service will anticipate what we want to say, who we want to say it to and how we want to say it. Based on the context of these interactions it will allow us to inform, socially connect, entertain, and organize for life-time usage. It will enable this communication, seamlessly and instantly, across mediums and technologies with 100% reliability and an easy to use interface”

Our Mission:

MangoSpring’s mission is to be THE way groups of people around the world effectively communicate across technologies and mediums. It is our goal that by the end of 201X*, we will be universally recognized as the BMW (innovation and quality) of our chosen space – group communication & socialization – and will have a global user-base that will rival Adobe’s Acrobat Reader.

We are very proud of where we started (MangoTasks – collaboration 1.0) and how far we have come (MangoApps – collaboration 2.0) and are even more excited about where we are going (MangoApps – collaboration 3.0).

A big thank you to all of our customers, partners and supporters for helping us get this far. I know we couldn’t have produced MangoApps without your input, support and guidance. As we start to embark on defining what MangoApps – collaboration 3.0 means, I am counting on your continued support and am excited about the opportunity to listen to new voices.

If you haven’t tried out MangoApps yet, give it a try (it’s free to try).  It will be time well spent!  I am confident that MangoApps can bring true change to the way you communicate and collaborate within your company / team / departments and make it much more efficient and effortless.

Thanks.

*(Our timing was a bit off and hence the (X) in 201X. Now that we have a firmer grasp of where we are headed, we are working on tweaking the mission a bit. Won’t be surprised if we are off again on timing!)