About ActiveInbox
Contact Us - We Like to Talk!
Support Questions:
We spend most of our time at the Community Forum
(It is very open and your question may already be answered)
You can also reach the team at support@activeinboxhq.com
- Sales Questions: sales@activeinboxhq.com
- Blog: http://www.activeinboxhq.com/blog/
(You can subscribe to this by email, and we love to hear your comments) - Twitter: @ActiveInbox
We are a small company with BIG service =)
What do you get when you have a small, down to earth team whose entire sense of pride & satisfaction comes from their customer's success? A direct line to the people making the product and the decisions!
We do service very publicly
We aim to do all our support in the open via the community forum, as it dramatically increases the number of people we can help with a small team, by cutting down on repetition (we heartily recommend it!). It also holds us to account as there is no hiding from people's problems - any dirty laundry is there for all to see!
Of course, we are also available by email, and we watch Twitter and the blog comments for feedback to catch the widest understanding of how people are using ActiveInbox.
And with humility
We believe in a transparent, honest, no bullshit approach to what we do and say. In our early days we certainly made mistakes with individual ActiveInbox releases, and we keenly felt the impact those mistakes made on your busy lives. Our pledge is that when something arises, we are committed to keeping you informed, getting it fixed, and tweaking our processes to stop it happening again.
For you
We are in this for the long haul. We have been going for nearly 5 years, we are profitable and the challenge for us in email is huge(ly enticing!). We do not have investors, we only serve you and will continue to grow and support you for as long as ActiveInbox fits into your life.
We believe in flow
Andy is an ardent fan of Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology, and especially its emphasis on flow.
The background notion is that modern psychology is focused on fixing people's problems, and there is very little dedicated to helping people be all they can be. Seligman and his associates at UPenn devised a framework for escaping 'learned helplessness' that breaks up our positive state of mind into 1) short term (and short lasting) fun - achievements, purchases, events with friends, etc.; 2) flow - being so good at what you choose to do that time is never felt; 3) higher meaning - something personal to you that dictates what you have flow for.
ActiveInbox's humble goal is to bring us just one step closer to achieving it; essentially making email - normally the great interupter and antithesis of flow - so well controlled and efficient that email blends into and amplifies our work.
ActiveInbox follows a fresh vision for email
At the heart of ActiveInbox is a new metaphor for email: emails are not a random exchange of letters, but a manageable flow of tasks.
We love the big ideas! As email is used by every knowledge worker on the planet, and there exists a little friction for every person an email passes through, if each person can grease their inbox to be a little more efficient then the flow of work between people, and therefore around the world, will be vastly more efficient.
We give Plus away (when we can!)
It's a small gesture in the grand scheme of things, but if we can help charities even a little bit by smoothing out email control for individuals and teams, it would be an honour to do so.
And we also give Plus accounts to anyone who is happy to write a review, as we need both your help AND your honest feedback (there's no pressure for false praise either - you can be as kind or as mean as you wish, it all really helps!).
The only caveat is that we're a tiny team and we want to GROW so we can do ever more awesome and exciting things! And that means bringing money in. So please, only ask for a free version if you have a really true need (registered charities are very welcome!).
We have grown from humble origins ...
For three long and often lonely years, Andy slowly tended ActiveInbox while it found its place in the lives of a small group of fans.
GTDGmail v1, as it was known before several mad tussles with corporate lawyers, started in 2006 as a simple open source experiment to use GTD® to create a cheap customer support ticketing system in Gmail. Call Andy naive (he was!) but he slipped it into the public domain without thinking it would go anywhere... boy was he wrong! Within the first year it had appeared in tech magazines, received tremendously kind letters from early adopters and above all else, found a community who gave their thoughts, their requests and over $20,000 in donations to keep the lights on. Without them none of this would be here, so thank you one & all :)
Their influence led to us sensing that, beneath the dusty exterior of a donationware product, we'd struck productivity oil. So in 2009 we decided to polish up GTDInbox, transform it into ActiveInbox, and as a team go full time with the aim of taking the nucleus of the idea to a wider audience and increasing the value of the features.
... And we are all part of a bigger movement
ActiveInbox continually experiments, innovates and otherwise contributes to the global efforts to improve email (and more broadly, personal management). We work alongside GTD®, productivity blogs and the rash of innovative email plugins that have sprung up in the last few years.
We would love for you to get involved too, your ideas and feedback make all the difference to the product we produce. You are always welcome to come and share your thoughts in the Community Forum.
Press Resources
Logo
Screenshots
Please take whatever you need from the Tour page.
Video
The V3 Overview gives a great introduction to the concepts.
Use us - we are very happy to help
If you want any screenshots, background, icons, interviews or a light hearted chat, just say hi -> andym@activeinboxhq.com.
Do you also use ActiveInbox?
ActiveInbox should be particularly useful for journalists, who often have a high inflow of emails - many of which aren't immediately useful, but may become so in the future (e.g. as part of a story) - and a need to nurture their relationships with contacts. If ActiveInbox can help you better - let us know!
Tell us what you write!
If you feature us, let us know: andym@activeinboxhq.com, we'd love to share it here (and if it's particularly insightful, on the blog). See existing Buzz.
The Team
Andy Mitchell - maker of lovely products
I take care of day to day improvements and talking to you all to understand what you need, and if things ever go wrong I'm the one you can shout at! I believe - and every single day we push ActiveInbox closer to this ideal - that the most beautiful software in the world is that which helps you achieve a true sense of flow in what you're doing.
Prior experience includes founding a couple of formative startups and a stint as a Nepalese rickshaw driver.
You can reach me any time at andym@activeinboxhq.com.
Pete Lambert - designer of lovely products
Pete tries his best to make things look pretty, splitting his time between drawing pretty pictures and making them work on the internets.
Prior to working on ActiveInbox Pete slept most nights. He also designed and built websites and UIs for web apps.
Contributors
Stephen Augenstein
Stephen came along during the development of 2.1 and essentially - not to mention completely off his own back - gave us a far more robust and efficient framework for interacting with Gmail. Quite simply, without Stephen, ActiveInbox would not be on the confident path it enjoys today.
Rob Mientjes
Rob is our Dutch representative, and is the free-wheeling creative we call upon when we need some stellar graphic work. Amongst other distinctions, he created our logo.
Mike Crowe
Mike is an avid ActiveInbox user and wanted to help enhance ActiveInbox by integrating with Prism. In his spare time, he enjoys learning new languages, and installing software just for the fun of it. During the day, he's an architect, system admin, and programmer for a wireless mobile device company.
Peyton Stafford
Peyton is an another avid ActiveInbox user who used his clarity of thought on his personal workflow to give early feedback on the value of certain features, contributed his twenty years of sales & marketing experience to this website, and engaged the user community with the possibilities of what ActiveInbox could do.