TheUnblocker.Com

1. With the rise of distributed teams, the nature of collaboration has evolved from tapping one another on the shoulder to 'human in the loop' systems where the digital workers have multiple 'inboxes', each with threads, channels, chats, etc.

This has given rise to perpetually interrupted and overburdened knowledge workers, which leads to a decline in collaborative engagement, a detriment to distributed and diverse teams.

2. Unblocker let's users understand how they spend their time in order to use it more wisely. Unblocker also let's users act on missed tasks and follow ups across all their communication, from a unified queue.

3. Employee engagement is one of the largest executive concerns about distributed teams. By enabling all knowledge workers to track their engagement and sense making, distributed work will become more effective, which will bring underserved populations into the digital workforce.

Atlasssian estimates that there are 800 million knowledge workers. This continues to increase, as barriers to joining the knowledge workforce are reduced due to digitization.

Considered along side the fact that >50% of the world population uses email, it's clear that the topics of collaborative engagement and productivity are high on the priority list for companies with digital workforces.

With these priorities for a globally flourishing digital workforce in mind, there are many ways to view the factors that contribute to the problems of disengagement and wasted / ineffective time. I'll present perspective here, the view from a motivated digital worker.

This person is limited by the fact that they are often working as part of 'human in the loop' processes, but (obviously) with a human brain, which can only retain ~7 items in working memory. The other issue is that the applications they are using are designed to siphon as much of their attention as possible.

This leads to digital workers burning out, disengaged, dropping projects, and missing deadlines. For members of underserved populations that are joining the digital workforce, it can be especially hard learn the tacit skills of digital collaboration.

Unblocker exists to serve digital knowledge workers and diverse teams of collaborators.

We are currently working with a group of beta testers to deeply understand their workflow and serve them reminders and intelligence that help them accomplish more and use their time as effectively as possible.

Unblocker delivers workflow intelligence to our users, who are digitally native knowledge workers, so they can be more effective with their time.  

Unblocker also enables users to act on their missed tasks and follow ups, across all conversations, from a unified queue.

A user connects their Unblocker account to their various chat, email, meeting, and collaboration platforms via an encrypted oAuth / API connection.

Using the real time data from these API, the system processes the meta data to derive the workflow intelligence and uses natural language processing to identify missed tasks and follow ups.

As far as we know, we're the only product that has unified all collaboration tools with natural language for the purpose of delivering workflow intelligence and optimization.

This has only become possible recently, given developments in semantic based machine learning and the trend towards distributed workforces.

The activities are the programmatic and semantic processing of how a digital knowledge worker engages with their tools and team.

The outputs are work analytics and intelligence as well as a a workers missed tasks and follow ups.

The short term term outcome is reducing the time between sense and response in day to day collaboration.

The medium term outcome that supports this is a deeper understanding of how to spend one's time effectively and how to block interruptions in order to do deep and focused work

The long term outcome of using Unblocker is more productive and engaged digital knowledge worker.

1. We currently have 100 beta users

2. We'd like to be serving 10,000 users within one year

3. We'd like to be serving 1,000,000 users within five years

Other than the adoption goals, which are stated in the last question, we will judge success based on some of the software growth metrics as well as qualified feedback and testimonials.

In terms of metrics, we aim to have our daily active users divided by monthly active users (DAU / MAU) be >60% and net expansion inside companies be >150%. If we're able to achieve these metrics, we will be well on our way to having a transformational impact on millions of members of the digital workforce. 

(1) We're assuming that the digital workforce is moving towards a scenario where almost everyone will become a 'power user' of the systems and tools they use. If we're wrong about this core assumption about the nature of knowledge work, that will impede our ability to provide value.

(2) Given the increase in data breaches, companies are becoming more restrictive to using vendors that require connections to internal data.

(1) An incumbent in the space could start to directly compete with us.

(1) We will continue to build software that's delightful to use and elegant in design that doesn't require a user do any upfront work (like adding tasks or configuring their account) in oder to get value from the product immediately.

(2) The data architecture that underlies Unblocker follows a "Zero Trust" principles, meaning that we are not retaining any extra data. We do not store a copy of all our user's conversations. This will help to open doors at data security minded companies.

(3) Not much we can do to prevent this, other then building as fast and thoughtfully as possible!

We have users in the USA!

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We're currently bootstrapping, with a team of 2 people.

David, CEO, was on the founding team of a SaaS company that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2018.

Chris C, CTO, has built dozens of web applications used by millions of people world wide.

Chris and David have been friends for years and students of how digital knowledge workers operate for years (via previous startup endeavorers they've worked one. Also, they created http://galactictick.com/ together!

We have ~100 beta users. Here's a selection of the organizations these users work at:

http://zoom.us/
https://www.klaviyo.com/
https://www.toptal.com/
https://www.10xmanagement.com/
https://www.thedopple.com/
http://projectvesta.org/

We have a B2B2C freemium model focused on "land and expand", which means that individuals inside of companies and their colleges start using Unblocker and then bring their teams on to the software because it makes it better as each user signs up (more data to compare).

The key users and beneficiaries inside of companies are people who have 'cross functional' roles and are having to do lots of coordinating and communicating as well as the people who manage cross functional teams.

We offer our product on a freemium SaaS basis.

With the free tier (Basic, $0/month) users get to the following:

• Platform access to act on missed tasks and follow ups
• Personal Workflow Intelligence
• Team Workflow Intelligence (for teams up to 5 people)
• Unlimited Integrations
• 1 month of of historical data 

With the paid tier (Pro, $17.99 user/month or $179.88 user/year) users get the following:

• All the benefits of Basic
• Team Workflow Intelligence (Unlimited team size)
• Unlimited Historical
• Data API Access & Data Export
• SAML-based Single Sign On

One day (hopefully soon) we'd like to integrate into ServiceNow's product suite. The type of data that we're capturing for companies and users would fit really well when plugged into ServiceNow's human capital management offerings.

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We'd like to partner with enterprises that have large remote workforces, with a near term focus on companies that use Slack and the Google Apps tech stack.