One inbox, several staff: A startup's solution to managing multiple e-mails

Hiver looks to expand overseas even as its presence in India remains minimal

US-based rental property management firm Vacasa used Google groups to manage its support e-mails but soon started facing difficulty in establishing who had to start working on an e-mail when it arrived. 

With help from Hiver, the firm turned its support@e-mail account into a shared inbox right inside Gmail. Without the hassle of switching between accounts, the firm could assign e-mails and with better transparency and ease. Bengaluru-based Hiver, a shared inbox management solution, two weeks back raised $4 million in Series A round of funding from Kalaari Capital and Kae Capital. 

Built for Google suit users, Hiver helps businesses manage shared inboxes like support@ or sales@ from their Gmail account. Founded by Niraj Ranjan Rout and Nitesh Nandy in 2011, the firm currently has over 1,000 customers across 30 countries and is used by the likes of Harvard University, Shutterstock and Pinterest.

Concept 

Hiver, a SaaS (software as a service) platform, adds a host of features to an organisation's Gmail inbox that interconnects all the employees to let them see what each of them is working on. 

The start-up offers works as a Google Chrome extension that uses automation to categorise e-mails. The concept is not new as Front has been a leading player in the field and caters for over 3,500 companies, including Shopify and Dropbox. Founded in 2013, Front offers several more features than Hiver.

Through SaaS technology like this, companies can get an overall analysis of who did what, the response time taken to reply to e-mails, and whether it needs to hire more people, among others. 

Opportunity 

Of the 1,100 firms that Hiver serves, it has less than 10 clients in India. Over 90 per cent of its customers are in the United States, followed by Europe and Australia.

"In India, managers try to make do with what they have and firms are miles away for paying for an additional service," said co-founder Niraj Ranjan Rout, adding that work sentiment is not the same for foreign firms. 

“People abroad take out the time to do self-search for services like ours. They are more self-driven,” added Rout. 

Therefore, while the firm has an opportunity to expand overseas, the scope of gaining popularity in India is minimal. 

Besides Front, the firm is facing neck-and-neck competition from Frontapp and other established helpdesk tools like Freshdesk, Zendesk and Helpscout. Since Hiver is limited to Gmail, which has 1.4 billion users as of April 2018, it has a predefined customer base.

Revenue and road ahead 

Offering plans at a starting range of $20-$22 per person, the bootstrapped company (until recently) has been profitable since inception. 

Run by a team of 50 employees, Hiver plans to rope in more firms without any advertisement and is looking to grow 100 per cent in the next five-six years with an estimated revenue of $100 million. The company pegs the total opportunity in the SaaS business at $1 billion.

Puneet Kumar

Vice President, Nexus Venture Partners

Expert Take

Ineffective marketing,  the biggest challenge for Indian SaaS firms

The Indian SaaS ecosystem is growing rapidly as the country has a great engineering talent pool to build globally compelling SaaS products. The most difficult part of a SaaS company’s journey is getting to product/market fit as more than 80 per cent of companies die before getting to it.

Hiver has done a great job to get to product/market fit in the last 12 months through rapid iteration. Indian SaaS companies inherently have a significant cost advantage — the cost of developing a product in India is at least 65 per cent cheaper. The biggest challenge I have seen in Indian SaaS companies is that despite building compelling products, they are not effective in marketing and selling those products in the global markets. 
Silicon Valley companies such as Intercom have been exceptional at marketing and creating pull for their products.

After achieving product/market fit, Hiver still has to go a long way to make their go-to-market strategy world class and truly scale the company in the years to come.