What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
What if your inbox actually worked for you?
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Ever wondered why email hasn't fundamentally changed in 20 years? While countless startups have tried to replace email entirely, Gmeilius is taking a refreshingly different approach by enhancing Gmail itself with powerful AI-driven collaboration tools.
Florian's entrepreneurial journey began during his PhD studies when he created a simple Gmail extension to better collaborate on academic papers. What started as a personal productivity hack gained momentum among colleagues, leading him through a Geneva-based incubator and eventually to Y Combinator—a journey that hilariously had him rushing back to San Francisco just two days after his wedding. Through this evolution, Gmeilius transformed from a consumer-focused tool to a B2B solution that addresses Gmail's most significant limitations.
The genius of Gmeilius lies in its seamless integration with Gmail rather than attempting to replace it. By enhancing a platform users already know, they eliminate the adoption barriers that plague new communication tools. Their feature set—shared inboxes, Kanban boards, email automation, and SLA tracking—addresses the collaboration gaps in Gmail's native experience. Most importantly, their AI capabilities are transforming how teams handle email by automatically routing messages, drafting replies, and classifying conversations. As Florian provocatively states, "I really believe that the way we use email is dying," not because email itself is becoming obsolete, but because AI will fundamentally change how we interact with our inboxes.
Ready to transform your relationship with email? Try Gmeilius for yourself and discover how AI can turn your inbox from a source of frustration into a productivity powerhouse. Book an onboarding session with their team to see how their platform can streamline your operations and free your team to focus on what truly matters.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, fascinating topic today, as we talk about the service that everyone loves to hate email and a company looking to revolutionize the email space at Gmailius Florian. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm fine. Thanks, Ivan. Thanks so much for organizing this.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining. I've been a Gmail user for gosh 20 years, through all of the ups and downs, and pretty much the same product it was 20 years ago. Look and feel may be a little different, but before that, maybe introduce yourself as founder and CEO of Gmailius and what was the big idea behind the company?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So actually the company started as a kind of MVP just for myself when I was a PhD student. At the time, I had to exchange a lot with a few different people on the world regarding different papers, different publications, and the fact is that we were mainly exchanging IDs or amendments and everything by email and we were all using Gmail. So the idea came to really create a kind of small extension at the time to really help in terms of productivity, to do stats and collaborate in a better way on Gmail. And actually those people, these friends, told me yeah, that's pretty cool, you should really try to publish that and make it open for everyone to use. So that's how Gmail actually came to birth. We had to be really getting just a tool for myself and a few other people, and then so I was in the UK at the time.
Speaker 2:Then I came back to my hometown, which is Geneva in Switzerland, for personal reasons, and I had these kind of side projects going on with early traction. I had finished my, I completed my PhD, and so I was okay, what now? What's the? What can I do? And I wanted to try the startup journey and really see what I could do there. So I joined Incubator in Geneva, where I was struggling for a few months.
Speaker 2:I did a pre-seed run and just after that I applied to YC because one of our investors told me yeah, but your primary market is in the US, you should try Y Combinator. So we applied there. We got accepted and, funnily enough, so I joined YC. But two days after that I had my wedding, so I applied for like to Switzerland just for 24 hours and then I had to go back to San Francisco. So my wife was really, really happy at the time, as you can imagine. But yeah, everything started like that and then we built, during YC, a product that moved from being a B2C SaaS to be more B2B oriented, and we're trying to streamline email management and email operations for different verticals right inside Gmail.
Speaker 1:So what we offer right now is.
Speaker 2:It's a kind of let's say, if I had to put it simply, it's a kind of AI assistance. We're going to do a lot of different operations, whether it's to draft replies for your emails, sort and classify your emails, or even dispatch emails to specific team members. You can imagine Gmail use as the kind of entity, a genius, that's going to transform Gmail and really make your daily life in your inbox a bit easier.
Speaker 1:Wow. Well, that's certainly the dream. That would be a big boost to my Gmail account, I think. But you decided in the beginning to build Gmailius right into Gmail's DNA. Why Gmail? Why not build a new email server or UX UI?
Speaker 2:That's a very good question. So at the very beginning it was really just for myself I was doing Gmail and then the decision to really keep being integrated with this ecosystem is that it was the major player and it is the major player in terms of email today. It's also something at the time where we had a kind of good API so we could use it and, in terms of market adoption, market entry, it was way easier to really plug in, have a plug-in that works right inside the tools that people already use and trying to migrate, and we have people add up the new tool, reinvent everything. So we thought it would be better just to focus on the ecosystem and really add the key features or the key value to Gmail itself, instead of reinventing everything and creating a new event client.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nice approach. There are also a lot of collaboration tools, productivity tools out there, including Google Workspace directly, but also Slack and Asana Front great products. How do you differentiate yourself in the crowded market? Like collaboration? Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2:I think it's a really fascinating market where you have a really different value proposition. I think that what makes a big difference for GMLs and for our customers is really the fact that we are seamlessly integrated into an ecosystem. There we know well. So in terms of learning curve, training for a team, it's way easier. I mean, they know the space, they know it works.
Speaker 2:And we also focus on one thing that Gmail doesn't do right. It's really email collaboration. On Microsoft, you have some kind of basic collaborative inboxes, for instance. In Gmail it's not the case. You have to use Google Groups and that's really not the best experience you can imagine. So that's really one thing that we started with. And then, on top of that, what became very clear is that people I mean a lot of operations start and end with email, and then in the middle you have a lot of different things that can happen, perhaps in connection with your CRM, with your ERP, with whatever tool, and so it really became clear for us that it was important to plug in and play nicely with this kind of additional tools, automate as much as we can the different parts of the PC or the operation that I can take place in email. So that's also why we built up the tool, really starting with a kind of foundation, which is collaboration, and then adding automation and now AI engines, really trying to cover as much as we can the daily operations of our customers.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So yeah, looking at your website, you have lots of cool features shared inboxes, kanban boards, email automation, sla tracking, all kinds of cool stuff I think I'd want to try. So it's really the all-in-one inbox, right? How is that impacting workflows from users? What's the feedback been?
Speaker 2:So, the feedback.
Speaker 2:The main one we have, and we come over and over. The first thing that people see is alignment and transparency in terms of who does what, who is the owner, and we are speeding up a bit the, the assignment, delegation, the visibility of the process. And then comes the part where, after one or two weeks, you see the added value of automation. You see that, for instance, you manage in a better way your SLAs or you can really gain time. A lot of our customers they have people that will actually the main job or primary job is to dispatch conversations, and so it makes their life easier because they can do some other stuff, and so you can scale your team, you can scale your operations while removing a lot of grunt work that takes place on a daily basis in your email. So that's really the two key things visibility, transparency and faster processes.
Speaker 1:Nice. Now, of course, ai has been the killer use case for productivity. I use a lot of these tools. They're quite amazing, but what does it mean for email collaboration and workflow automation specifically, how do you envision AI being used? Automation, specifically, how?
Speaker 2:do you envision AI being used? So really the one the beauty of AI and AI agents, agentic AI. Right now, when it comes to collaboration, it is more going to be about learning who are the key stakeholders in a team for a specific operation, type of operation, and so being able to automatically dispatch or assign delegates, specific tasks, specific conversations to these stakeholders. What we are observing is really that it's something that takes a lot of time when you add up all these kinds of micro operations that you do every day in your email. If an agent can do that on its own, it really helps. And then, obviously, with AI, you can learn a lot from the different emails that you're sending, and so you can have an agent that's going to draft replies for you. So, again, we're going to waste less time trying to find the perfect draft or start the draft, and also classify your inbox, managing your emails in a better way.
Speaker 1:Well, we can all get behind that. So you know, people have been predicting the death of email for decades now. What's your take on the future of email? Probably not dying, but definitely evolving to getting smarter. Have we leveled off as a communications tool? What's your take?
Speaker 2:I really believe that the way we use email is dying. I really believe that the way we use email in the past years and the reason for what's going to come in the coming months, for coming years, is going to be pretty transformative. But clearly, email is not dead. It's not going to die soon. It's clearly the number one communication channel when it comes to business production and business communications. It's something that's unique in the sense that you just need an email address and it's almost agnostic, so it's really easy to use, when compared to Slack, where you need to use a specific ecosystem WhatsApp, whatever. I don't see email dying. I really see the way we use email dying, for instance, and I really see the way we use email dying, for instance, and I really see a transformation in our use of this channel of communication.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a last sort of open platform left almost given all the proprietary interfaces out there. I used to have my own email server. You can't really do that in most arenas today. Let's talk about growth and go-to-market. I mean, who's your ideal customer and how's that evolved and how's? It going in the different regions in the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so our primary market remains the US because it's where we have the biggest number of space customers. Even if we see, over the last few years, a significant increase in western europe, our primary market remains the us. Now, when it comes to ics or what kind of person as we serve, I would say that right now it's it's mainly smes, so small to medium-sized businesses, where operations are main operations, go through email, so it can be everything that is accounting, customer service, sales, marketing, legal. We cover a lot of different departments, but as the product gets more mature and as we grow, we're also closing a larger organization. Our largest customers count tens of thousands. As we grow, we're also closing a larger organization. Our largest customers count thousands of tens of thousands of employees, for instance.
Speaker 2:So it's, I mean, it's the natural, it's the organic life of a SaaS, where you start with kind of a niche, smaller deals, and then, as the product gets more mature, you learn also a lot in terms of which kind of point, pain point you solve, how you need to solve them. You attract a larger customer, larger deals. But yeah, email being really I mean everyone using email in a business, business wise. So by definition, we're going to serve a lot of different industries and certs. What's really the common denominator is really the volume of emails and companies or departments that we leave thanks to email.
Speaker 1:Got it. So, looking ahead, where do you see Gemalius in the next couple of years heading as we get more and more embedded with AI technology? What might the future look like?
Speaker 2:I think that we started with one obvious channel in terms of communication for any business email.
Speaker 2:That was a starting point where we see the product evolve to really to become the brain of your operations. What I believe is going to be more and more important is for any worker, any employee, any manager to have the right tools to do the groundwork, to do the operational work and then be able to focus on what is strategic, what is really key for the daily operations. So, yeah, we're going to expand the product in terms of, we're trying to connect more and more services and we cover as much as possible all the spectrum that makes a typical operation. So we could focus, for instance, on accounting operations, from the invoice received in your email to the actual payment of this invoice and going through the different accounts, payable, legal teams that sometimes are needed here. Same thing for customer support. Right now, to be honest, what we are trying to see is which kind of vertical really makes the most sense to get started there, and so, being more general but focusing more on specific verticals, and there are respective operations- Fantastic.
Speaker 1:Well, I have to give it a try. I assume you have some sort of trial offer, so I'll sign up and give you my feedback and definitely congratulations on all the success onwards and upwards. Thanks.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, Ivan, and yeah, we do have a trial. Feel free to also book an onboarding with our team. We're happy to help you get the most out of our platform.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, I can't wait to try it out and thanks everyone for listening and watching and sharing this podcast and, of course, don't forget to check out my new TV show, techimpact TV, now on Fox Business and Bloomberg Television. Thanks everyone, take care.