Flowtown, social marketing service, have been out for a while. Basically, you imports mails from your mail account ( i.e. gmail ) and Flowtown provides social services your contacts have been using. Later on you can start email campaigns.
This actually cool idea. Startup has chosen to bootstrap instead of VC money ( maybe I missed it ? ) and started charging from users from start. I always support bootstraping which is only way to keep control of your company and makes you focus on monetization from start.
AFAICS their strategy and service need some tweaking. Idea, email as social profile, has a lot of potential. But why don't create FF/Chrome Gmail/Hotmail/.. addon that will analyze persons you get mails from? How many times have you got mail from someone recommended by person you know, suggesting you business opportunity? Do you wanna have instant ability to check its social activity and to get overall "influence score" based on activity? That could be a time saver. VCs and investors would gain instant value and their word of mouth would spread this service like hurricane. Everybody is looking for their virality formula but true value and word of mouth are most neglected ones. Include premium account with latest and most engaged social upates. Charge it to HR departments/ head hunters / recruiters / investors who would get huge value from such service.
Leverage it with great existing top-notch customer service and you will get instant success.
Just one more thing - import of contacts is aweful! It imports alphabetically your first 50 gmail account and you don't have an option to select contacts that you can import. So, I ended up with lost of contacts starting with A, B and some Cs' and most of them are not usefull. Nonsense! On top of that, you get charged initial $5. FAIL! User never gets visibly noticed that he has been charged for basic import. No notification email, no alert. You can see it on billing page, but not while you import contacts.
Overall score of service would be 5/10 for execution and 7/10 for idea. I'm I too harsh ?
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