Launching today at the Disrupt conference, Thinkfuse is all about TPS status reports, more specifically making it easier to share and manage weekly status reports in order to assist organizations in achieving their goals.
Thinkfuse is armed with $500,000 in seed funding from Founders Coop, Ali & Hadi Partovi, Scott Banister, SV Angel, Todd Warren, Emil Michael, Travis Bogard and other angel investors.
Today, the company posits, status reports are emailed from one person to another only to wind up somewhere in an inbox, lost in all the other noise and collecting dust. Status reports deserve better than that, they contend, as they often contain vital business information tied directly to goals, and as such they should be accessible to the entire company and organized in a way that helps move the needle forward.
Thinkfuse thinks it can solve this problem with a subscription-based “freemium” application designed to collect, follow, and search status updates across an entire organization.
Managers can use it to set up a reporting schedule and template for their direct reports, who then receive automated reminders.
Passive readers, meanwhile, continue to receive and comment on updates the way they’re accustomed to in email. The system also creates a searchable archive that’s accessible to the rest of the company, tagged with goals, and available for any stakeholder to follow.
Thus, people in different business units, project teams or other groups can see what others are working on to track dependencies, or lend support. This also helps them gain insight on how his or her work fits into the whole.
Thinkfuse was co-founded by Brandom Bloom and Steve Krenzel, both former Microsoft employees who actually met after their time at Redmond, when both worked on the Google Translate service. Chief executive of the company is Aydin Ghajar, who was previously responsible for revenue and user acquisition at iLike.
Q&A
Q: In big companies, they still use email, this is a workflow step. how do you see people who are already overloaded work this into their systems?
A: People can actually use their email to update their status reports on Thinkfuse.
Q: This seems like the sort of thing that Yahoo would love to use. Who will you charge?
A: We are planning to use a freemium model.
Q: if you had presented this three years ago, this would be interesting. What’s different with what you are doing?
A: there is a wave of social media apps for the enterprise, but you can’t reliably use this as a communications tool for important projects. We are specifically addressing status reports.
q: do you have any filters, how do you send reports to specific members of a team?
A: We have three settings, private, for people invite or set to a domain.
Q: How big does a company need to be for this to work?
A: it applies to both big and small startups, from two-person startups to larger companies.
Q: Do you have any special algorithms?
A: We are searching for rich text but over time we’ll be examining more structured data.