Our Vision for Streak

I’m Omar, along with my friend Aleem we founded Streak. In this first post I hope to give you some background on why we started Streak and our vision for where we want to take it in the future.

One of the best pieces of startup advice I ever received was “solve your own problem.”

Streak is the solution to a fundamental problem that we’ve struggled with for a while now. My past experiences with sales, and customer support services always followed the same path: I live and work in my inbox, but every service is a separate website so the switching becomes too annoying and I inevitably stop using them. But not using anything isn’t a solution either. I’m the kind of person that gets easily overwhelmed, so when I don’t have something to organize and manage my work and life… well, let’s just say bad things happened.

Enter Streak.

Our goal for Streak is simple: give you the tools to manage relationships in the place where you live and work, your inbox.

In creating these tools we had a profound insight, that email is now the fundamental communication protocol. For a technology that was developed in the 60s and 70s, this is a heavy task. That’s why in 2004 Google changed the way we think about email by grouping email messages into conversations. They didn’t go far enough.

Streak gives you the tools to group conversations into something we call Boxes. A Box can represent a deal, a project, a customer, it’s however you want to organize your work in the way that makes sense for you. Through the use of Boxes and Pipelines, Streak gives you the ability to manage your relationships with something you already do everyday, email.

All within your inbox.

Now, we know how important a person’s inbox is, so you can always be sure we’ll be holding ourselves to the highest of standards. We use Streak everyday and we live in our inbox. This is good for the rest of our users because both Aleem and I (especially Aleem) are extremely unforgiving when it comes to the experience (really especially Aleem).

To exemplify this we have some critical guiding philosophies around the design of Streak:

1. keep Streak simple and flexible
2. keep Streak functionality inside of gmail
3. never have a negative impact on gmail

We’re still early, but the future of Streak looks so exciting, I can’t wait to see where we’ll be in the next 3 months, let alone the rest of the year and beyond. So please let us know what you want and how we can make Streak better, we want to make this a tool you actually want and love to use everyday.