Hiver describes their mission to make email work 10x better for every business. And in the process of building the future of email, Hiver are solving the fundamental problems with email that lead to email clutter and overload, without taking anything away from email’s simplicity and speed.
To emphasize more on it, Niraj Ranjan Rout, Co-founder and CEO of Hiver took the centre stage to explain us more about Saas, Hiver and technological advancements in India.
DC: SaaS is a fairly new concept in India. How is it doing in the market today?
Mr. Niraj: Well, India is realising the need for software which brings in ease of doing business. Startups and large corporates together are moving towards subscription based revenue models which is enhancing business growth across industries. It guarantees consistent cashflows to the companies.
Businesses are increasingly concerned about the experience of the end customer today and software helps companies upgrade that experience, leading to better conversion rates and in-turn better business results.
Technological advancements in India are another reason how SaaS is gaining more and more prominence today.
The SaaS landscape in India is growing really fast. There are a lot of successful global products that are built in India.
DC: What is the USP of Hiver?
Mr. Niraj: If you look at email, it is fundamentally broken for teams. It’s meant to be a one-to-one channel but we have been using it for team communication. The usual way to communicate with a team is to use Google Groups which doesn’t support teamwork - but is just a way for team to receive emails on a shared id.
Hiver solves this by creating shared inboxes that sync with these Google Groups or shared emails. So now you can easily turn these shared inbox emails into tasks, delegate them to a team member, and keep track of their status without having to learn and adapt to a new tool.
We have already raised USD 4 million in Series A round of funding led by venture capital firms Kalaari Capital and Kae Capital in 2018.
DC: What is it that your company is trying to solve and how?
Mr. Niraj: Hiver aims to be the answer to every question that pops in your head when email gets too overwhelming and inefficient. It is the future of productivity for businesses.
Most people use their email inboxes as a task management system for themselves and their colleagues, but email does not work well for that. Also using email to handle a process like customer support or sales in even small sized teams can be ineffective and counterproductive. The email clutter would make it difficult to find the relevant information efficiently when needed.
Hiver enhances Gmail to allow teams to manage business processes such as sales, support, operations from their inbox. It allows users to access shared inbox emails from Gmail, assign emails as tasks, see their status and full conversation history. Apart from that, it also helps users create and share email templates, write notes on emails and share them, etc. With Hiver, teams can use their email to get all this done efficiently, without having to learn and adapt to another set of tools.
DC: What is the kind of technology you are currently using? Please explain in brief.
Mr. Niraj: We use a combination of backend and frontend technologies to make a lot of magic happen inside Gmail. On the frontend, our product plays beautifully inside Gmail, adding a lot of functionality seamlessly. In the backend, we’re constantly acting upon a massive number of emails which comes down to more than a million.
DC: What are your plans for the next 3 to 5 years?
Mr. Niraj: At Hiver, we’re solving problems that are faced by every knowledge worker in the world, irrespective of which country, business vertical or industry they are in. We’re driven by the opportunity of solving these problems for tens of thousands of business. In 5 years, we aim to take our product to 100,000 customers across the world.
We currently cater to 1500 customers across the world including Hubspot, Harvard University, Lonely Planet, Airbnb, Plural Sight, Shutterstock, to name a few. We have our customers across 30 countries including US, UK, Australia, and Germany among others.
