PRODUCTIVITY TOOL WITH EMAIL AND CRM.

What started as Acsend – a software tool for accountants – has now grown into a productivity tool called RogerRoger. After a turbulent time, this startup is now making great strides and they’re talking to Microsoft. Time to catch up with CEO and co-founder Peter Jacobs.

Back to the drawing board

RogerRoger ‘s predecessor was Acsend, which started out as a software tool for accountants. “It was a Swiss army knife,” says Peter. “Customers came, but also left just as quickly. That was because we offered too many functionalities that were already present in other tools. So we went back to the drawing board. We had support from business developer Peter Langela, who steered us in the right direction.” That led to RogerRoger, an e-mail productivity tool. “Think of it as a team inbox, mixed with Trello,” Peter explains. “You can manage e-mail with your team and create tasks and manage projects directly from that e-mail. That’s a gap that hasn’t yet been closed by other tools. By integrating e-mail with task management and a concise CRM, people can collaborate more easily and tasks no longer get stuck in your inbox.”

Microsoft partner

Instead of creating a tool for a specific audience, they are now solving a problem for a larger audience. Even with this broad target group and the many other software tools on the market, Peter is optimistic about RogerRoger. “There’s little chance we’ll be overtaken. Similar companies are emerging, but they go for the low-hanging fruit, such as interface adjustments for your Gmail. But then again you can’t create projects and there’s no CRM attached, for example. And what’s also remarkable is that most of the tools are made for Gmail. For us, this offers opportunities for organizations that use the Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft itself may see it that way too. We were recently called by Microsoft Teams and we’re partners now. That’s something we’re very proud of, of course!”

Glorified letterbox

Now the trick is to accelerate marketing and keep developing the tool. “We’ll no longer focus on a specific industry, but more on a specific problem for which we offer a solution. We have also learned a lot when we approached companies. At first, we thought: ‘We’re rolling out RogerRoger across the company.’ But that’s not how it works. Different teams work together in different ways. We should focus mainly on the teams that still work together via e-mail. Because e-mail is not intended for collaboration, but many organizations do try. So it turns into a kind of glorified letterbox. RogerRoger links up e-mail and tasks, so you work more efficiently. That’s like gold.”

Taking the market by storm

The next step is to provide even more value with the tool. “For example, we’re going to add a dashboarding and reporting option, so you can gain insight into things such as how long it takes to complete a task, or how long you leave a task. Then we will go deeper.” And when it comes to their own organization? “We’re going to invest heavily in marketing and sales to take the market by storm. By June next year, we want to double the number of customers, so that’s what we’re going for!”

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