the sender needs to send regular updates to product managers, the message can be created, personalized, and sent through ToutApp. The whole idea is to speed up the communication process when users are sending similar messages to many people, or to the same person over and over.
Kader, 28, has some experience founding, building, and exiting a company. He earned dual bachelor’s degrees in management and computer science in 2006 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute outside Albany, NY. While an undergrad, he and a group of friends launched a startup, HipCal, which let users create shared calendars for groups to keep track of important events and class assignments. “We took over a small room in our fraternity house to turn it into our office,” Kader.
Plaxo bought HipCal during Kader’s senior year and the team relocated to California after graduation. He remained there for two years before becoming an enterprise technologist for a hedge fund in Connecticut (Kader would not disclose its name). In 2010, he left the firm to develop a startup called Braintrust. The initial idea was to eliminate e-mail when communicating among tight-knit groups of people. But while developing Braintrust, Kader ironically built a tool to e-mail people faster, which led to ToutApp. “I was writing the same e-mail over and over to tell bloggers about what I was working on,” he says.
No longer out to kill off e-mail, Kader says his company can help it evolve as a tool for business users. He believes that attempts to trump the role of e-mail with other types of communication have little chance. “Google Wave and other social media tools that ignore e-mail and try to replace it inherently fail,” he says.
Kader moved from Connecticut to New York City in late 2010 and is using co-working space at WeWork in the SoHo neighborhood. He says ToutApp maintains its California presence at shared space furnished by 500 Startups.
ToutApp has a staff of four and is looking to hire engineers and a designer, Kader says. The service is available as an app for mobile devices. Users currently must visit the ToutApp website and send their messages through its servers though the responses land in their own inboxes. Kader says the company is developing a deeper level of integration that will let users to send ToutApp messages from their own e-mail programs such as Gmail and Outlook without visiting the website. “We need people that can figure out other systems and connect into Tout[App] really fast,” Kader says.
