I’ve already blogged a bit about Mailroom 2.0.

Looks like it’s finally happening… This Sundayy (say it in your loudest Monster Truck Commercial announcer Guy Voice), the latest release of Mailroom will be dropping (99% sure, we do have some last minute stuff to knock out).

We’ve aptly code-named it Growing Pains. It has, after all, been a long time coming. But I hope the wait has been worth it to our now thousands of Mailroom users.

The biggest changes are in the UI (that’s all Charles — newly minted JavaScript Blackbelt Samurai & probably the smartest coder I have ever worked with, among other things (he’s CEO). Truth. But a lot of work has also gone into the backend to support those changes & fix a few bugs (that was my role).

Already got a lot of great feedback on the YouTube video we put up previewing Mailroom 2.0. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can check it out here.

Lessons Learned: It Takes Both

Ninjas: You Probably
Need 2 of ‘em.

In this case, the lesson I learned from the experiences of this release is that it takes both a UI Wizard and a Backend Pro to deliver a solid product.

At least, when we’re talking about this level of complexity. One way I like to measure the complexity of RoR apps is by looking at how many migrations they have gone through. (for the non-geeks reading this, that is how many changes have been made to the underlying data model, i.e. adding a Person object’s “first_name” and “last_name” fields would be 2 data model changes) Sometimes you throw several changes into one migration but usually each migration encapsulates some unit of change.

No. of migrations now in the Sproutit Suite application: 127 !!!

And of course… this says absolutely nothing about the level of complexity on the client side!

Lesson Learned:

CRM: It’s a Jungle Out There

The reason this release took so long was because during this time we were also working on a new CRMish (Customer Relationship Management) app that will be an adjunct to Mailroom. So far the plans are to make this puppy free (for the average user).

It’s good enough though (imho) that we could easily sell this app to the average small business and make a pretty penny. We’d rather use it as friendly intro to our other services, which it will help provide the glue for, and perhaps sell bigger packages to those companies who need thousands and tens/hundreds of thousands of contacts in their database.

Stay tuned in the next few months for more on a tool (we still don’t have a name for it yet) to help your small biz keep that friendly small-company vibe with your clients & customers, while scaling to thouands and tens of thousands of clients and customers.

That should be the real goal with CRM, after all, we believe. To keep your clients close, not turn them into another statistic for your bottom line.