Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Austin-based Mumboe, originally founded in 2005 as FineTooth. Austin Startup sat down with Bill Kane, the CEO of Mumboe, to talk about their technology, where they are headed, and why there is an “e” at the end of their name.

Tell us a bit about Mumboe?
Mumboe is an on-demand web application that helps businesses uncover the savings and revenue opportunities often buried in complex legal agreements. Using Mumboe, organizations can create, organize and share agreements in a secure, central location, quickly mine agreement documents for key contract details, and identify at a glance the specific terms that impact their business. Secure web-based tools let users collaborate anytime, anywhere, while providing a full audit trail of agreement changes and revisions. Combining elegantly simple design with pay as you go pricing, Mumboe is the easy, affordable choice for any organization that needs a clear view of its business commitments.

Who is your target audience?
Anyone who deals with contractual agreements in their business. If you think about all the documented agreements a typical business has to track and manage, that includes everything from leases and service-level agreements to NDAs and intellectual property agreements. So we are a very useful application for the corporate legal department, as well as a sales organization or an HR department or a purchasing manager. These “corporate consumers” are often small and growing businesses, and individuals and departments in larger organizations that need a simple, affordable way to manage those agreements.

How are companies solving this problem today?
On the high end, there are contract lifecycle management (CLM) applications aimed at big corporations with thousands of users. These are typically pretty expensive, complex and very process-oriented. On the opposite end, there are businesses using a mix of limited-function tools and applications such as a spreadsheet to track agreement parties and terms, a calendar application to track contract renewal dates, and emails to communicate with business associates and assign tasks. As the business grows, trying to scale these manual, disconnected processes quickly becomes a nightmare. To give a real-world example, Register.com, an early Mumboe Beta customer, told us that that the “spreadsheet approach” to managing contracts was definitely not working for them, but the enterprise-level applications they looked at were overkill for what they needed. They decided to go with Mumboe because we offered a simple, affordable solution that made sense for their business.

How do you address customer concerns about security?
The perception that SaaS is somehow less secure than a behind-the-firewall solution is changing. Of course, companies like Salesforce.com have really helped pave the way, and now most of the big software players like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are all delivering on-demand versions of their products. For smaller and mid-sized companies, applications like Mumboe actually offer a level of security that they don’t have today. Mumboe includes 256-bit encryption, password protected accounts and administrative control over user permissions, as well as off-site storage and backup. We also just made the move to Amazon S3, a web hosting service that allows us to offer our customers the same highly secure storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own sites.

You’re allowing customers to sign up for free on your web site. How do you plan to make money?
We want to make it as easy as possible for customers to try our application and to do business with Mumboe. We’re confident that, once people see the application and discover how incredibly simple it is to use in comparison with the value it offers, they’ll want to keep using it. That’s why we offer a free starter account to anyone who wants to sign up and require nothing more than a valid email address. You can use that account to do everything you can do with the full product to make sure it meets your needs. The only limit is on storage space. Then, if you find it useful, you can use a credit card upgrade for only $24/user/month. What’s more, you can cancel at anytime, so there’s no major commitment involved.

Because Mumboe is a web application, there is no complex installation process or upfront budget outlay. People can just log on to our web site and start using the product, then add users when and how they wish. And while we are not yet profitable, we do have revenue already and we have some pretty aggressive plans in place to take us to profitability. To bridge that gap, we have been backed by private investors,

Mumboe uses an “agile development” process to release product features and updates. What does that mean to you as a company, and to Mumboe’s customers?
For our customers, it means that instead of doing one monster update to our product every year or two, we release new features, fixes and updates on a regular basis - usually every couple of weeks (or less). Following an agile development process lets us incorporate customer feedback and feature requests much more quickly into the product, and make sure the product stays relevant to our customers’ needs. As a company, it means that we are much better able to adapt to market opportunities and new technologies. As an example, in the time between our initial beta launch in January 2008 and our March product launch, we completely redesigned the application’s user interface to respond to usability suggestions from our customers. And because of that input, we now have a UI that makes the customer experience much simpler and more productive.

What are your plans for growing the company?
Right now we’re focused on building the Mumboe user community and on delivering the core features and capabilities that are important to our customers. Because of our agile development approach and SaaS model, we can keep our operations very lean and efficient. This forces us to be very selective about what we choose to develop and deliver, and who we hire. You won’t find a lot of inflated titles or extraneous positions at Mumboe; the majority of our staff are hard-core developers working on different aspects of the product. To build the community, we’re pursuing some strategic opportunities to integrate with key platforms such as Salesforce.com and WebEx Connect, and exploring partner relationships with other software and service providers that we feel can add value to the core Mumboe application. We’re also pursuing some viral marketing initiatives and raising our profile through key industry events and online efforts.

Where did the name come from?
We wanted something fun and memorable that would reflect the easy, informal, approachable qualities we wanted to embody as a company. And of course you need a name that’s actually available as a web address. Then one day we talked to a customer who was clearly frustrated by the complex legalese used in his company’s business agreements. He told us in no uncertain terms: “I just need something to help me cut through all the mumbo jumbo!” and that’s when we hit on the name Mumboe. People like to pull me aside and tell me (as if I somehow didn’t know) “But it’s a negative!” Sure, we could have named the company “ContractsExpress” or something equally (un)inspired, but Mumboe is memorable. I’ve heard that the folks who founded Yahoo! got the same argument. I also get asked why we added the “e” at the end. We like to say we borrowed it from Flickr.

Tell us about the Mumboe team.
Our primary emphasis is on building a great product and our team reflects that. Scott Diedrick, who heads up development, is an extremely talented web applications developer. We also have two PhDs (in linguistics and computer science) on the technology team, and we’ve just added a UI/user experience specialist and an experienced Rails developer, bringing our total to 17 employees). We also have some very seasoned people making sure the product resonates with our user community. James Walley, our director of customer service, is doing a great job of engaging with our customers, developing Mumboe’s service and support processes, and running our user forum. He’s also the “voice of Mumboe” that you’ll hear in our product training videos. Rebecca MacDonald, our VP of marketing, has over 15 years of experience in the software space and has worked with dozens of startups in Austin and Silicon Valley. We also have a business development expert focused on cultivating strategic customer and partner relationships. Altogether they are a group of very talented professionals that I’m proud to be a part of.

What’s next on your radar?
Right now we’re very focused on growing our user community and expanding our conversations with customers, to make sure the Mumboe application reflects their real business needs. We get a lot of questions about integration, and have plans underway to integrate with some of the major business applications and platforms. We also have a major product development in progress that will make it even easier for our customers to identify and manage the key terms in a contract. I can’t talk more about that just yet, but we expect it to be a key technology differentiator that we’ll announce later this year. Finally, we are really looking forward to joining the Austin software community and becoming a success story that helps this city continue to build its reputation as a technology leader. I travel frequently to Silicon Valley and the Northwest, and I’ll continue to do that to develop our national presence. But for me, Austin is where it’s at. I have a very selfish motivation to do my part in helping the tech scene continue to thrive here.

Sphere: Related Content

Technorati Tags: Austin, mumboe, Q&A Wednesday, Startup

Filed under: Q&A Wednesday