Start Me Up! A profile of Twoodoo social collaboration

If you've ever worked in a team you'll know how hard and scattered it can be to collaborate effectively using conventional tools.

Online collaboration tools come in all sizes and flavors these days, but sometimes the more simple/minimal the better.

This is the approach startup twoodo is taking. Read on for more info!

In one sentence, what is Twoodo?

Twoodo is a social collaboration tool for small teams that let's you integrate actions directly into conversations by using twitter-like tags.

What problem(s) does Twoodo solve?

If you've ever worked in a team you'll know how hard and scattered it can be to collaborate effectively using conventional tools. Emails are extremely messy and a horrible way of organizing a business process.

Instant messaging means absent people get left out and information about "who said what" and "who has to do what" gets lost very easily. Productivity tools that attempt to solve these issues are only shared task lists and don't give enough importance to conversation. Sending someone a simple task takes at least 8 steps and collaboration shouldn't be about filling out forms.

Twoodo solves this by allowing users to have a conversation, just like chat or email, except tasks and actions are directly integrated inside the conversation. Using natural language and twitter-like tags users can assign tasks and give deadlines seamlessly within the discussion thread. On the click of a button, the conversation turns into a task list.

What are your immediate goals?

We've interviewed hundreds of teams and our immediate goal is to help them work more effectively. We're currently in private beta mode running a number of pilot tests to fine tune our tool. 

What were the biggest challenges involved in building Twoodo?

Integrating people's workflow. One team member will adopt the tool very rapidly, another might follow, the rest may be more reticent. To tackle this we are currently integrating with email. This means even if the rest of your team isn't on board yet you will still be able to use the tool effectively.

How will the company make money?

We're letting people use the tool for free. Once they get hooked they can upgrade to a pro account which will allow them to invite more people to their network, get more storage space for sharing files and more advanced features to manage their projects.

Who is in your team?

We are a team of four. There is Denis Duvauchelle our CEO and visionary who came up with the concept a few years ago and brought us all together. Guillaume Acard our CTO and computer genius. Sean Antony our mobile expert. And myself, David Arnoux, CMO and designer.

We are also part of Startupbootcamp Amsterdam. Run by Patrick de Zeeuw and Ruud Hendriks, the program has connected us with a robust team of mentors and advisors.

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years' time?

It's difficult to make long term forecasts when you're a lean startup. In one year we want to have talked to thousands of teams across the globe and help them achieve their objectives and save time. We plan to be used by over 5000 teams by mid 2014.

In three years we want to be considered as the Twitter for businesses.

In five years I hope we'll still be a lean company talking to our customers and understanding their pains on a daily basis.

Other than Twoodo, what are your favourite websites / apps / tools?

Some of the sites we are addicted with are: Startupbootcamp, Evernote, Betali.st, Quora, Hootsuite, Stackoverflow.