YC-Backed Taskpipes Is SaaS To Simplify Using Lots Of (Other) SaaS Platforms

(GNN) - If there was a neat label for startups whose raison d’être is to take the strain out of dealing with other startup services then Taskpipes would be wearing that badge proudly on its lapel.

The YC-backed, U.K. founded b2b startup is attacking what it says is a growing data-management problem for businesses — created by the proliferation and adoption of SaaS platforms. So, in other words, those shiny, cloud-based platforms which promise to streamline your business processes by taking various data-processing tasks off your hands are actually introducing a new headache by fragmenting your data across multiple silos.

That means businesses using multiple SaaS platforms are having to engage in manual data-wrangling when they need to work across these different data buckets, or pull data-sets into other pieces of software for processing. It’s this SaaS-generated data-processing headache that Taskpipes has seized on as another business opportunity.

Its solution, another SaaS platform (obviously), makes it easier for business to grab data from these various third party repositories and set up rules to perform whatever data processing operations they need done. So yes, it’s SaaS platforms all the way down.

“Taskpipes is an online platform that allows you to automate these repetitive and regular time-consuming tasks that people do to manipulate data, to basically connect different platforms together,” co-founder Fraser Atkins tells TechCrunch.

“It automates repetitive data processing tasks that people normally do in Excel. Maybe you have a load of data stuck in your ecommerce platform and the only way you can get that into you accounting software is by downloading a raw CSV data, dumping it into Excel, performing a filter to remove a load of data you don’t want, then sorting the data, reformatting the columns to then upload it into your accounting software.”

“The number of SaaS platforms is just exploding,” he adds. “It’s been totally ridiculous recently. And although each SaaS platform makes that specific aspect of your business more powerful it then means whereas before you ran everything through a few spreadsheets, now you have your data in all these different places.

“When you download the data from one of these platforms and you want to put it into the other one the data’s obviously not compatible.”

Isn’t it a bit hard to automate the bespoke manual pieces of data processing that businesses need to do to tie up their usage of various SaaS platforms? Atkins says not, given that the series of steps businesses are performing to get one set of data into a compatible format for processing elsewhere are always the same — and can therefore be defined as processing rules in Taskpipes to be run automatically after you’ve set them up once (thereby cutting out tedious and time-consuming manual repetition). So its pitch to businesses is time- and efficiency-savings.

Isn’t this much like macros in Excel? It is, concedes Atkins. But Taskpipes is targeting its SaaS platform at people who aren’t capable of writing VBA macros or indeed Python scripts — offering a simple interface that even non-Excel whiz kids in the business should be able to get to grips with.

“We’re like the central node in this network of all your different data. Because whereas maybe five years ago you’d have most of your data in an Excel spreadsheet, maybe a couple of SQL databases, now people have their data across all these different third party platforms so how do I get my data from Mixpanel into Salesforce without having to either spend ages writing the integration code or having to do it manually every single day through Excel.”

It’s also aiming to improve on macros by offering more granular controls. “The problem that macros present is that they’re really opaque, they’re really hard to edit afterwards, and they also can’t do really cool things — you couldn’t set a macro up very easily to run every single day,” he adds. “You couldn’t integrate it with these different platform and so we feel that we bring a lot more functionality than a lot of the existing solutions which people are basically hacking through Excel at the moment.”

The Taskpipes beta was launched around seven weeks ago, and thus far it has a “handful” of paying customers across a range of industries. It currently supports any platform that can export data to CSV format. But next up it’s planning to expand to add integrations with third party platform APIs so it can fully automate pulling data down, excising the need for humans to upload the raw data. So cutting out another step.

“Where we want to move with this, and the next stage we see in product development, is actually providing integrations — so we automatically pull your data from Salesforce, we pull your data from your Shopify store and we automatically upload it to your accounting software, to your Mixpanel account — so that getting data from one platform to another is no longer a hassle,” he says.

“We sometimes explain the concept to people and they come back to us and say ‘oh, that’s basically like IFTTT for data processing isn’t it?’. That’s a nice way of putting it,” he adds.

On the competitor front, Atkins names elastic.io, which self bills as ‘integration platform as a service’ — which is presumably one label for this type of layered service that manages other services. The difference between elastic.io and Taskpipes is the latter is aiming its platform at people with no technical background. “We want to make this completely accessible because the people who are doing this manually at the moment are the people who are the non-technical people. So they are the people we’re targeting,” says Atkins.

Funding wise, Taskpipes has pulled in around $140,000 so far, via YC and also a small portion of that seed coming from the U.K.-based Entrepreneur First accelerator program which it also went through. The team is presenting at YC’s Winter demo day this month, and will be looking to raise more funding to build out those API integrations and scale up its SaaS for managing SaaS use.

With YC Backing, PersistIQ Hopes To Remove Excel From The Outbound Sales Process

#GNN - As with many companies, the two founders of PersistIQ, a YC-backed startup had a problem they saw needed fixing and they decided to build a product to take care of it. In this case, they found themselves coordinating their cold-call drip marketing campaigns in an Excel spreadsheet and they thought there had to be a better way.

That’s how their new company PersistIQ was born — they hope to provide an automated solution focused solely on coordinating and automating outbound drip sales campaigns.

Outbound sales refers to the process of finding customers yourself. This might be simply cold calling or emailing from lists you have bought or other sources that could be founts of potential business for your company. You’re doing the hard work of contacting people, and tracking those who respond, those who don’t and when to respond again.

Co-founder Pouyan Salehi says inbound marketing is clearly all the rage these days, but trying to get the customer to come to you by generating content to attract them to your site takes a lot of hard work. Once you get them there, you can assign each one a score based on their actions such as reading a blog post, downloading a white paper or visiting a pricing page. Ultimately, the best scores will be tossed to sales where again, you have to coordinate contact with them and get them to respond.

Regardless of how you get the lead though, the challenge for every salesperson is getting to a first reply and that takes persistence and a little bit of help from technology. Salehi says sales statistics show that it often takes up to 7 interactions with a potential client before you get a response and most sales people don’t have that kind of patience. He says research suggests most give up after just two contacts without a positive response. Hard to blame them, but it would be a lot easier if you had a tool to do the reminding, follow ups and resending and then see the response in your inbox. That’s where PersistIQ comes in.

As Salehi says, “Once we get leads into our systems, there’s an immediate pain point we face. I need to be doing outbound sales, but I’m  not sure where to start, and the follow up part takes so long.”

Salehi  and his partner were simply trying to solve this pain point. While there are products like CRM tools, marketing automation platforms and other tools from companies like Salesforce.com, Marketo, Hubspot and many others that also provide a more automated way to track this kind of process, many busy salespeople ignore these because the tools are part of a much larger package. Salehi says instead of dealing with the complexity and trying to find it inside a larger tool (if they even know it’s there), they rely on the old-fashioned Excel spreadsheet, which as you can imagine can be pretty labor-intensive to keep updated.

It gets to the point where the tracking tool, the administrative part of the job, begins to take over the sales part and PersistIQ wants to simplify that process by providing a tool to import a list of potential clients, eliminate duplicates and document leads who have been contacted already automatically, allow you to segment the list, and then create campaigns.

If the person doesn’t respond at point in the process, you can send another ping a set number of days later automatically. If they do respond, the response lands in your inbox where you’re probably doing a  lot of your work anyway and you can contact the lead in the usual fashion.

For now, the company is concentrating on email, but Salehi says he can see adding other tools for phone and social media leads down the road. And there is direct integration with Salesforce today, which automatically records each attempt to contact the lead in PersistIQ.

For now, the two-person company is being nurtured by Y Combinator and hopes to go into Beta in the fall and get some seed funding and continue their journey. You can go to the website today and sign up if you wish.

IMAGE BY FLICKR USER JEFF DRONGOWSKI UNDER CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Microsoft And Salesforce Announce Broad Product-Integration Partnership

This afternoon, Microsoft and Salesforce announced a broad partnership that will bring their respective software and service products closer together.

Salesforce will support Windows, Windows 8.1, build “interoperability Salesforce and Office 365,” Microsoft’s subscription-based productivity suite, and integrate OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, And Outlook in various capacities.

This is a big deal for Microsoft given Salesforce’s quickly expanding customer base. Salesforce, a pioneer of the SaaS model that Microsoft is now also pursuing, likely has a rich pool of customers that Microsoft either wants to court, or make happier. Salesforce likely wants to attract Microsoft’s more conservative customer base by providing stiffer integration with products they already know.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. I’m reading that as Microsoft paying Salesforce.

Microsoft is fighting a multi-front platform war with Google, Apple and others, and so any wind it can put at the back of its nascent business-facing services, such as OneDrive for Business, is a positive for the firm.

The deal isn’t short-term. According to a Microsoft announcement, regarding Windows support, “[a] preview is planned to be available in fall 2014 with general availability in 2015.”

Salesforce is up more than 3 percent in after-hours trading. Microsoft is flat.

Update: On a call, Microsoft and Salesforce commented further on the partnership. Salesforce will use Microsoft’s Azure broadly, and the firms affirmed that the deal isn’t a short-run event.

Top Image Credit: Marc Benioff