Goodbye Stata Labs, Hello Next Great Thing...

One aspect of agency life that never changes: clients come and clients go – it’s just a reality of the business that you have to accept. Last week I had to accept the fact that one my clients, Stata Labs, was leaving Voce by way of an acquisition.

Stata Labs signed with Voce in the spring of 2003, it was a startup bringing to market a new search-based email product called “Bloomba” that promised to help people better manage and organize their inboxes (read: organize your "lives" heavy emailers).

The technology was beautiful and they had a good blend of executive talent, but the company’s success was dependant, to some extent, on two very significant factors: First, that people would accept a search-based approach to email and second, that a little known company in Redmond would continue doing what it did best – absolutely nothing.

We did some category building and exec profile pieces over the summer and introduced Bloomba in the fall of 2003, right on the heals of Microsoft’s Office 2003 launch. We hit an early homerun with a BusinessWeek product review, with subsequent product stories from some of the top IT and consumer tech books in the industry (1, 2, 3, 4). A few months later, Chris Shipley branded Bloomba the “Google of email” at DEMO and we quickly learned that overcoming significant factor number one was a piece of cake – people really took to search-based email. It was solving a *real* problem. Significant factor number two, however, was still lingering uncomfortably in the background.

Little did we know that the next “big thing” in the email space wouldn't come from Redmond, but Mountain View?

On April 1, 2004 Google introduced Gmail. That was a long day. Google brought a tremendous amount of validation to the category of search-based email, and while we never really considered Gmail a direct competitor, we knew that in some capacity we had to now compete with two major companies – Google and Microsoft -- for both customer AND media mindshare. That’s what some folks in the industry might call a “red flag.”

Despite this challenge, we continued to secure great stories and more important, new customers at a very respectable pace, all of which helped lead to the culmination of events last week – the formal acquisition of Stata Labs by Yahoo!.

I’ve heard that 1 in 10 startups actually make it, so when I think about all we were able to accomplish in the span of 18 months – helping to take a company from its infancy to acquisition – I find comfort. I also take pride in the fact that PR played a big role in the company’s marketing strategy. It still sucks to lose a good client, but I couldn’t ask for a better end to this story and I’m glad I had the opportunity to be part of this experience.

Now on to the next great thing.

Update: Todd Bishop with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer picked up on this post. Good stuff. I'll try not to let this get to my blego...