Communicate faster and keep track of your projects with Hibox
Hibox helps you handle the three most critical pain points in collaborating with your team: faster communication (team messaging), keep track of your projects (task management) and live discussions for remote work or separate offices (video calls).
Having all these tools integrated helps teams start working right away, whereas with other messaging apps you have to setup separate products that require an additional cost and time and create external integration’s that often just show notifications that don’t actually let you get work done.
Kevin William David interviewed Mariano Rodriguez Colombelli, CEO at Hibox to know more.
Hi Mariano, Can you tell us about Hibox?
Hibox is a powerful collaboration platform that fully integrates project management, team messaging and videoconferencing in the same app. Users also have their own AI virtual assistant to help them be even more productive.
Hibox helps companies increase productivity, save time managing tasks, reduce time spent in meetings, reduce dependence on email and improve communication.
Tell me more about why you are building this?
As companies adapt to flatter organizations, remote teams and the incorporation of millennials into the workforce traditional collaboration tools such as email are no longer the best solution. Managers are looking for a better way to communicate with their teams and keep track of what they are working on. A new breed of platform is needed and the opportunity is huge. Gartner estimates the value of the enterprise collaboration market will be over $49 billion by 2021.
Hibox came about as a “spinoff” from our company’s first collaboration product called Joincube, one of the leading Enterprise Social Networks in Latin America. By analyzing our clients’ use of Joincube we detected that smaller teams needed a faster, more agile communication method as well as an easy way to manage tasks and track progress. That’s when we first had the idea to create a chat for companies that directly integrates task and project management.
How is Hibox different from what already exists in the market?
Hibox was designed for real companies, not just tech savvy startups, all the essentials for collaboration are built- in without any need for external integrations. Hibox is the only solution that combines task management, chat and videoconferencing in the same tool.
Hibox uses Machine Learning to recognize patterns and learn from user behavior. Hibox can help you find the best person to assign tasks to based on skills and availability, predict how much time tasks will take, schedule meetings and much more.
We also detect and analyze employee sentiment in real time so managers to0 can make better decisions for their teams.
Some of our top competitors include Slack, Asana, HipChat and Trello. Each of these tools offers an incomplete vision of what your team needs to collaborate (i.e. just communication or just task/project management). Hibox offers a complete vision of productivity with 1) faster communication (team messaging), 2) keep track of your projects (task management) and 3) live discussions for remote work or separate offices (video calls).
Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Hibox?
Teams of all sizes and industries use Hibox. From teams on big corporations as 3M and Samsung to small companies and freelancers. Any team that wants to improve the way they work together, communicate and manage their tasks and projects could benefit from implementing Hibox.
We have seen significant interest from marketing teams, consultants, accountants, architects and lawyers.
Hibox is usually adopted by the entire team but roles that typically lead the implementation are project managers, team leaders, CEO’s and founders.
How are your customers using Hibox? Could you share a few different use cases?
Companies with multiple branches / offices use Hibox to improve communication between offices and have more visibility to what is going on in other branches.
Companies using Hibox to organize and manage tasks and files for each client (ex. Marketing agencies, human resources, accounting firms, law firms).
Founders and project managers looking for a better way to manage tasks online with their teams.
Have there been unique use cases for Hibox that you hadn’t thought of or expected?
There have been so many interesting use cases that we have seen where great teams use Hibox to get more done with less effort. We’ve seen everything from hospitals to large financial institutions to adult entertainment. Hibox really does work for all kinds of teams ;)
Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?
More than “growth hacks” what has been a huge catalyst for us is creating high quality content for our blog with great productivity and collaboration tips. It’s an awesome resource for staying up to date on the latest trends and finding creative ways to help your team work better together.
You can check it out here: https://www.hibox.co/blog/
What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?
The biggest challenge is resisting the temptation to add every new feature that a potential client asks for. Our goal has always been to make Hibox incredibly easy to use and intuitive — no user manual needed! We used tools like Net Promoter Score and client interviews to create buyer personas and identify what the common frustrations and goals were of our potential clients to decide which features to implement.
What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?
We added an integration with email that essentially lets users create an ad hoc integration with any external tool they want. All users need to do is set up their email notifications from the external app to be sent to the specific Hibox email designated for the group they want the notification to show up in. It’s a great way for users to keep everyone notified even if we don’t have a specific integration for that tool.
Finally, what are the top 5–10 products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?
Google Drive and Dropbox
They act as shared document tools. They allow you to create or upload any document with free access to modify or download them within your team. The big plus of this is that they automatically update and save your work!
At Hibox, we are an international team who work in different time zones and with different languages, so we need to be able to access our files anytime anywhere. This tool has become our best friend and we could not survive without it!
This tool manages your availability and acts as a calendar. You can set up your weekly schedule and the time zones are automatically detected. What we love is the automated follow up and to be able to manage team availability — from $0 to $10 per month, it’s a really good deal!
It creates and manages your meetings, and is very intuitive and efficient. The free deal offers many good features, such as video calling with up to ten participants etc.
Buffer sets and manages your social media accounts. A big plus is that you can connect Buffer with Feedly, which enables you to share articles from your favorite blogs and newspapers at whatever time you want.
This is one of the most famous CRM tools. It allows you to plan activities such as calls, meetings, appointments etc. You can track and manage everything, especially deals and conversations with customers. Note: it is recommended for smaller teams.
Intercom is used to chat directly with international customers. It is a win-win situation for you and your clients because you can reach them instantly whenever you have a question. It also helps keep track of your leads by giving you access to information about your customers.
This tool manages your email marketing and automations, sales and CRM. You can track your campaigns, know which one is going well, and get in touch with customers and prospects!
*surprise surprise*. It is awesome and we love it. We created it with everything you need to boost productivity. For real, you can collaborate with your coworkers and clients through special streams, you can do video calls, you can assign tasks — the list goes on! Group chat, video calling and task management in one single platform — everything with the help of Artificial Intelligence!
