An Open Letter to the YouSendIt Staff:

This month, YouSendIt completed a $10-million round of funding. Sigma Partners was the lead investor, contributing $6 million. The other $4 million came from our existing investors, Sevin Rosen and Alloy Ventures.

Closing the “B” round of funding is a major milestone for all of us at YouSendIt. To have a significant amount of funds in the bank is obviously a good thing. Yet, how did we get here?

We got to here because our customers have told our investors that YouSendIt is a mission critical service.  Without YouSendIt, they won’t be able to communicate with their business clients, partners and colleagues efficiently and effectively.

Every month, more than 320,000 new customers come to register and use our services, while more than 4,000 new subscribers sign-up for our paid plans. We now have more than 4 million registered users and 22,000 subscribers. And we’re growing rapidly.

Where will YouSendIt go from here?
Is it possible for us to become the premier digital content delivery and management services on the Web? Will our customers value that? According to industry research, more than 180 billion e-mails are sent with attachments each year, and that number is growing. How many of those e-mails were bounced by the recipient e-mail servers because the attachments were too heavy?
If even one percent of those were bounced back, that is 1.8 billion e-mails.

Can we solve that e-mail bounce-back problem? You bet. We do that every day, every minute, for thousands and thousands of our customers. 

Around 70% of business operation processes are built around documents. From a simple sales contract negotiation, to a creative design review at an advertising agency involving multiple stakeholders, a multi-tier review process for an RFI/RFQ to HR documents, marketing plans and press releases – every day documents need to be shared, reviewed, and approved inside companies and across company boundaries – from SOHO to large enterprise.

These document-based workflows typically involve small groups of people collaborating over time, in both synchronous (real time) and asynchronous (offline) modes. For example, a project lead may use a Web conferencing tool to kick start the project. In the Web conference, the project lead may use PowerPoint (or other tools) to review the objectives, timeline, dependencies etc., and close the meeting with a schedule for the next meeting. The project members then will start to work on their sections of the project by collaborating with each other and sending documents around for review, comments and updates. The project team may come together again through Web conferencing a few more times to check on progress and resolve discrepancies. In between Web conferences, the project members will rely on document collaboration tools to move the project forward.

Can we become the platform for integrating a valuable sync-and-async-collaboration solution? You bet. That is in our roadmap. The first phase of that project is targeted for release in Q3 of 2007.

Are we going to deliver Web conferencing tools? No. We will expand our current API to allow easy integration of Web conferencing tools into our content delivery and management services. It will require work on both engineering and business development fronts to get Web conferencing capabilities onto our platform. That is do-able and desirable.

Obviously we need to continue to build out and open up our services.
We must continue to build out many more application plug-ins so the use of our services will become seamlessly integrated with our customers’ business workflow. These application program interfaces and plug-ins, together with a rapidly growing customer base, will propel us into an even faster growth rate. As our customer base continues to expand, third-party developers will want to build out their applications and offer them to our millions of customers. As those applications add value to our customer base, many more customers will join the YouSendIt network, thereby attracting even more developers to create even more applications on our platform.

While growing the business, we must focus on satisfying our customers 100 percent of the time.
It is a tall order. But it is critical to us. Why? Seventy percent of our customers came to us through referrals. Many of our customers put their own reputation on the line to refer our services to their business clients and colleagues. We must continue to offer a wonderful user experience to our customers; otherwise we will risk dampening our current growth rate. 

To continue to improve on the customer experience, we will be deploying a knowledge- base system to enable customer self-serve and chat solutions. Our customers are busy knowledge workers in a highly competitive environment. They value their time and want to stay efficient at all times. A self-serve solution, if done right, is the most efficient model and renders the highest customer satisfaction. The new self-serve solution will be deployed in Q3 of 2007. We will continue systematically to measure customer satisfaction to ensure our customers that we are the guaranteed easy-worry-free content delivery and management services for them.

We have a lot to do, don’t we?
Last year has been both challenging and exciting for all of us. You have always made my job easy.  Without the dedication and innovation from you, we won’t be here today.  I am very grateful for all your effort and the results generated and I will do the best job I can to help make YouSendIt an even better place to be for you, the trusted brand for our customers and a sound investment for our investors.

Thanks.
Ivan Koon, CEO