Unitonomy

Unitonomy is halfway to its investment goal on Wefunder! We just won the Render Capital Competition (another $100k investment) and have some other good news to share.

KNOW MORE FASTER: UNITONOMY SELLS INFORMATION & KNOWLEDGE SOLUTIONS TO INDIVIDUALS AND TEAMS

Unitonomy is starting by augmenting the inbox with our product Glvvv. Email sits at the core of work. Email is made for correspondence yet we use email for much more than that. Email doesn't help us manage our work, manage information, or manage ourselves. We are unbundling the email experience and focusing on the habit where we can make an immediate impact: emailing ourselves reminders.

Excited? That's just the start.

For the 1 billion knowledge workers in the world, work communication is all over the place. The disconnect is not just siloed systems. So many messages, so many channels, so many apps. Knowledge gets lost. Information is missed. Connection dissolves. And now work is going remote?

Knowledge workers need help managing knowledge and information. 

Companies need help cultivating culture.

These are related problems that AI & software can solve.

Soon AI-powered software will dramatically improve productivity (you), collaboration (your team), and work culture (your organization) by augmenting the communication tools of knowledge workers.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of scaling my previous startup, Touchcast, was cultivating how we worked as a team. We grew to over 100 people across 7 time zones. Each of our teams had a specific, siloed system that helped them coordinate their efforts (Jira for the tech team, Salesforce for sales, Zendesk for customer support, etc.). With so many siloed applications, important information got lost and often details were never communicated across teams.

Like most modern companies at this stage, Touchcast turned to Slack. Soon we were drowning in messages and alerts. So we ran more meetings. Instead of improving our culture, we were making it inefficient and productivity suffered. We've found that this same story plays out across organizations worldwide.

We thought we had a culture problem. In reality, we had a communication problem. We needed help managing and transferring our information and knowledge.

According to Gartner, enterprise companies spent over $2,000 per employee in 2018 on consultants and workshops to change company culture and improve communication. Meanwhile knowledge workers are spend 80% of their time communicating in email, messaging systems and meetings, according to Gallup.

This is a really valuable problem to solve: can communication be enhanced to make information and knowledge transfer efficient and effective? Because that's how you change culture.

Whoever defines the market owns the market.

Culture management software is a nascent market that Unitonomy will define and corner. (we already vie for the top SEO ranking!) Whereas the productivity and people operations markets are focused on serving or managing the individual employee, culture management software focuses on the mechanisms and conditions for good communication and collaboration.

The time is now to offer innovative software solutions that cultivate employee connection through better communication and AI for 3 reasons:

• The covid-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to remote work, and that is accelerating the adoption of new tools and systems to help manage information and communication.
• AI technology (like GPT-3) has matured to where we’re going to see an explosion of systems that augment knowledge workers in the coming years. 
1. We’ve reached a tipping point when it comes to engagement, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Companies are investing in their culture.
   

1. Our total addressable market is massive:
   

• 60M knowledge workers in the U.S. / ~1B in the world
• With the pandemic forcing companies to work remotely, Gartner reports 82% of company leaders plan flexibility for employees to work remotely moving forward.

Our products don't replace communication systems like email or instant messaging. Our products augment them. 

We've built an engine to augment knowledge workers across the communication tools and systems they already use. Using the metaphor of a car's transmission, here's how communication transmits between capturing and organizing (we've already developed the green blocks):

This engine enables the potential to scale and expand quickly. In ten years, we envision Unitonomy offering products spanning the specific needs of internal communication across workplace culture. 

Utilizing this advantage, our wedge to drive adoption is our product Glvvv. So many people email themselves reminders and Glvvv keeps this act just as fast and automatically categorizes the information.

Our beta products are opening to the public as we launch our WeFunder campaign.

By late summer of 2019, a group of people joined me on the Unitonomy mission because they saw the vision, believed in me, and wanted on board. The pandemic forced us to change plans around when to run private beta pilots and fundraise. The silver lining is we used the time to develop Glvvv.

Now with companies adapting their cultures to remote work, demand is running high for the solutions Unitonomy is providing.

Launch on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/getcommit-by-unitonomy

There's a softer side of knowledge that companies need to understand: how do employees feel about their work?

A critical part of internal communication. is listening, and that's what OrgVitals does. Unitonomy took research from the University of Louisville that surveys employees. Using our engine, we created OrgVitals to ask employees how they feel about their work experience, their collaborations, and the overall culture. 

But how we ring the cash register doesn't matter if we can't build awareness with customers. 

Our customer for Glvvv is the individual knowledge worker. Our aim is to have Glvvv customers tell their boss and have companies use GetCommit.

Unitonomy is putting significant effort into running acquisition experiments to understand which segments of customers convert through different mechanisms:

One core strategy comes from our first investor (Garrett French, citationlabs.com): lead with generosity. Unitonomy provides free tools that get people to our website. This includes the User Manual  (fun tool to generate a presentation that's all about you as a collaborator to share with your team). Give them a try!

Through these experiments we've cracked SEO and Unitonomy already ranks at the top for "culture management" out of 2.5B webpages!

We are confident we are well-geared to execute on our vision because of the quality of our team. We are 9 people full-time and 3 part-time (plus sales reps working part-time on commission).

Three advisors joined us: employee engagement researcher Dr. Brad Shuck from the University of Louisville; Martin Low, founder of OnPlane Consulting and formerly of Amazon; and Christopher Davis, senior product designer at Trello (Atlassian).

As the pandemic hit, we paused our initial fundraising (we raised about half of our $500k goal just as quarantine began). We hunkered down to mature our beta software. Now is the time to formally launch our beta products and renew our fundraising. 

To date, the Unitonomy team is super proud of what we've accomplished in short order and despite the global pandemic:

We are creating something valuable, to not just improve our customers' lives today, but to position them better for the future. We know the commitment and time such an endeavor takes because we've already lived it. We hope you will join us on the journey.

Unitonomy, Culture Management Software. Help people work together better.