CloudSponge

CloudSponge provides software-as-a-service that handles address book importing from all major sources (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, MSN/Live/Hotmail, AOL, Outlook, OS X Address Book, and more).

A low monthly fee buys unlimited access to simple copy/paste HTML integration (about 5 minutes to get up and running) or an in-depth API. API wrappers are provided in all popular programming languages for simple integration for customers that prefer to use the API.

It’s free to try and easy to integrate. The website has a Test Drive that webmasters can use to see how the product works with their own address book, plus lots of Examples to see how other websites have used it.

The founding team is Jay Gibb, Jeff Natland and Dave Graham from Arizona Bay.  We have been working together for more than 10 years.  We've been exclusively serving the startup market with system architecture, programming, software design and full concept-to-launch-to-maintenance life cycles for entrepreneurs.  We have worked with more than 100 startups and we're very excited to have co-founded CloudSponge.

The development team is Blair De Jong (Customer Development), Graeme Rouse (Lead Developer), Jim Humiski (Principal Developer), Kevin Willock (Infrastructure) and Kyle Johnstone (Sales).  All of them have worked with the founders for several years on a variety of projects.  Jim, Kevin and Graeme in particular have been with us for more than 7 years each.

We're a tight team who knows each other very well and we've had strong working relationships through thick and thin for a long time.  Each member is excellent at what they do and the quality of our software reflects that.

We have a subscription-based revenue model for our software-as-a-service business.  $25/month or $275/year for unlimited address book imports.  Affiliate, Reseller and Integration Partner revenue sharing programs are in place (by request only) to drive growth.  Search engine marketing and heavy participation in developer communities drives significant amount of traffic from people who are seeking a solution for address book importing.

Our primary competitive advantages are our focus and simplicity.  The other companies who provide this type of functionality (there are only a couple) either a) do it as a byproduct of their primary business or b) the provide a complicated software package that needs to be installed and configured by a sophisticated developer.

Address book importing is our entire business.  We're dedicated to keeping it working at all times and making sure that as contact sources change their APIs or data structures, we change with them as quickly as possible.  Customer support is our first priority and addressing customer feedback quickly has resulted in 100% happy customers.

Simplicity is our goal.  Customers who want to get up and running quickly can copy and paste our HTML snippet into their website and be up and running within a few minutes.  Those who prefer a more customized solution can use our pre-written API wrappers to get our data into their website's programming language (Ruby, C#, Java, PHP, etc.) in a few minutes, then manipulate it themselves however they like.