"CRM for your life" might sound like a service that only highly organized nerds could love (especially if you call it customer relationship management for your life). But even those who don't obsessively sort their inbox by labels or color-code their closet by season can find something to love in Google Chrome extension Streak.
After graduating from Y-Combinator in early 2012, Streak went public with its service in March. The young company announced it just raised a $1.9 million funding round from Battery Ventures, Lowercase Capital, Redpoint, Floodgate, Crunchfund and get this, CRM heavy-hitter Salesforce.
Streak positions itself as a customer relationship management tool for your inbox. Instead of folders and labels in Gmail, Streak uses a spreadsheet system to organize projects and the e-mails that correspond to them. It can be used for sales people to track leads, friends who are planning a trip, or even journalists tracking story pitches. In my case, I use it to track an article from pitch to publish date.
To get started with Streak you create a pipeline, or themed file cabinet for notes and e-mails. Each pipeline comes with pre-made stages, or steps in your workflow. As a writer, my stages include pitch, in progress, and published, which help me organize ideas I plan to turn into stories, articles I've started, and articles that are finished and live.
When you get a new e-mail that you want to add to a pipeline, you create a box – a folder that stores the e-mail and any other helpful information – from a drop-down menu. For me, that means every e-mailed story pitch that catches my attention gets a box. As the pitch progresses into an article, I can add more relevant e-mails and notes to the box to help organize all the information I need, so I don't have to hunt for it later.
What makes Streak so useful is that it's completely customizable. You can tweak those stages by changing their name and color to fit your organizational logic. That's led people to use it for apartment hunting, wedding planning, travel, product management, and hiring. Streak founder Aleem Mawani says one of the service's earliest adopters, former Googler Adam Sah, liked Streak so much that he decided to invest.
Streak includes scads of other nifty features, including a notes field for each box, reminders for specific e-mails, and snippets – Streak's version of canned responses. You can share your pipelines with friends or co-workers, and track changes that others make to them with an activity feed. You can filter your boxes and add pipelines to your inbox, for an at-a-glance view of your workflow.
Though it's a powerful tool, it takes time to get used to. With a substantial learning curve, newbies might not pick up on Streak right away. But for enthusiasts of an organized life, and I proudly count myself among you, the time spent setting up Streak is well worth it. And for those of you who can't bothered to get organized, I'll wave on tax day as you stand in line for hours at the post office.
