FeatureUC&C31 May 2018 · 6 min read

Wrinkl Messaging Transforms Differentiation into Innovation

As more companies embrace group collaboration and messaging apps, Wrinkl is a tool designed to make people think differently about communication.

Rob Scott

Today, almost every company has some form of messaging or collaboration app designed to help them communicate with speed. In a world where many organisations see email as outdated or inappropriate, Wrinkl is designed to bring speed and simplicity back to the communication experience. Rather than simply reiterating what other collaboration groups are doing, Wrinkl started their solution from scratch, building it with a focus on innovation and invention.

We had a fantastic opportunity to sit down with the passionate CEO of Wrinkl, Marc Cohen. A serial entrepreneur, Marc is now onto his sixth business with Wrinkl. Over the years, he's designed companies focusing on everything from IVR to speech recognition, and all of his ventures have been profitable. However, despite his prior success, nothing has been more exciting to Cohen than his brand-new messaging app.

Tell Us About Wrinkl and Where it Started?

It's easy for anyone to see just how huge team-based messaging applications have become in the modern age. However, Wrinkl is far more than just a response to a market trend. Cohen told me that the company started in 2015, and they began developing their software in the Spring of 2016.

"We started with a very unique goal in mind. We have a fundamentally different philosophy when it comes to communication, and when we started our app, we hadn't even heard of other messaging brands like Slack. We started because we'd noticed a trend towards a distributed workforce. We knew that people wanted to work remotely, but there were a lot of issues with retention, recognition, and engagement, and we wanted to solve those issues."

As Wrinkl began to experiment with their own technology, they started playing with other communication tools, but they felt those systems were distinctly limited.

"Group messaging, in general, is very noisy and perishable. We wanted an app that made things simpler and stopped us from having to switch between multiple channels at once."

One of the most exciting things about Wrinkl is the company's commitment to innovation. They have a very exciting patent portfolio.

"For instance, one of the things we have to deal with the noise of the group messaging app is "Sidebars". These are for when you're having a conversation in a group, but you want to message someone privately. Sidebars allow you to switch to a private conversation without having to leave the channel."

How Much Do You Think Team Apps Can Reduce Email Overload?

A lot of the companies focusing on team messaging and collaboration apps today claim that they want to essentially eliminate email from the communication conversation. However, Wrinkl doesn't believe that this is necessarily the right way to go. According to Wrinkl, email is here to stay for a while yet. Marc told me:

"Email isn't going away anytime soon, and anyone who tells you differently is either misleading you or overly ambitious. Email has its limitations, but people are comfortable with it."

For Wrinkl, the aim isn't to destroy email, but work with it. "We've actually integrated email into our system to give people a more comprehensive experience. For instance, if you're in a group marketing channel and you want to send a message to someone outside of that channel, we don't think you should have to switch to your email app. Instead, you can simply click on the little envelope and send a message out to someone."

With their single-pane-of-glass approach to collaboration and group messaging, you can send an email without leaving a page, and the message can be posted both on the channel and to the third party's email address. What's more, when someone sends an email back, it goes to Wrinkl, where it starts off in a private message, and can then be shared with the rest of the team.

"We're not trying to destroy email, we're trying to co-opt it"

To some extent, that's an insight into how Wrinkl is dealing with the rising issue of external comms too. When it comes to communication with the world outside of a business, everyone's thinking about security, and Cohen told me that "Security is paramount to us, we have all the protections our peers have, and then additional levels of security too. There's the question of network security, and then the security of control. Like you can set your system up to receive emails back from a third-party for 24 hours or a week, to reduce the risk of spam."

What Does the Future Look like for Wrinkl?

To some extent, Wrinkl is already a highly futuristic app - but this is a company that's not going to sit on its laurels. Cohen told me that the brand is constantly developing new innovations and patents - and that's something they have a lot of pride in.

"We're a small company, but PC magazine already rates us above Atlassian Stride and on par with Workplace by Facebook - and we're just getting started."

From the very beginning, Wrinkl knew that they wanted to do something different. "We kept ourselves under wraps until we had something that would really rock peoples' worlds. We work around the clock, seven days a week so that we can say we're not just painting team messaging a different colour, we're doing something really different. All of our competitors are doing the same things. They're not innovating, they're differentiating - and there's a big difference."

One example that Cohen gave on how Wrinkl sets itself apart is with search. While many competitors are talking about search and what it can do, Wrinkl has not only a good search feature but a solution that helps to cut down on searching too. "We have the channel mode, where your standard conversations take place, then the "at a glance" mode where you can grab messages that matter most to you."

Wrinkl deals with the issue of perishability in messaging apps too, for instance with their "lists" feature, where they can tag messages as outstanding, so you can see which tasks you haven't dealt with yet. There's also the "Bundles" feature where you can bring messages together to show how a decision was made or a solution was found.

How Does Wrinkl Go to Market?

Finally, I asked Marc about Wrinkl's go-to-market strategy for those interested in getting involved. The company has its own free trial model which you can get by going to the website and downloading the system for up to 60 days. After that, it's either $5 per user per month for a subscription, or $36 per user per year.

"Our go to market strategy is a bit of everything right now. We're driving people to our website, going direct to other companies, and talking to channel partners. We're looking at every possibility, and then we'll double down on whatever works best."

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