Springs company says e-mail isn't dead, focuses on video

E-mail ain’t dead yet. The Colorado Springs Internet start-up BombBomb wants to prove there’s plenty of life left in one of the earliest Internet technologies.

“(E-mail) has constantly been evolving as the workhorse of the Internet, but it’s not sexy,” said Conor McCluskey, BombBomb’s co-founder and CEO.

The business buzzwords these days are usually focused on social media, but good, old-fashioned e-mail can offer the same advantages, McCluskey said, and is more universal, with three times as many accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined, and is still growing.

What BombBomb delivers is video e-mail. Businesses record a short, targeted video message and a streaming video window gets placed inside an e-mail container. The technology is deceivingly simple — there are so many e-mail systems that providing video that works everywhere is a major headache for BombBomb — and it has proven popular with churches, real estate agents and other small business people who relate to their customers individually.

“We want those relationships,” McCluskey said. “It’s a shift back to the old days where it’s not how many people you know, it’s who.”

Although e-mail itself is now decades old, using video in e-mail has only really taken off with the advent of video-capable smartphones and HTML5, the newest standard powering the Web. McCluskey  began BombBomb five years ago, but has grown from three to nine employees in the past year and moved from McCluskey’s house to a hip loft workspace in Old Colorado City.

“People are finally comfortable making their own videos,” Beute said.

While businesses could simply attach a video to an e-mail message, BombBomb’s streaming window offers a better presentation, avoids file size limits and the sort of analytics — who watches the video, which links do they click on, how much time do they spend with the message — that businesses want out of their advertising.

“Mixing that text portion of my e-mail with a simple video is really simple, and, at this point, it’s still novel,” said Ethan Beute, BombBomb’s marketing director.

Churches were BombBomb’s first clients, said Darin Dawson, BombBomb’s chief relationship officer and co-founder. Ministers are obviously comfortable speaking publicly and church members are engaged and want to receive the information in a video e-mail.

Sending e-mails only to people who actually want to see them is one of BombBomb’s core values, he said.

“We liked the idea of churches,” Dawson said. “They send awesome e-mail.”

Another novel use is shopping. Personal shoppers at the Nordstrom’s in Park Meadows Mall use video e-mails to show clients new styles and new arrivals. It’s that kind of highly targeted approach that makes e-mail marketing work where spam e-mails fail, Beute said.

On a larger scale, Pikes Peak Library District and the World Arena are using BombBomb to highlight library events and arena shows, respectively. Mayor Steve Bach recently signed up, too. Those e-mails go out to thousands of people, Beute said, but it’s still an engaged audience.

“We don’t want people getting e-mails who don’t want to get them,” he said. “We hate spam.”

In true start-up fashion, McCluskey said he’s focused more on building market share than profitability for the time being. Still, he said, BombBomb’s customer base and revenues are growing month by month. And McCluskey believes his simple idea can grow very, very large.

“We want to grow a world-class business that changes the world,” McCluskey said. “The opportunity is, we think we can change the way people relate. And we think we can do that from Colorado Springs.”