Stealth startup of the week: Blist takes on Excel

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Stealth startup of the week: Blist takes on Excel

Kevin Merritt already has one successful startup under his belt, Orange County e-mail archiving startup MessageRite which was sold to FrontBridge in 2004. But after FrontBridge was gobbled up by Microsoft two years ago, Merritt -- who had served as chief technology officer of FrontBridge and had moved to the Seattle area -- got the itch to pursue another idea that had been circulating in his head for a decade.

The 41-year-old entrepreneur founded blist eight months ago with the goal of creating Web-based tools in which everyone from sales professionals to fantasy football participants to working moms could interact with data in a much more visual manner than they do with spreadsheet software such as Microsoft's Excel.

"It is a database for the rest of us," said Merritt, adding that the blist service allows people to "play with data in all sorts of ways." That means a business manager could use the tool to track attendees at seminars, a sales manager could use it to stay on top of leads or an amateur investor could use it to analyze stock picks. Photos, music or Web sites can all be stored in the system.

"We are dealing with more and more information and right now people are using all sorts of inappropriate tools to manage the information," said Merritt, citing an example of a business manager who tracks sales leads with Microsoft Word. "... Nobody has innovated enough to make the applications easy enough for your average business person or your average consumer to manage your own data."

In addition to Microsoft's Excel, Merritt noted competition from Intuit's QuickBase and Vancouver, B.C.-based Dabble DB. Online lists providers -- such as Bla Bla List, Ta-da List and Remember the Milk -- also could be viewed as competition, though Merritt said they don't have the ability to search or analyze information.

"Most of these list managers, I think are designed for people with fairly small and manageable lists -- 20, 30 or 100 items," he said. "While you could certainly create a blist with 20 or 30 or 100 items, there is also no reason why you couldn't create one with 10,000 sales leads." That information, he said, would need to be searched and manipulated for it to be useful. It also could be maintained by various people or opened to the public, a reason that Merritt sometimes describes the startup as the "Wikipedia of structured data."

Based in Kirkland, the 8-person company plans a move to Pioneer Square Nov. 1. A launch of the Web-based service -- which will derive revenue from monthly subscriptions -- is scheduled for the next six to eight months.

Merritt has invested about $500,000 of his own capital in the startup, though a few California and Seattle venture capitalists have been knocking on his door. He's currently contemplating whether to raise capital now or wait until the launch is complete.

While Merritt calls MessageRite a solid "double" and a "pretty good exit," he is swinging for the fences with blist.

"We are addressing a far larger market," he said.

Posted by at October 17, 2007 11:36 a.m.
Category: Web 2.0

Comments

#58568

Posted by unregistered user at 10/17/07 3:35 p.m.

Is this similar to what SmartSheets is doing?

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