It has happened to all of us. You get a ton of emails and you just cant find that attachment you received a week ago and now that it’s due, you have two options: You either rebother the sender… or dig through old emails for the paperclip icon until you finally find it. What we need is a way to easily manage our attachments and that is precisely what Dittach is doing. With the app, you simply insert your email address and then filter it down to what type of file you are looking for or the sender and it wont take more than a few seconds to locate. This is something we’ve all complained about and it is finally here.
We spoke with CEO Daniel Gelernter about the app and where it plans to go in the short and long term.
Tell us about the product.
You waste time every day looking for email attachments. But if you spend ten minutes looking for
an attachment in your emailer, you could find it with Dittach in ten seconds. We give the user direct access to his email storage in a browsable, searchable feed that includes the entire history of his inbox – even if it goes back ten or fifteen years. You can read files in Dittach without having to download them, and you can forward or share them direct from the app. We are already available for Gmail on iPhone and iPad and are expanding rapidly to other platforms.
How is it different?
You might have 10 or 15GB of data in your email attachments. That’s your storage. But emailers aren’t interested in letting you use it as your storage – you can’t access it as you’d access the files on your own computer. We’re the only ones who unlock a user’s complete email storage.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
Anyone who uses email will have encountered this problem occasionally, but we’re especially going after the millions of young professionals who have to deal with a half-dozen attachments on a daily basis and for whom any attachment more than a few days old is liable to get lost.
What is the business model?
We’ve started by building a consumer app that is completely free. We are currently developing a paid prosumer version that offers multiple accounts and more sophisticated file management capability for a small monthly fee.
What inspired the business?
Frustration. I’d just spent ten minutes looking for an attachment, couldn’t find it and had to ask my friend to resend it. It occurred to me that there was no reason it had to be that hard.
Why do you consider this a stand-alone business rather than a feature in a larger company’s product offering?
Absolutely the best question. The answer: Email isn’t the only place you store your digital life. It’s the largest right now, but it won’t always be that way. Our ultimate goal is integration across all storage platforms – to unify the fragments of your digital life and give you the overall picture. In the future we’ll be integrating with cloud storage services and social networks as well.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
We’ll be available for Desktop and Android and will have Outlook compatibility. We’re also planning some exciting integrations with other services but can’t tell you what they are yet.
What is the one piece of startup advice that you never got?
Find a mentor. It may seem obvious, but if you set out to learn it all by yourself, your first company is likely to be a very time-consuming and frustrating set of training wheels.
If you could be put in touch with anyone in the New York community who would it be and why?
A great software developer who’s willing to work for equity. Times ten.
Why did you launch in New York?
New York has always held a sort of mystical fascination for me and it’s one of the reasons I started a company in the first place – so I could move to and work in the city. It’s always on, always happening. I’ve heard people say that the energy is going to Austin or Europe, but I think New York remains far and away the most vibrant city in the world.
Where is your favorite bar in the city for an after work drink?
Paddy Reilly’s on 29th and 2nd Ave. It’s just the best bar for low-key hanging out, if you like Guinness and live music, which you should.
