Limnu shines when people are using it together.
There are some really great things about working remotely. Pants are optional. Snacks are abundant. My cubicle is the size of a house. But there are some not really great things about working remotely, like the lack of whiteboards. Business is built on whiteboards. The ability for a presenter to draw concepts and lend greater understanding to his or her team is invaluable, and it’s a conceptual understanding remote employees always miss out on. Until now.
Limnu is an online collaborative whiteboard. It’s not a drawing app. It’s not for graph or chart production and it’s not a to-do list. It’s simply a whiteboard, and that simplicity is what sets Limnu apart. “We tried to make sure we didn’t put too much into it,” co-founder David ‘Grue’ DeBry says. Too many unnecessary features, DeBry and his co-founder David Hart knew, would make their product clunky and slow. “The last thing you want to do is slow people down,” DeBry says.
Both DeBry and Hart have a background in digital media and art, so they were well-suited to create Limnu. But they didn’t build this product just because they thought they might do a good job. They built Limnu because there was a problem that needed to be solved. At his last startup, DeBry managed a team that was spread all over North America, and, during calls, one of the things he heard most from his team members was, “I wish I could draw this idea for you.” He and his fellow workers tried every available online whiteboard tool but all were found wanting. “They didn’t scale well, they were slow, and clunky,” he explains. So he and Hart built a whiteboard prototype.
They introduced their prototype to a handful of users and were met with overwhelming enthusiasm. They soon realized they had something people were excited about, so they quit their jobs and made Limnu a company of the legit variety.
In the last few months things have really taken off for DeBry and Hart, a growth that can be attributed not just to the quality of the Limnu whiteboard but to the integrations DeBry and Hart have built into the product. On the very day Slack announced its app store, Limnu was there and was the only whiteboard available. Since then people from all sorts of Slack teams have started using and loving Limnu. More than half the countries in the world are using Limnu and in the next couple of months DeBry and Hart anticipate their user base to grow from thousands to tens of thousands as more teams use Limnu for collaboration. “Limnu shines when people are using it together,” DeBry says.
Part of what makes Limnu an optimal tool for teams is the video chat functionality from appear.in. “Limnu is intended for a conversation, not a presentation,” Hart says. The ability to video chat within Limnu makes conversations seamless as meeting in a boardroom. Maybe more seamless. Because pants optional.
DeBry and Hart hope to see the excitement about their product spread. Excitement from people like Rodolfo, an educator who says, “Although there are other options on the market, Limnu stands out for its simplicity and quality,” and James, a business owner who says, “We’ve been looking for something like this. We’ve tried other ones and they’ve all frankly sucked. [Limnu] is outstanding.”
Up to this point, the goal for DeBry and Hart has been user growth and satisfaction, not revenue. But they have so many more things they hope to do with Limnu and they need more hours and manpower to do it. So they’re ready to start raising funds. Their hope is that their velocity of growth will feed the argument that Limnu is a product worth investing in.
The two co-founders will be presenting at LaunchUp on March 24. They also were kind enough to draw up this awesome Beehive Startups logo.
Published 3/11/2016
