Saturday night saw the launch demo of coedit, one of Dallas’ newest startups with a software tool that allows multiple people to easily co-author an email.

The official company name — coedit — styled with a lowercase “c” and underlined “co” underscores the idea of collaboration.

“If you’ve ever been stuck in one of those email or text loops where several people chime in with (a) modification about how an outbound email should look, or if you’ve ever had egg on your face for hitting send too soon without getting another pair of eyes on an email draft, then this is for you,” the coedit team told Dallas Innovates.

Editors note: Collaboration as a concept is important to coedit, and the company requested to speak our writer as a team.

“Our research and personal experience indicates that finding the sweet spot between too much input and too little is hard for a lot of businesses and teams to get right.”

Per research from Carleton University of 1,500 people in six organizations, office workers spend one-third of their time reading and answering emails, and 30 percent of those emails are not considered urgent or important. The coedit tool was built to improve email creation across teams working together helping to make email messaging more relevant and accurate.

Coedit email helps coworkers collaborate on an email via a Gmail extension that creates a shareable, secure link that allows all contributors to type and edit the same email in real time.

“Our research and personal experience indicates that finding the sweet spot between too much input and too little is hard for a lot of businesses and teams to get right,” said the team. “With coedit, the originator of the email provides the invitation to collaborate and makes the final decision before hitting send. We’ve found this really streamlines the process and tailors it to the individual initiating the collaboration.”

COEDIT: FROM PAIN POINT TO IDEA TO COMPANY

The bootstrapped company was co-founded by Zachary Wiles, a longtime Dallas startup scene-maker and serial entrepreneur going back to the early days of Tech Wildcatters, who also serves as CEO of coedit. Wiles is joined by co-founder and CCOO Christian Pascual, a designer and creative director with an early-state startup background.

The coedit team encountered a pain point working together in their own design agency realizing that companies need a collaborative voice when emailing because, as they described it, “Inaccurate communications are costly and embarrassing.” The solution was creating a tool they found indispensable – a one-button solution located within the Gmail compose window. With their combined startup backgrounds, it was a natural leap to think, “Wouldn’t it be cool if everyone in the world collaborated like this?”

“We really want to focus on the collaborative aspect of the authoring and editing process, so we underline the ‘co.’”

The result was founding the company and offering the coedit email tool to everyone. While the tool can be used by any sized business, out of the gate the team is focused on boutique agencies. According to the team, the tool helps meet the challenge of coordinating with freelancers, vendors and remote workers to put together a “rock solid” quote for a customer, an accurate status update, or the perfect phrasing for a product description or press release.

The official company name — coedit — with lowercase “c” and underlined “co” has a background story.

“We intentionally chose the way we display coedit. It’s more than just a portmanteau of collaborative editing,” explained the founding team. “We really want to focus on the collaborative aspect of the authoring and editing process, so we underline the ‘co.’ We also like the idea of using the lower case ‘c’ for a couple of reasons. There is no aggrandizement in a collaborative process, so dropping the capitalization made sense, like saying, ‘We came up with an idea.’ rather than ‘I came up with one.’”

The coedit email tool is an example of what the team described as its collaboration lifestyle, but as a Delaware public benefit corporation, coedit is built to scale and looking beyond its initial software launch to everything from face-to-face communication to artificial intelligence algorithms.

“We’re always looking for better ways to work together and to help others work together,” said the co-founders.

They added, “Ultimately, it’s not about the company as much as it is about a culture of working together and the future is definitely collaborative. We’re on the cutting edge of that.”