This project management tool from Cambodia wants to give Trello, Asana a run for their money

In 2016, Emanuele Faja (known as Manny among friends and in the tech industry) started a UI/UX and development agency, called Mäd, in his home country Cambodia. As the business grew, the number of software tools used in the company also grew. They were not just expensive but also complex to use.

“I had to spend a lot of time teaching both our team and clients on how to use and familiarise with various tools/platforms. I wanted to develop a simple tool, which would not just be easy to use but also powerful enough to run complex projects. This led me to create Bloo.io,” he tells e27.

Bloo.io, a product of Bloo Inc., a startup based out of Phnom Penh, is a project management tool. The product was developed and launched in April 2018 by Manny, who was later joined by Dong Truong, former CTO at Nam Kim Steel, a large steel company in Vietnam.

Beat the Bloo

An online platform, Bloo enables businesses (large and small) to manage all their team communications, files, ‘to-do’s, and processes. Business can sign up for an account on Bloo, create projects corresponding to each main functional divisions (sales, marketing, finance, web, brand, etc.), start building their processes, and track ‘to-do’ lists. All data and files uploaded are taggable, searchable, and can be accessed by web, Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android applications.

“Your teams can find all the information needed to do their jobs on Bloo, instead of using multiple disconnected tools,” he explains.

One of the critical features of Bloo is its user-friendliness, claims Manny. The product was tested for almost two years with employees that have little-to-no computer literacy, and they were able to pick up and use Bloo quickly, he says.

“Our apps follow Google Material design to ensure that anyone who has used any Google app (for example, Gmail) feels right at home. Our iOS app follows Apple’s Human Interface guidelines closely to ensure a familiar experience,” he continues.

A cost-effective and multi-lingual platform

Unlike its bigger competitors such as Trello, Asana, Basecamp, which charge clients on a pay-per-use basis, Bloo charges a flat fee of US$50 per month per organisation, irrespective of the number of users. Manny claims a 100-person organisation is likely to spend between US$25,000 and US$80,000 on similar software, but Bloo costs them just US$500 per year.

The Bloo platform also supports unlimited file hosting with files up to 2GB in size, whereas companies like Trello limit usage to 20MB on their free version, and only 250MB on premium accounts. According to Manny, this is a deterrent for companies, like architecture and design studios, that regularly deal with large file sizes. Bloo also claims to have built-in file management across all projects.

“Finally, the way we handle notifications is different from other tools. We give users complete control over notifications they want to receive. It is often a big issue on other platforms, where you either get spammed with lots of emails/push notifications or you receive no notifications about what’s important for you,” he asserts.

Manny believes that hundreds of millions of people in Asia, who are becoming knowledge workers, will need tools that are simpler to use and less intimidating than what Silicon Valley provides. Bloo aims to be one with its multi-lingual platform. It, however, doesn’t want to restrict itself to Asia.

Also Read: Cambodia to embrace tech future with the upcoming BarCamp ASEAN 2019

“Asia is a fast-growing market and is under-served. We have added many languages from this geography to our platform. Apart from English, the platform is available in Khmer and Vietnamese. We plan to eventually roll out in other languages such as Thai and Chinese and even Spanish,” he shares.

Besides, the company plans to take advantage of the changing tech landscape to differentiate itself from its competitors. “We have been able to use the latest technologies such as VueJS and GraphQL, which enable us to quickly ship features to customers. Besides, because of our smaller size, we can stay much closer to our customers.”

He also claims that many customers of Dropbox, Trello, Basecamp, Asana, and Briefcase have already switched to Bloo. “Our lower cost base may also make a lot of companies consider switching to us, especially if there is a recession in the future and budgets tighten up.”

Bloo, which underwent the Stripe Atlas startup programme in the US, has already integrated a payment feature to its platform, and has paying customers since day one, he says. “NGOs, banks, design agencies, schools, retail locations, and even a large multinational construction are already using Bloo,”

While it is a highly-competitive industry, Manny doesn’t see this as a ‘winner-takes-all’ market. It is always going to be very fragmented, he says. “There are over 30 million SMEs in the US alone, and several hundred million worldwide. Even a small share of this market is enough to build an extremely healthy business that provides great service to customers,” he concludes.

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