Executive Summary

Many SMBs — especially small sales, support, and operations teams — treat Gmail as their primary workspace and suffer from inbox-driven chaos: leads, tasks, follow-ups and notes are scattered across threads, labels, and external apps, costing time and missed opportunities. This is a large addressable pain: roughly 30 million SMBs globally spend on average $400 per year on productivity/CRM apps (a $12.0B market), and many would trade a low-friction tool that reduces context switching and manual work. Build a Gmail-embedded product that pairs a Kanban board mapped to labels/threads with a lightweight CRM sidebar for contacts, companies, deal stages, templates, and one-click automations — delivered as a Gmail Add-on/Workspace Marketplace app with an optional Chrome extension so users don’t leave their inbox. Prioritize minute-scale setup, thread-level actions (drag-to-stage, templated replies, task assignment), and a data model that keeps customer data in the user’s Workspace account to simplify compliance and trust. Timing is favorable: workspace-embedded tools and the “inbox-as-workspace” trend are real, and stronger Workspace APIs make deeper integrations possible at lower engineering cost. With a market score of 92/100 and revenue potential 86/100, a well-integrated, competitively priced product can convert users faster than standalone tools, but distribution and Marketplace traction will determine how fast. You can stand out by delivering the cleanest in-mail Kanban UX (thread-native cards and zero-setup label sync), privacy-first data handling, and SMB-focused automations rather than trying to be a full CRM. Honest risks are platform dependence (API limits and UI changes), medium competition from Gmail-native and adjacent players, and the need to prove measurable time- or revenue-savings to justify paid tiers, so early efforts should target a few verticals with high email-driven workflows and tight feedback loops.

Market Opportunity

Reduce inbox chaos — Kanban + lightweight CRM embedded directly in Gmail targets a $12.0B = 30M SMBs x $400 ARR (avg spend on productivity/crm apps per SMB per year) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 10% CAGR for SMB productivity SaaS.

Key trends driving demand: workspace-embedded-tools -- users expect capabilities inside the apps they already use, reducing friction and increasing adoption; inbox-as-workspace -- inboxes have become the central hub for work execution, making in-mail workflow features high-leverage; api-first-saas -- stronger, more capable Workspace APIs enable deeper, reliable integrations at lower engineering cost; tool-consolidation -- SMBs are consolidating point tools to reduce costs and complexity, favoring multi-feature embedded apps.

Key competitors include Streak, Sortd, Gmelius, Drag, Trello (Atlassian) — adjacent workaround.

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Reduce inbox chaos — Kanban + lightweight CRM embedded directly in Gmail

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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