500 Startups-Backed Cloud Productivity Tool 300.mg To Close Its Doors Next Week

Launching its public beta in the fall of last year, 300milligrams (also known as “300.mg,”) set out to build a “priority inbox for team conversations.” The startup was one of the 34 teams in 500 Startups’ Fall 2011 batch, and, after graduating in January, spent the first half of this year iterating, trying to find its stride, some follow-on funding, and a workable business model.

Alas, it seems that 300.mg was unable to find the cash it needed to press on, as TechCrunch learned today that the startup will be closing its doors next Friday, June 15th. According to an email sent to its users, the service will be officially shuttering its service on June 15th, and “all data will be deleted.”

Founded by Estonian serial entrepreneurs Mark Kopfman, Anton Litvinenko, and Jevgeni Holodkov, 300.mg aimed to be a solution to the fragmentation of business apps. When we spoke to Kopfman earlier this year, he told us that many businesses have become active users of a variety of cloud services, whether it be Dropbox, Google Apps, or Salesforce. But, with the distribution across different platforms, the web, desktop, and mobile, the founders believed employees struggled to find and organize their business-critical documents, complicating collaboration.

So, 300.mg offered a team communication tool that integrated with a host of cloud productivity apps, like Google Docs and Calendar, Evernote, Salesforce, Box.net, Basecamp, and Dropbox, to help them boost productivity through easier, all-in-one-place access to their documents, tasks and conversations.

Through its prioritization algorithm, which is based on users’ work activity streams, 300.mg surfaced threads that are most relevant to team members. It also aggregated and prioritized the most important email notifications from connected cloud apps, as well as offering a collaboration layer over work tools to let users discuss the most important items without switching between apps.

While the idea looks good on paper, enterprise social networks like Yammer have seized too much of the market, and there were just one two many moving parts for 300.mg. We’ve reached out to the team for more, and will update as soon as we hear back.

In the meantime, as you’ll see in the email below, it looks like the founders have already moved onto their next startup, called Import2, a service that helps businesses migrate their data between blogging platforms like Tumblr, WordPress, and Posterous. The service will be “launching soon.”

Find 300.mg here.

Email below:

300.mg Shutting Down Permanently

On June 15, 2012, 300.mg, notifications from people you work with, will shut down permanently and all the data will be deleted. We’d like to thank you for great support of 300.mg and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

If you are looking for a good substitute to 300.mg service we suggest you to try out yammer.com or hojoki.com.

Thanks,
300.mg Team

P.S. If you are curious, 300 Milligrams team will be focused on a new product for businesses using cloud – www.import2.com

UPDATE: Kopfman jokingly tells us that part of the startup’s decision to shutter its services was that “it was extremely hard to compete with email … He also said that the team is looking at this more as a “major pivot” than the end of the road. “With the new product import2.com,” he says, “we are going to contninue helping businesses with their challanges in using cloud apps.”