OtherInbox featured in the 2010 McCombs BBA Fall Case Competition at the University of Texas

November 8 2010, 4:34pm

This past Saturday, OtherInbox was honored to be the case study in the McCombs BBA Fall Case Competition at the prestigious Red McCombs School of Business located within the University of Texas here in Austin.

Every year the undergraduate students take on a consulting case for a real business and help tackle some of their business or industry-related issues. In the past they have profiled Fortune 500 companies such as Dell, Motorola, Ford and IBM. This year, with sponsorship from Conoco-Phillips, Accenture and Disney (!) they selected our very own OtherInbox as a platinum presenting sponsor and case study. We were thrilled! OtherInbox (OIB) is at a very interesting point in our business cycle. We have had tremendous growth in the last year and are rolling out new and exciting features constantly to make Organizer more robust, easier to use and better than ever. We wondered how UT’s brightest business students would best capitalize on our rapid growth, sustain our momentum and reach new users all with a start-up’s conservative budget. We were not disappointed by the presentations! Our founder and CEO, Joshua Baer brought along team members Dave Wilby, Hoon Park and myself, John Rodriguez (J-Ro) to serve as preliminary judges and to represent OIB. We saw a ton of new ideas about our company and, perhaps most importantly, a ton of validation for some of the things being thrown around the office and drawn up on the whiteboards. The competition involved 16, four-person teams who had a work week to look over a cache of data from OIB including resources, products, tools, needs and more. The resulting presentations were judged on whether or not they delivered feasible solutions, credibility and of course, presentation skills. Only 4 teams moved on to the finals round where Josh and UT Alumni Tim Garippa and Eric Sung served as judges under the leadership of John Doggett, senior MBA program lecturer at UT’s McCombs School of Business. Anyone in the room during the finals presentation truly received a crash course in Global Entrepreneurship! In the end, after nearly 8 hours of scrutiny and questioning, the Tower Solutions team emerged victorious having delivered a business presentation one might expect from a larger, seasoned consulting firm. The team of Gautam Shah, Christopher Schulze, Kelley Rytlewski and Michael Koetting took home $1000.00 and advanced to a national round at USC. Good luck guys! Josh was completely stoked and tweeted about the experience -  “Wow! Very impressed with the case competition results!” John Doggett said, “This is the best case competition I have seen in a long time! The product and the company were very worthwhile efforts for our students. OtherInbox is a great start-up and offered (our students) something they could really care about.”  Thanks John…  It showed and we had a blast! Remember, we are always up for suggestions on how to make Organizer better. Tell us how you would do it! Please don’t hesitate to send us an email at help@otherinbox.com or ping us at @OtherInbox on Twitter, we’re all ears! No MBA necessary…