Jonathan George on the failure of Evomail, starting over and how Wichita can support entrepreneurs

Wichita entrepreneur Jonathan George has been doing a lot of reflecting lately.

The startup he co-founded and led, Evomail, failed earlier this year, and it sent him into a two-month period where he ignored emails, focused on family and didn't set an alarm.

Now he's back in the startup world. He's getting involved in the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce's Entrepreneurship Task Force, and he's working with two business partners on a new startup, a social media payment concept he refers to as "Secret Project X."

And he's talking more about what happened. During the summer, when it appeared that Evomail had stopped maintaining its email management app, I wasn't able to reach George. This week, he talked with me about what went wrong and what he learned.

'We ran out of money'

Evomail was to be a solution to the challenge of managing email on mobile devices.

But as it turns out, George says, there isn't really one big problem with email.

"There are a million different problems," he says.

He says it was hard to find a market for the product because everyone is looking for something different in an email solution.

The challenge was compounded by some cash-flow problems.

Evomail raised $100,000 in capital to do something expensive. The app wasn't supposed to be just a layer between the user and an email client. Evomail developed a proprietary cloud solution to host emails itself, giving the company much greater control over the user experience.

"We tried to recreate the whole back end," George says. "It was incredibly expensive to run those servers."

The revenue was to come from enterprise contracts. Evomail announced its first, for $280,000 per year, in February. But when that client started slow-paying, then cut the scope of the project in half at the last minute, it created immediate cash-flow problems at Evomail, George says.

Emily Behlmann oversees the website and other digital projects. She covers technology. For technology news, subscribe to the WBJ's free TechFlash newsletter.