Info-enza is the term coined by Troy Malone, Chief Evangelist and Founder of Pelotonics, to define the absence of information epidemic that he commonly experienced as the Production Manager at Blue Sky Broadcast. His challenge—working on 40+ projects simultaneously, each with its own distinct clients, tasks, teams, and deadlines. After adopting David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system and switching to Basecamp for project management, Malone found himself more organized but still overwhelmed. Enter the vision behind Pelotonics, a web-based group collaboration solution for project management.

According to Malone, Pelotonics’ philosophy is to provide a layer of group productivity that still allows people to keep using their own personal productivity systems. Malone firmly believes that each individual has their own hybrid personal productivity system, and any group collaboration software needs to support and integrate each individual’s own system if the collaboration solution is going to solve typical project management challenges. Perhaps it’s this philosophy that has motivated Malone and his CTO, Daniel Marashlian, to focus on developing third-party integration options with services like Evernote. They’re attempting to integrate everything from Outlook to Remember the Milk with the Pelotonics platform to ensure that users can actually continue to use the GTD system of their choice.

At first glance, Pelotonics has the best feature set of any online group collaboration tool. I created a faux project to test the software and the Evernote integration, and although the interface didn’t feel as friendly as something 37Signals would build, it certainly became clear to me that the software is extremely robust, flexible, and intelligent.

Oh and if you’re wondering what the heck Pelotonics means (I was certainly clueless) look no further than the precision sport of cycling, where cyclists group together and ride in pelotons to maximize the efficiency of their ride. Smart right?

Pelotonics Quick Stats

  • $500,000 in funding from Angel investors
  • $0 for a free, 3 project, 1 GB plan
  • $24 - $199 p/month - price range of available paid plans
  • 2 full time employees, though they do use contractors
  • <100 paying customers

To Watch or Not

Pelotonics is feature-rich, Malone and Marashlian are incredibly savvy with their web strategies (check out PeloTV, they broadcast live daily), and they have .5 million in Angel investor funding to support their lean operation costs. Pelotonics battle, however, will be the battle of name recognition and conversions. Pelotonics beats Basecamp in a variety of ways, but 37Signals owns the group collaboration space in terms of name and awareness. Of course, Pelotnonics hopes that leveraging the customers of other services like Evernote will bring them additional attention, but should that audience chose to convert to paying customers is a question that remains to be answered.

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