I recently had the opportunity to interview Boris Jabes, the Co-Founder of Meldium, an account and password management tool designed for teams. The interview allowed us the ability to understand more about why password management systems can be useful and what separates Meldium from all the other companies out there in their space who are focusing on the same products.

What Made You Guys Decide to Come up with Meldium?

In typical startup fashion, we were fed up with the way things were. While working at startups, we loved using web apps to get our work done faster, letting us focus on building our product. Thanks to the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS), companies no longer need to waste time & money setting up servers and administering services that are available as a monthly subscription on the Web. The best part is that anyone with a credit card can get powerful apps up and running without assistance from an IT team. Need a way to chat within your team? You can be up and running with HipChat in minutes. The unfortunate side effect of using the Web is that we’ve ended up with passwords & accounts all over the place. Teams are forced to share passwords by email or with a spreadsheet, which really doesn’t make life any easier. Even worse for admins, the onboarding (and termination) process has become chaotic and insecure. Meldium solves this by providing a central place to manage a team’s passwords & accounts. Instead of sharing a spreadsheet, everyone gets a launchpad for your web apps that automatically logs them in. Instead of creating accounts on dozens of web apps, you can add people to every app (e.g. Google, Dropbox) with one click.

Who Are Some of Your Competitors and How Do You Differ?

There are two kinds of competitors out there: password managers and enterprise single-sign-on tools. Meldium strikes a balance between these two ends of the spectrum. For example, most password managers are not designed for teams. With Meldium, admins can do powerful things like onboarding users across web applications and control who has access to sensitive accounts (instead of sharing a single giant list). Another key difference is that we’ve emphasized simplicity and ease of use. Traditionally, products in this space are built for geeks and IT specialists. The whole point of moving to cloud services is that we can take advantage of great apps without resorting to IT. Anyone on a team can get started with Meldium and it doesn’t require any special knowledge to act as an administrator for a team. Ultimately what matters is to pick some kind of system instead of letting passwords proliferate chaotically. While we’d rather you pick Meldium, it’s better to have some kind of system rather than none!

What Are the Advantages to Using a Tool Like Yours?

There are so many ways that Meldium makes our lives easier and here’s just a few examples:

1. Onboarding new people is simpler. With one click, you can add a new employee to all the right apps and from their customized dashboard they can jump in on day.
2. Never having to remember your passwords. We’re all overwhelmed with passwords and when you couple personal accounts with shared work accounts, it quickly becomes too much to remember. Meldium automatically logs you in so you don’t have to!
3. It’s a more secure way to share accounts. Recent attacks against brands on Twitter were made possible because employees were tricked into typing shared passwords. With Meldium, users don’t know your critical passwords and you can avoid a huge class of security headaches all while enjoying a smooth sharing experience.

Does Meldium Work for SMBs as Well as Larger Companies/Teams?

Meldium is perfectly well-suited for teams large & small. In fact, the majority of our customers are small & medium businesses! It doesn’t hurt that smaller businesses are moving to the web faster than ever. We designed the application to make it simple for anyone to sign up, whether you’re a brand manager looking to manage a social media team or an office manager trying to improve the onboarding & termination process for your team.

What’s the Best Part About Being an Entrepreneur?

For us it has been the close relationship with our customers. In a traditional environment the people building the product are rarely the same as those who interact with the customers. In our case, we get to own the whole cycle – from taking feature requests, to writing the code, to support & bug fixes – we get to do it all. As a result, the joy we experience when we deliver something our users want is amplified. Having that tight relationship with our customers has been very gratifying. We live for feedback!

Give Meldium a try and let us know your thoughts below.

Boris Jabes is the co-founder of Meldium, an account & password manager designed for teams. His mission is to make it simple to build a business using modern web applications. Prior to founding Meldium, Boris spent time as a PM and lead working on developer tools at Microsoft. He hails from Canada and considers every sunny day in California a gift!