There prob­a­bly aren’t that many prod­uct man­agers who’d claim to love email. Turn your back on your inbox for five min­utes and it’s clut­tered again, often with stuff you don’t want and didn’t ask for. And as for com­ing back to it after a vaca­tion, well, that’s a whole oth­er sto­ry. But one tech start­up CEO sin­cere­ly does love email, not least because every­one still uses it. And, says Lee Ott (co-founder and CEO of Palo Alto-based ‘Rokket Launch’) most of it, no mat­ter how volu­mi­nous it might be, isn’t junk. Rokket Launch aims to sort it all out, mak­ing man­age­able and ordered mole­hills out of moun­tains of elec­tron­ic jumble.

PeeqPeeq’s progress 

Prod­uct numero uno for the start­up, which has raised $1.25 mil­lion so far, is the quaint­ly named app Pee­qPeeq. What, the curi­ous prod­uct man­ag­er will be won­der­ing, is a Pee­qPeeq? The clue’s in the sound rather than the spelling: it peeks through all the shop­ping-relat­ed emails in the user’s inbox, sucks them up and orga­nizes them into a Web store acces­si­ble by desk­top PCs, iPads and iPhones. And it neat­ly places all the shop­ping-relat­ed mes­sages into a sep­a­rate fold­er exter­nal to the inbox.

Ott likens it to a kind of Flip­board or Zite for shop­ping. And Pee­qPeeq does some pret­ty clever things in addi­tion, like pick­ing up when a sale is due to end or comb­ing a retailer’s web­site so that it knows exact­ly which items qual­i­fy for the storewide dis­count it’s just sent an email about. It becomes a con­tin­u­al­ly updat­ed cat­a­log of things to buy. That’s a good deal more pos­i­tive than all those apps out there pres­sur­iz­ing users into total­ly clean­ing out their inbox­es, as most prod­uct man­agers would prob­a­bly agree. For Pee­qPeeq, email is a resource, not a burden.

More in the pipeline 

Shop­ping is just the first step. Ott has plans to cre­ate more apps aimed at grab­bing a range of oth­er con­tent types from that groan­ing inbox, putting them tidi­ly away but read­i­ly acces­si­ble in sep­a­rate apps.

The mon­ey raised has come cour­tesy of Mora­do Ven­tures, Jer­ry Yang’s AME Cloud Ven­tures, Farzed Nazem and Jon Rubin­stein, most of whom (like Ott and his co-founder Anirbin Kun­du) are erst­while Yahoo exec­u­tives with a dash of WebOS expe­ri­ence. Ott’s field at Yahoo was mobile but he became Hewlett-Packard’s head of prod­uct for webOS.