12 ms·

Probably because there simply isn't money to be made in being an e-mail startup. Or, more correctly, there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investor

by untog 11y ago

Probably because there simply isn't money to be made in being an e-mail startup. Or, more correctly, there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable but small levels of profit, but that isn't what Silicon Valley rewards. EDIT: also, IIRC Apple's restrictions on background processing meant that they needed to have every user's account set up on their servers to process push notifications. Did that ever change? If not that's a non trivial expense/complication to scaling, especially when you're up against an OS-integrated app that doesn't have those restrictions.

minimaxir 11y ago
I thought the business proposition of Mailbox and Carousel was providing more utility/centralization around Dropbox services/storage (via file attachments and photo storage). Which never was a great idea, but still.
bdotdub 11y ago
> there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client. I imagine for a huge majority of people, default mail client's work fine enough for personal use.
- racl101 11y ago
  "I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client." Yeah, this is definitely what I saw with Sparrow. For it to become popular it has to be adopted by a substantial number of people. However, I find that only really tech savvy people cared about Sparrow and its streamlined interface. When I showed it to other people, they were reluctant to use anything else because they were afraid to move from their Apple Mail. I'm guessing if Sparrow had existed for windows it would've been the same thing with people using Outlook. And then there's people who don't even use e-mail, who think it's outdated and prefer PM messaging as a form of communication. It's easy to see why a lot of these promising mail client apps don't really take off the way other apps and services do. Nevertheless, Sparrow will always have a home in my Mac, as long as it keeps working on OS X.
  - kirklove 11y ago
    Same. Sparrow is still my favorite email app on the Mac. Sadly had to give up on it with iOS as it just got super wonky. Will use it as long as it works on OSX.
    - ctingom 11y ago
      Still using Sparrow, but wondering if it works on El Capitan? Does anybody use it on El Capitan?
      - kirklove 11y ago
        I use it with El Capitan. Still works fine.
        racl101 11y ago
        Good to know.
        jeffkeen 11y ago
        Better than fine. Works great. Still the best email client, even after not being updated for years. That's saying something.
- webjprgm 11y ago
  Yup. I still don't see why everyone complains about current mail clients. Mail.app on OS X / iOS, Outlook on Windows, works for me. To make me switch, you would have to show me why the new thing was so much better. Like how Google search results were always better than Yahoo! (IMHO, no objective measurements used) so I switched. You would also have to explain it in a sentence I could immediately understand, whereas all the recent clients I've ready about either (a) claim to make things better but don't tell/show me how before I get bored of the page, or (b) use manager speak that I can't understand or is vague and abstract promises to increase collaboration or something. Therefore I've given almost no attention to any recent attempt to change email.
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    There's a big distance between "works for me" and "delights me." I use Thunderbird on Linux and Windows. It "works for me," in the sense that it's stable and predictable and doesn't lose my data. But it also has lots of niggly little problems that annoy me, like UI decisions that made more sense ten years ago than they do today and limited tools to support people like me who have a ton of mail. So while I use and recommend Thunderbird, I also would love to see something come along that is so much better that it makes me fall in love with it, instead of just shrugging my shoulders and resigning myself to this being as good as things get.
    - jarek 11y ago
      How much are you looking to pay for this? How many people are looking for delight in their email client? Do these numbers multiplied add up to a few tens of millions?
- x0x0 11y ago
  Not to mention, if you're old like me, you remember paying (I think?) $100 and then eventually $49 for eudora / upgrades for eudora. In approx 1990 dollars. We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app, and expect perpetual upgrades for that price! So simultaneously expectations have skyrocketed and prices have plummeted. Part of the problem is, unlike say Pinboard, an email client doesn't feel like 1-3 devs worth of work. The protocols are horrendous, you have to understand the quirks of lots of servers, etc. Plus all the UI and backend and search work. I'm not sure it's approachable as a small indie company. There's also, of course, bad behavior by large companies such as mozilla: Thunderbird made it very difficult to build an indie email client because you have to compete on merits and against free, but they eventually got bored and just quit making it. Not to mention competing with free/ad-supported. And the semi-annual YC/vc supported email client company. Not to mention what is coming close to active sabotage of productivity apps by the ios and mac app stores (lack of trials, lack of upgrades, etc).
  - radiorental 11y ago
    I'm sorry, I apologise in advance, but this irks me. "We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app" Where do users/customers get these expectations? Call it market forces, race to the bottom, whatever... do a little root cause and not blame joe public please.
    - x0x0 11y ago
      That's a long running debate and for our purposes unimportant. It's still a prominent, maybe even the most prominent, item on my personal list of "reasons I shouldn't build an email app."
      - radiorental 11y ago
        point taken.
  - hussong 11y ago
    I remember paying for The Bat! and loving it.
jethro_tell 11y ago
Also, it's not 'disruptive' which isn't very sexy. At the same time, no one's really disrupted email (probably since gmail) and even sms for the most part, as a form of communication because they are the only cross platform with a very low barrier to entry. Note that all the sms replacement apps still use sms as a fall back since it's a shit show of walled garden apps.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I'm starting to believe that any idea of "disrupting" communications via a private company should be culled in its infancy. Market can't do infrastructure. Most companies will do their utmost to lock you in, and then abandon the product as soon as it's even marginally more profitable to do something else. Doubly so with Internet startups, for which the barrier to exit is incredibly low.
jordigh 11y ago
Do you think Nylas is headed towards this eventual doom too? I guess Mailpile isn't trying to be commercial, so perhaps it will keep soldiering on the power of donations for as long as that keeps up.
- grinich 11y ago
  Hey there-- I work at Nylas. We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year. Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3] [1] https://nylas.com/features/ https://nylas.com/features/ [2] https://nylas.com/n1 https://nylas.com/n1 [3] http://github.com/nylas/ http://github.com/nylas/
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jordigh 11y ago
    Can you compare yourself to Mailpile? I want an email client (and maybe server) that is privacy-conscious and easy to configure. Are you two completely different projects?
    - grinich 11y ago
      We're two totally different projects. We focus on a lot of stuff in addition to privacy (like great design).
      - jordigh 11y ago
        I understand what Mailpile is. It's a self-hosted email web client. What is Nylas? The website doesn't seem to be written for me, but for PHBs. Apparently you have great business, design, and APIs, but what is it that those things do? Are you an email client? A server? A webmail service? What makes you different from Gmail or from Mailpile?
mbesto 11y ago
Yet that same Silicon Valley rewarded Mailbox with $100MM in an acquisition...
- untog 11y ago
  That's exactly my point. Silicon Valley rewards "go big or go bust", it doesn't reward "small, sustainable business". I don't for a second blame the founders of Mailbox for doing what they did. When the market creates a strong set of incentives like this you can't really expect anyone to do anything other than take the $100m. But this is the side-effect.
  - exelius 11y ago
    VC is generally designed for big bets and big payoffs (invest in 10 risky bets in the hope that 1 pays off to cover your losses on the other 9). Less risky ventures with smaller payoffs take longer to grow, and don't satisfy the payoff requirements of the VC model. That doesn't mean they're bad companies, but there's definitely a funding gap for the type of company that will require $3M in investment up front and be worth $10M in 5 years. That's still a great return, but right now it's the domain of private equity.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      VCs themselves aren't the problem. Big bets are fine. The problem is acquihiring. It's: - good for founders - they get a big fat paycheck and a chance for a job in a big company - good for VCs - a payoff, even if small, is better than no payoff at all, so they want their 9 not-so-good startups to be bought - good for the buying company - they can literally just kill the competition by throwing money at them, + they get some proven and experienced employees, which may be worth it given the unreliability of the standard hiring process Care to guess who this deal is not good for? Startups are (and are being heavily marketed as) a get-rich-quick scheme. Most of the people involved are self-selected to follow this process. And all this talk about providing value to the users? That's the part of the scheme where you get used.
dirkdk 11y ago
And you are limited by a 30 year old standard (IMAP) with an insane message format. Building a truly new email experience would require a new protocol as well.
- ash 11y ago
  There's JMAP protocol (from fastmail.com): http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/
  - darkr 11y ago
    I really hope this protocol takes off and gains widespread adoption.
    - brongondwana 11y ago
      Me too :) Hoping to announce a bunch more support in the Cyrus IMAP server very soon!
- matthewmcg 11y ago
  It could be worse. I still have relatives using POP--across multiple devices!
refriedbeans3 11y ago
Side effect of this is that Mailbox was the first to support out of the box notifications on my Apple Watch + gmail accounts. Apple mail doesn't monitor/push emails from Gmail so you don't get notified on the watch.
erikpukinskis 11y ago
That's because making a big pile of money the Silicon Valley way requires two things: a product, and a moat. It's not hard to create an email product, but email moats are hard because it's an anarchist technology by design.
- roddds 11y ago
  Would you mind explaining what does "a moat" mean in this context?
  - Analemma_ 11y ago
    Platform lock-in.
  - widdershins 11y ago
    It's a ditch dug around a castle to stop people getting in. i.e. the 'wall' in the walled garden.
    - oneJob 11y ago
      So, "wall" != "moat" Some castles had a wall and a moat. Anywho. I think there is a differences in kind here that is material to the discussion.
      - plemer 11y ago
        A moat is a competitive advantage that's hard for competitors reproduce or otherwise overcome. Coke's moat is its near universal brand awareness and affinity. Comcast's moat is its infrastructure and political clout. Crossing a moat in any conventional way is very resource intensive and often leaves the challenger vulnerable.
  - xiaoma 11y ago
    Warren Buffet talks about "moats" all the time. Basically a business with a moat is just a business with a defensible advantage. If you think of your business as a castle, a moat is something that stops others from taking your castle from you. This could be anything from a network effect (Facebook, LinkedIn), economies of scale (Amazon, Walmart), to patents (most biotech companies) to brand (Coke). The way he put it was something like, "If you gave me 100 billion dollars to take Coke's market, I can't. They've been investing in infrastructure and brand all over the world for decades. Even if I could make a better tasting beverage, people would still buy Coke. They have a moat". http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/09/warren-buffett-on-economic-moats/?all=1 http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/09/warren-buffett-on-economic-...
patmcguire 11y ago
You wouldn't expect Slack to be able to make so much off of messaging - there's got to be some way to be better enough to make money.
- avree 11y ago
  Slack is a corporate product that sells subscriptions to their native-only service. An e-mail client that only let you see your last 30 days of e-mail without paying for it likely wouldn't catch on because people have different expectations for how e-mail should work/openness than they do with a corporate communications platform.

by untog 11y ago

minimaxir 11y ago

I thought the business proposition of Mailbox and Carousel was providing more utility/centralization around Dropbox services/storage (via file attachments and photo storage). Which never was a great idea, but still.

bdotdub 11y ago

> there isn't enough money to be made to satisfy VC investors. Mailbox and the like could have lived quite comfortably as paid-for apps with comfortable I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client. I imagine for a huge majority of people, default mail client's work fine enough for personal use.

racl101 11y ago
"I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client." Yeah, this is definitely what I saw with Sparrow. For it to become popular it has to be adopted by a substantial number of people. However, I find that only really tech savvy people cared about Sparrow and its streamlined interface. When I showed it to other people, they were reluctant to use anything else because they were afraid to move from their Apple Mail. I'm guessing if Sparrow had existed for windows it would've been the same thing with people using Outlook. And then there's people who don't even use e-mail, who think it's outdated and prefer PM messaging as a form of communication. It's easy to see why a lot of these promising mail client apps don't really take off the way other apps and services do. Nevertheless, Sparrow will always have a home in my Mac, as long as it keeps working on OS X.
- kirklove 11y ago
  Same. Sparrow is still my favorite email app on the Mac. Sadly had to give up on it with iOS as it just got super wonky. Will use it as long as it works on OSX.
  - ctingom 11y ago
    Still using Sparrow, but wondering if it works on El Capitan? Does anybody use it on El Capitan?
    - kirklove 11y ago
      I use it with El Capitan. Still works fine.
      - racl101 11y ago
        Good to know.
      - jeffkeen 11y ago
        Better than fine. Works great. Still the best email client, even after not being updated for years. That's saying something.
webjprgm 11y ago
Yup. I still don't see why everyone complains about current mail clients. Mail.app on OS X / iOS, Outlook on Windows, works for me. To make me switch, you would have to show me why the new thing was so much better. Like how Google search results were always better than Yahoo! (IMHO, no objective measurements used) so I switched. You would also have to explain it in a sentence I could immediately understand, whereas all the recent clients I've ready about either (a) claim to make things better but don't tell/show me how before I get bored of the page, or (b) use manager speak that I can't understand or is vague and abstract promises to increase collaboration or something. Therefore I've given almost no attention to any recent attempt to change email.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  There's a big distance between "works for me" and "delights me." I use Thunderbird on Linux and Windows. It "works for me," in the sense that it's stable and predictable and doesn't lose my data. But it also has lots of niggly little problems that annoy me, like UI decisions that made more sense ten years ago than they do today and limited tools to support people like me who have a ton of mail. So while I use and recommend Thunderbird, I also would love to see something come along that is so much better that it makes me fall in love with it, instead of just shrugging my shoulders and resigning myself to this being as good as things get.
  - jarek 11y ago
    How much are you looking to pay for this? How many people are looking for delight in their email client? Do these numbers multiplied add up to a few tens of millions?
x0x0 11y ago
Not to mention, if you're old like me, you remember paying (I think?) $100 and then eventually $49 for eudora / upgrades for eudora. In approx 1990 dollars. We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app, and expect perpetual upgrades for that price! So simultaneously expectations have skyrocketed and prices have plummeted. Part of the problem is, unlike say Pinboard, an email client doesn't feel like 1-3 devs worth of work. The protocols are horrendous, you have to understand the quirks of lots of servers, etc. Plus all the UI and backend and search work. I'm not sure it's approachable as a small indie company. There's also, of course, bad behavior by large companies such as mozilla: Thunderbird made it very difficult to build an indie email client because you have to compete on merits and against free, but they eventually got bored and just quit making it. Not to mention competing with free/ad-supported. And the semi-annual YC/vc supported email client company. Not to mention what is coming close to active sabotage of productivity apps by the ios and mac app stores (lack of trials, lack of upgrades, etc).
- radiorental 11y ago
  I'm sorry, I apologise in advance, but this irks me. "We now live in a world where people pitch tantrums about paying $10 for an app" Where do users/customers get these expectations? Call it market forces, race to the bottom, whatever... do a little root cause and not blame joe public please.
  - x0x0 11y ago
    That's a long running debate and for our purposes unimportant. It's still a prominent, maybe even the most prominent, item on my personal list of "reasons I shouldn't build an email app."
    - radiorental 11y ago
      point taken.
- hussong 11y ago
  I remember paying for The Bat! and loving it.

jethro_tell 11y ago

Also, it's not 'disruptive' which isn't very sexy. At the same time, no one's really disrupted email (probably since gmail) and even sms for the most part, as a form of communication because they are the only cross platform with a very low barrier to entry. Note that all the sms replacement apps still use sms as a fall back since it's a shit show of walled garden apps.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I'm starting to believe that any idea of "disrupting" communications via a private company should be culled in its infancy. Market can't do infrastructure. Most companies will do their utmost to lock you in, and then abandon the product as soon as it's even marginally more profitable to do something else. Doubly so with Internet startups, for which the barrier to exit is incredibly low.

jordigh 11y ago

Do you think Nylas is headed towards this eventual doom too? I guess Mailpile isn't trying to be commercial, so perhaps it will keep soldiering on the power of donations for as long as that keeps up.

grinich 11y ago
Hey there-- I work at Nylas. We've structured our business to... actually have a business. Our team spent the first year selling APIs to developers [1] which already power lots of paid apps. The N1 mail app we released two months ago[2] follows this and will have paid features next year. Plus both are open source free software, and quite popular on GitHub. [3] [1] https://nylas.com/features/ https://nylas.com/features/ [2] https://nylas.com/n1 https://nylas.com/n1 [3] http://github.com/nylas/ http://github.com/nylas/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jordigh 11y ago
  Can you compare yourself to Mailpile? I want an email client (and maybe server) that is privacy-conscious and easy to configure. Are you two completely different projects?
  - grinich 11y ago
    We're two totally different projects. We focus on a lot of stuff in addition to privacy (like great design).
    - jordigh 11y ago
      I understand what Mailpile is. It's a self-hosted email web client. What is Nylas? The website doesn't seem to be written for me, but for PHBs. Apparently you have great business, design, and APIs, but what is it that those things do? Are you an email client? A server? A webmail service? What makes you different from Gmail or from Mailpile?

mbesto 11y ago

Yet that same Silicon Valley rewarded Mailbox with $100MM in an acquisition...

untog 11y ago
That's exactly my point. Silicon Valley rewards "go big or go bust", it doesn't reward "small, sustainable business". I don't for a second blame the founders of Mailbox for doing what they did. When the market creates a strong set of incentives like this you can't really expect anyone to do anything other than take the $100m. But this is the side-effect.
- exelius 11y ago
  VC is generally designed for big bets and big payoffs (invest in 10 risky bets in the hope that 1 pays off to cover your losses on the other 9). Less risky ventures with smaller payoffs take longer to grow, and don't satisfy the payoff requirements of the VC model. That doesn't mean they're bad companies, but there's definitely a funding gap for the type of company that will require $3M in investment up front and be worth $10M in 5 years. That's still a great return, but right now it's the domain of private equity.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    VCs themselves aren't the problem. Big bets are fine. The problem is acquihiring. It's: - good for founders - they get a big fat paycheck and a chance for a job in a big company - good for VCs - a payoff, even if small, is better than no payoff at all, so they want their 9 not-so-good startups to be bought - good for the buying company - they can literally just kill the competition by throwing money at them, + they get some proven and experienced employees, which may be worth it given the unreliability of the standard hiring process Care to guess who this deal is not good for? Startups are (and are being heavily marketed as) a get-rich-quick scheme. Most of the people involved are self-selected to follow this process. And all this talk about providing value to the users? That's the part of the scheme where you get used.

dirkdk 11y ago

And you are limited by a 30 year old standard (IMAP) with an insane message format. Building a truly new email experience would require a new protocol as well.

ash 11y ago
There's JMAP protocol (from fastmail.com): http://jmap.io/ http://jmap.io/
- darkr 11y ago
  I really hope this protocol takes off and gains widespread adoption.
  - brongondwana 11y ago
    Me too :) Hoping to announce a bunch more support in the Cyrus IMAP server very soon!
matthewmcg 11y ago
It could be worse. I still have relatives using POP--across multiple devices!

refriedbeans3 11y ago

Side effect of this is that Mailbox was the first to support out of the box notifications on my Apple Watch + gmail accounts. Apple mail doesn't monitor/push emails from Gmail so you don't get notified on the watch.

erikpukinskis 11y ago

That's because making a big pile of money the Silicon Valley way requires two things: a product, and a moat. It's not hard to create an email product, but email moats are hard because it's an anarchist technology by design.

roddds 11y ago
Would you mind explaining what does "a moat" mean in this context?
- Analemma_ 11y ago
  Platform lock-in.
- widdershins 11y ago
  It's a ditch dug around a castle to stop people getting in. i.e. the 'wall' in the walled garden.
  - oneJob 11y ago
    So, "wall" != "moat" Some castles had a wall and a moat. Anywho. I think there is a differences in kind here that is material to the discussion.
    - plemer 11y ago
      A moat is a competitive advantage that's hard for competitors reproduce or otherwise overcome. Coke's moat is its near universal brand awareness and affinity. Comcast's moat is its infrastructure and political clout. Crossing a moat in any conventional way is very resource intensive and often leaves the challenger vulnerable.
- xiaoma 11y ago
  Warren Buffet talks about "moats" all the time. Basically a business with a moat is just a business with a defensible advantage. If you think of your business as a castle, a moat is something that stops others from taking your castle from you. This could be anything from a network effect (Facebook, LinkedIn), economies of scale (Amazon, Walmart), to patents (most biotech companies) to brand (Coke). The way he put it was something like, "If you gave me 100 billion dollars to take Coke's market, I can't. They've been investing in infrastructure and brand all over the world for decades. Even if I could make a better tasting beverage, people would still buy Coke. They have a moat". http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/09/warren-buffett-on-economic-moats/?all=1 http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/09/warren-buffett-on-economic-...

patmcguire 11y ago

You wouldn't expect Slack to be able to make so much off of messaging - there's got to be some way to be better enough to make money.

avree 11y ago
Slack is a corporate product that sells subscriptions to their native-only service. An e-mail client that only let you see your last 30 days of e-mail without paying for it likely wouldn't catch on because people have different expectations for how e-mail should work/openness than they do with a corporate communications platform.