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"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month." Ok. Number of Paul Grah

• duck 15y ago
  I think email needs to be changed from top to bottom, but offering speed alone would be a hard sell to launch with. You can get the Microsoft offering (Exchange Online or packaged with Office 365) starting at $5 a user. Microsoft can afford to spend money on it. I've used it and it is a lot faster than GMail (although it wasn't enough for me to switch).
  • diego 15y ago
    One thing I noticed is that email is a problem for "important" people who receive tons of messages per day. They must read/answer that one vital email right away. Kevin Rose talked about this a few years ago, and I've heard many high-profile investors complaining about this. For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well. Perhaps email is perceived as a problem just because it gets tons of "face time" with us every day. I'd leave it alone and focus on one of the countless unsolved problems in the world.
    • politician 15y ago
      Perhaps, but as Bentley and Gulfstream discovered, there is a tidy profit to be made servicing the niche needs of high-profile individuals.
      • dminor 15y ago
        Undoubtedly, but tidy profit and frighteningly ambitious are two different things.
    • duck 15y ago
      GMail is just good enough It is, but only in terms of what we think of email in today's usage. I think the next step will be where you can make the messages dynamic which would basically allow you to receive/deliver an interface to an app. Of course with all that power comes the issue of how to control it, but that would be an interesting problem to solve. Imagine instead of getting a notification email for an update on a Basecamp todo list, you would see the actual todo list and could manage right from your inbox.
      • mgkimsal 15y ago
        for some reason, shades of two-way-rss hype just came flooding back from 2006.
        • Agathos 15y ago
          I thought of 2009, when Google Wave was announced.
      • icebraining 15y ago
        The only reason you can't do that already is because email clients prohibit it for security reasons, and Hotmail is already experimenting with emails that allow that within a sandbox. Emails can send HTML and JS, there's nothing innovative about it. You only need to convince developers to add JavaScript sandboxes to their email clients.
      • miguelos 15y ago
        That's exactly what my future start-up will do! Is anyone interested in making it happen?
    • stingrae 15y ago
      People are like sheep. If you get the "important" people to use it, you have most certainly will have a large user base of "regular" people
• skb_ 15y ago
  Then what's a good way to think? If you can't start from "I would pay for this", then where do you start? If you wouldn't pay for it, then why would you expect others to pay for it?
  • diego 15y ago
    Would you pay for computer support, or extended warranties? I wouldn't, but millions of people do. It really depends on the context. When thinking about something for the masses, you are one very particular data point. You want evidence that lots of people would pay for something. If you are building something for people like you and: - there are lots of people like you, and you can make it very cheap or - you ARE paying tons of money for it already, and it could be better and cheaper (e.g. travel) then you may be on to something.
• dgallagher 15y ago
  Rich people have the same number of seconds per day as poor people, except each second is worth more. Right now everyone is driving a black Model-T; there isn't a premium edition of email available, though one is certainly desired (personal assistants and secretaries currently fill this gap). If the cost of a premium email/task-list system is less than the dollars saved in time, and less than an assistant, people will buy it. Aim for the higher-end market, solve their problems first on their dollar, and later expand downward to everyone else.
  • sliverstorm 15y ago
    there isn't a premium edition of email available, though one is certainly desired (personal assistants and secretaries currently fill this gap) I think you misunderstand. The premium edition of email is much like the premium edition of anything else- it's the email you don't have to use, the plane you don't have to fly, the car you don't have to drive, the food you don't have to cook. So I don't know that personal assistants and secretaries are "filling a gap" in the stop-gap sense, but rather they are the solution. If you want to capitalize on it, do like a chauffeur company would do, but with email.
• sskates 15y ago
  Somehow people manage to pay Dropbox hundreds of millions of dollars a year, in spite of their stingy-ness. The email version of Dropbox would almost certainly be a bigger market.
• stevenj 15y ago
  "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Peter Drucker said: "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer." So an entrepreneur tackling this problem would already have at least one prospective customer, thus they'd immediately be in business. And who knows, maybe something "big" grows out of it (e.g. maybe you discover there's a big market for this in the enterprise space).
• mrb 15y ago
  Most households have no problem paying $50/month for a service that their whole family uses frequently: cable TV. So here is my idea: make and sell this great email-like/todo-list/file-sharing/whatever service that an entire household can use, and charge $50/month. That's only $10/month/user for a family of five. Come up with reasonable limits to ensure enough revenue (eg. max 10 users per plan).
  • dkrich 15y ago
    I'm not sure you can compare cable to email. I may be in the minority here, but I agree that email is not really a pain point for me. I pay $50/month for cable because that represents a choice of having ready access to television or nothing. The idea that households would pay $50/month for email is a bit of a stretch given that the alternative is free email that works pretty damn well.
    • mrb 15y ago
      I am not talking about email as you know it. I am talking about this service that pg thinks needs to replace email. I do agree with him that people currently use email in a way it was not intended to (todo list, sending files, etc), and that surely there must be a better way of doing these tasks, that would be worth $50/month, while getting rid of the limitations of email such as attachment size limits. In fact I know I am right, because the reason we, in 2012, still have no easy way to share large files between friends and family members, is precisely because the storage and bandwidth costs are higher than the cost of email.
      • dkrich 15y ago
        You honestly believe there are a lot of families that would pay you $50 a month for a service that enables them to easily create todo lists and share attachments? You're a pretty optimistic person. How many services do you yourself pay for today on a monthly basis? I can count mine on one hand. To get $50 from me every month you better have a life-changing service.
• pg 15y ago
  Number of business email users? Tens of millions certainly. "Would I pay for this?" is a great question for founders to ask, because it combines two of the most powerful techniques for generating startup ideas: solving problems you yourself have, and using payment as a test of how much people want something. One of my techniques for helping founders to come up with ideas is to ask them what they need so much that they'd pay for it.
  • sid- 15y ago
    One of the simple ideas we could do with email for power users is to show the sender a list of imap folders the receiver has created in his inbox and allow the sender(maybe an assistant) to target the emails in that folder thus turning it into a collaborative effort in organizing stuff
  • samstave 15y ago
    But there are decades of precedent against how much people will pay for email. Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email? Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees. Thats the problem with enterprise scaling vs cloud/startup scaling. They are inverse; The enterprise wants the cost per unit to go down when scaling. The startup/cloud wants the profitability to increase at the same rate when scaling. We all want great services, but NOBODY wants to pay for it. I myself seek to offload cost at every opportunity; work pays for machine, phone, travel, software etc... Same model. Yeah - I'll seek to solve problems I have, but not based on how much I would pay - but how much I would like to offload that cost. (Clearly there is a lot of grey here, and there are areas where this doesn't make sense -- and others where it does -- and these are not mutually exclusive. (i.e. in areas where I am both building for the consumer and the provider (healthcare))
    • ghshephard 15y ago
      "Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email? Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees." Yes, I certainly do believe that any American corporation with 150K employees spends significantly more than $7.5mm/year on their messaging system. These systems actually get _more_ expensive as they grow larger - Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Sarbanes Oxley, Customer Service, SLAs, Data Loss Protection, Intrusion Detection - All these email services that the small enterprise doesn't worry about (that much) - add up significantly in larger enterprises.
• patio11 15y ago
  Seeing as how you're on HN you may have heard of 37Signals, Fog Creek, and Atlassian. All sell products which are domain-specific improvements for email. They collectively have, conservatively, X00,000 paying users. These are small companies in this problem space - IBM has at least 48 options for I-can't-believe-it's-not-email at every price point between $200k and $200 million. Ditto Microsoft and a dozen other big software companies. "The web" includes a bunch of stingy twenty something's on the consumer Internet, but it also includes the producer Internet, and the producer Internet is one giant system for turning piles of money into bigger piles of money. Something which makes that happen is cheap at any price.