5 ms·

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 mo

by 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.
  - rdl 15y ago
    Lockheed is a horrible example too because they have extensive classified operations (their support costs for email within classified projects probably exceed 7.5mm alone), and because Lockheed IS&GS is a major contractor for outsourced IT services. I think the Gartner figure was something on the order of $500-1000/yr per employee for messaging in large high tech businesses. A lot of that is IT staff, and all the other systems for security and compliance. Email is one of the big apps within enterprise.
bambax 15y ago
Would it be possible for you to elaborate on what your email needs are and how they're not met? Would your problems be solved by hiring a personal assistant (a real person)? Then the solution is AI and it's hard. Or do you believe it's impossible for anyone but you to sort through your mail? If that's the case, what we need is to make sorting email "fun" (more enjoyable than TV). We may be looking for the Angry Birds of email.
- miguelos 15y ago
  The problem with emails is not the spam or the sorting, it's that they're not actionable. Tasks in a to-do list are almost directly actionable, and that's what most emails aim for.

by pg 15y ago

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.
- rdl 15y ago
  Lockheed is a horrible example too because they have extensive classified operations (their support costs for email within classified projects probably exceed 7.5mm alone), and because Lockheed IS&GS is a major contractor for outsourced IT services. I think the Gartner figure was something on the order of $500-1000/yr per employee for messaging in large high tech businesses. A lot of that is IT staff, and all the other systems for security and compliance. Email is one of the big apps within enterprise.

bambax 15y ago

Would it be possible for you to elaborate on what your email needs are and how they're not met? Would your problems be solved by hiring a personal assistant (a real person)? Then the solution is AI and it's hard. Or do you believe it's impossible for anyone but you to sort through your mail? If that's the case, what we need is to make sorting email "fun" (more enjoyable than TV). We may be looking for the Angry Birds of email.

miguelos 15y ago
The problem with emails is not the spam or the sorting, it's that they're not actionable. Tasks in a to-do list are almost directly actionable, and that's what most emails aim for.