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Why email startups fail
- emrah 1y agoThat's crazy, is it really that hard? 37Signals can apparently do it and they are a tiny shop
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- throwaway843 1y ago[dead]
- ajjenkins 1y agoI’m surprised Hey isn’t mentioned. That’s the only example I know of someone recently trying to reinvent email. Maybe it wasn’t included because it’s part of Basecamp and not its own company. But I think it’s important to discuss if your argument is that “no one has successfully reinvented email”.
- tristan957 1y agoBy reinvent are you referring to UX? Fastmail is reinventing email through superior open protocols.
- BiteCode_dev 1y agoUX is what made the difference between the first iPhone and a palm.
- worthless-trash 1y agoWe have regressed as a society.
- ericrosedev 1y agoObligatory “as far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product”
- benhurmarcel 1y agoJMAP is mentioned in the article (negatively)
- CaveTech 1y agoIt is mentioned, there's an entire section named "The HEY Experiment".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jpmi1 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sethammons 1y agoI was engineer 12 at SendGrid and left after IPO and subsequent acquisition by Twilio. Being infrastructure and the backing many email marketing companies, we did really well. Kind of like selling shovels in the gold rush. We struggled more on the product front breaking into the much larger marketing space. Learned a lot there leading and scaling teams and scaling the email infrastructure to support over 8 billion daily sends.
- zaik 1y ago> email marketing companies This means spammers, right?
- colechristensen 1y agoNo, in order for their traffic to not get blackholed, places like sendgrid have to follow the rules and make their customers follow the rules. The marketing emails they send will be somewhere between things people actually want to see and mildly annoying. There are plenty of things I subscribe to which are marketing emails I want to see.
- BiteCode_dev 1y ago"mildly annoying" That's another name for spam.
- thorncorona 1y agomarketing emails are mildly annoying until you want to buy something and they become useful for the 20% coupon
- iancmceachern 1y agoOr the band you love is in town
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- duxup 1y ago>But they ignore the fundamental reality: email works perfectly for what it was designed to do. Yeah the fundamental thing is email does it's job, and if you want to change that job in any dramatic fashion ... it no longer does its core job.
- chevman 1y agoWhat's left to conquer in email land? Most of the large marketing ecommerce/enterprise market was captured via ExactTarget/Salesforce, Oracle/Responsys/Eloqua, IBM/SilverPop/Acoustic, Adobe/Neolane/Marketo by the mid 2010's. SendGrid/Twilio was another a few years later, Amazon SES is ok, then you have some of the smaller market players (MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc). Hard to scale/grow a startup in any real way when there are so many fairly well entrenched solutions across industries and company sizes.
- yard2010 1y agoI'm far from an expert but I would say there will always be people who hate the current enshitified solutions and are looking for the new cool kid in town
- AbstractH24 1y agoTurning your email newsletter into structured data. A db of events you get emailed, articles you should read, discounted to review, etc Something I’d die for someone to tackle.
- turnsout 1y agoThere’s still a huge opportunity for AI. The way it’s used currently (sorting & drafting replies) is barely scratching the surface. Until you can literally turn your mailbox over to AI the way you would with a human assistant, email UX is not a solved problem.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- muratsu 1y agoMailbox raising 6M, having a 100M exit and getting called out failure is crazy
- runako 1y agoRapportive listed at having raised $120k for a $15m exit also stands out.
- JimDabell 1y agoThis is a weird article. Email is a hodgepodge of terrible protocols that have progressively had more and more technical debt laid upon them for decades and decades. Vendor quirks are everywhere, and it’s incredibly unreliable. Its defining quality – it’s decentralisation – has been beaten out of it by IP reputation so everybody ends up sending through a handful of providers. The article kinda acknowledges that it’s a shitheap that’s awful to implement, but somehow still champions the idea that it all works fine. And what’s with the repeated jabs at the “terrible” exit rate that actually seems pretty good?
- dboreham 1y ago> incredibly unreliable The underly technology is very reliable. Email not getting delivered to the recipient is more about low/no-cost providers preferring to filter almost all messages rather than spend money on doing a good job of spam filtering.
- landl0rd 1y agoTo what lever can one apply money to get better spam filtering with even remotely constant returns to scale?
- delusional 1y ago> and it’s incredibly unreliable I will never understand where this sentiment comes from. I've run my own mail server for like 7 years at that point. It's so incredibly rare for my mail to not deliver that I can't remember the last time I had to debug it. The most annoying thing I've had to deal with was dovecot breaking compatibility with their config format, but even that was a couple of hours of work to get back on track. My most surprising experience was when I broke the mail setup while migrating servers once. Postfix was down for something like 7 days before I got around to fixing it. The cool thing was what happened after I fixed it. While my server was down, the other relays had been dutifully holding onto my mail, waiting for me to once again accept it. So after a week of downtime, I still got all my mail within 24 hours after starting up my server again. That's fucking reliable in my book.
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- laborcontract 1y agoMy first thought was wow - 20% of email startups succeed? That’s actually pretty good.
- patchtopic 1y agocompared to other businesses this number seems OK :-)
- scarface_74 1y ago> The Acquisition-to-Shutdown Pipeline For the founders and their investors, that’s nut a bug it’s a feature
- AbstractH24 1y agoMy heart goes out to those founders. I think they need one of those star studded benefit concerts for them (oh, wait. It just occurred in Venice last weekend)
- jiveturkey 1y ago> Techstars alone has 28 email-related companies with only 5 exits - an exceedingly high failure rate (sometimes calculated to be 80%+). This is actually better than overall failure rate. At 80% I would absolutely be investing in more email companies! The entire analysis is skewed to satisfy their own messaging or perhaps internal motivation. Mentioning Cyrus IMAP and SpamAssassin is ... being stuck in a time warp. Being self-funded, their position is not surprising. However they really need some perspective.
- aussieguy1234 1y agoIf 1 in 5 takes off, is that really a bad success rate given that's widely considered the average startup success rate?
- dvt 1y agoAverage startup success rate is 1/10 at best. The "90% of startups fail" metric that's often cited is likely inflated by B2B companies which find significantly more success (like, an order of magnitude more) than B2C.
- IAmBroom 1y agoNot sure that's inflated, as it's comparable to the 5-year failure rate of new storefront businesses, according to what I read in the pre-internet days. 10% of attempts to monetize new ideas might just be a basal level, since the root issues (humans, often without formal business training nor experience) don't change with technological implementation.
- chazeon 1y agoActually recent email innovation I enjoyed is Mimestream, the macOS native client for Gmail. Apple’s smart inbox is half baked but better than nothing. Cloudflare now also has a pretty good email forwarding service.
- croisillon 1y agoI fell in love with Zenbe back in 2009 and i’m still angry at Facebook for acquishutting them down in 2010
- dvt 1y ago> Electron Performance Crisis: Modern email clients built with Electron and React Native suffer from severe memory bloat and performance issues. These cross-platform frameworks, while convenient for developers, create resource-heavy applications that consume hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes of RAM for basic email functionality. No (real) customer has ever, or will ever, care about this. Discord and Slack are pretty much case-in-points: bloated Electron apps that just about everyone on the planet has installed on their computers. I personally hate React, but technology decisions are irrelevant to the long-term success of startups. (As long as they don't grossly interfere with customer experience, the feature set, etc.) > Final Warning: After analyzing hundreds of email startups, the evidence is overwhelming - 80%+ fail completely. Email isn't broken, and trying to "fix" it is a guaranteed path to failure. First, I'd bet money that figure is actually wrong: the failure rate is likely way higher than 80%. And I'm honestly not sure how anyone could seriously think a 20% exit rate is bad in just about any vertical (but especially a "boring" one like email). > Resources: Volunteer developers can't sustain enterprise-level software What am I even reading here? Author does realize openssl[1], Linux[2], and many other "enterprise-level" pieces of software are entirely (or almost entirely) maintained by volunteer developers, right? Anyway, the post had its opposite intended effect on me: it made me think about ways I could reinvent email. [1] https://github.com/openssl/openssl https://github.com/openssl/openssl [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/torvalds/linux
- wlonkly 1y ago> Author does realize openssl[1], Linux[2], and many other "enterprise-level" pieces of software are entirely (or almost entirely) maintained by volunteer developers, right? And, even more on point, so is Postfix!
- egglemonsoup 1y agoI am a real Discord customer who is actively looking for an alternative due to how terrible the performance is on my M1 MacBook and on my gaming PC. I'm just one person—I'm not claiming to represent the 'average' customer. But I am part of the average.
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- personjerry 1y agoPretty sure this is AI written, hence the inconsistencies mentioned in this comment section.
- tomas789 1y agoYes. I’d rather read the prompt than this.
- AbstractH24 1y agoYet somehow ranked on this site, made it to my inbox, and was intriguing enfough for me to read until they end. Something that’s maybe true for 5% of the articles I get sent (which composes the top 30 HN articles of the previous 24 hours). There’s a perverse lesson there.
- mike_hearn 1y agoIt definitely is. Click the links that go to HN comments, in the section about how the community is right. Not one of them is anything to do with email.
- AnonC 1y agoIf Fastmail is included in the startup category, why aren’t email companies like Posteo and Mailbox.org included? Runbox.com is a one person operation. They’ve all been around for decades and are still going strong. Posteo hasn’t even taken any VC investment (which could be one reason, as the article points out, for failure). Migadu has been around for quite sometime and doesn’t find a mention in this list.
- andrewshadura 1y agoNot sure why they attack Fastmail and JMAP all the time.
- cedilla 1y agoIs 80% even that high? I thought the idea behind VC was to fund companies where 90% are doomed to fail, 9% might do okay, in order to cash in big on the 1% that have stellar success. Am I way off with my numbers there?
- fyrn_ 1y agoMy god this "article" is an inconsistent pile of AI slop. It actively contridicts itself and changes the thesis several times as it goes on and on and on.
- isaachinman 1y agoIt seems Forward Email has come to the exact same conclusion I did in a blog post awhile back: https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction https://marcoapp.io/blog/marco-an-introduction I agree that "reinventing" email, or building a business based on "AI features" are both terrible ideas. We began building Marco not to do either of these things, but simply because _there wasn't_ any actual cross-platform IMAP client. Apple Mail exists (but is terrible) if you only have Apple devices. Lots of other options like Superhuman and Shortwave exist, but only support Gmail+Outlook. All we're doing is building the app that should have existed 10 years ago: a cross-platform, offline-first "Thunderbird". Except far more lightweight and modern. And yes, we've built it from the ground up. And no, it's not Electron. https://marcoapp.io https://marcoapp.io
- nottorp 1y ago> And no, it's not Electron. > it became clear that they are developing a single web application, and then wrapping it with CapacitorJs to run on native platforms. So what's the difference? When complaining, Electron is a generic term for instantiating a whole -ing browser to display a RecyclerView (in Android terms). Not necessarily a complaint about Electron in particular. > offline-first Humm. Does that mean you plan to interpose your own server between the app and imap? I sure hope not. If you mean you keep a local copy of the emails, that's about how any decent email app works. Even Apple mail can do it for gmail over imap :) I may actually be a potential customer, I'm just pessimistic. Not a fan of "join the waitlist" marketing either. By the way, how much is a latte where you live?
- isaachinman 1y agoI think you're conflating Electron apps with hybrid apps. Electron literally bundles Chrome and NodeJs, resulting in apps that are 300mb+. The Marco macOS app is 3mb. Yes, we have a server runtime between the client app and the upstream IMAP provider. As does Superhuman, Missive, and any other product that actually provides push notifications. For users that see this as a non-starter, we enthusiastically recommend local-only clients – Thunderbird, Talanoa, etc. The waitlist is not marketing. We are in alpha right now and are genuinely not ready for GA. As soon as we are, the waitlist will disappear. No, I do not live in the bay area, or even the US. You may consider toning down the negativity in the future.
- albertgoeswoof 1y ago> Every single "email startup" is just building UI on top of existing infrastructure. They're not building actual email servers - they're building apps that connect to real email infrastructure. This is something that shocked me when I built https://mailpace.com https://mailpace.com I just assumed that everyone doing email ran their own smtp servers. Turns out YC and others are funding wrappers on aws ses left right and center!
- zombot 1y ago> Turns out YC and others are funding wrappers on aws ses left right and center! A groundbreaking innovation that will totally disrupt everything including pizza delivery!
- DrillShopper 1y ago> Turns out YC and others are funding wrappers on aws ses left right and center! Given what a giant pain in the ass (for good reason, fuck spam) it is to get into the Gmail inbox I can understand why the spammers do it.
- krageon 1y agoThis just isn't true. For some reason everyone keeps repeating it anyway, I suspect because they haven't tried it and someone told them confidently it wasn't practical.
- tracker1 1y agoDunno... I'm running a mailu box, without delivery issues to Gmail... now Outlook.com hosted mail (not o365) is another story. I have forward/backward dns configured as well as dkim, spf, etc. With TLS endpoints configured for secure transmission. It's worked pretty well in general. That said, I'm not using it that much, and there's no spam coming from my server (dedicated box on OVH), I dedicated a VM/IP to the mail server.
- philsnow 1y ago> Gmail's threading: Enhanced email organization Gmail's threading is an abomination. "If you want to fork a thread, just change the subject!" This idea is so brain-dead and antithetical to deep mailing list conversations. "Oops too many people replied, guess gmail'll fork the thread without changing the subject" My disdain for this misfeature is palpable.
- meinersbur 1y ago> Email works perfectly OMG. How can someone say this in the age of AI spam. Legitimate emails categorized a spam. Impossibility to run independent email servers because getting blocked by the big players. Forced subscriptions to mailing lists. Tracking through images....
- pickledoyster 1y ago>How can someone say this in the age of AI spam. The article is AI spam
- NoGravitas 1y agoThey mean it works perfectly for them. If I get Quantum Leaped back into my younger self, I'll start working on fixing email around 1993.
- mslansn 1y ago> Email Statistics: 347.3 billion emails sent daily without major issues, serving 4.37 billion email users worldwide as of 2023. The average user receives 86 emails per day?! And I get a bit overwhelmed if I receive more than 3. Kinda puts things into perspective :-)
- Leon_25 1y agoWe’ve worked on email infrastructure for multiple clients at Axon, and everything in this write-up checks out. Most startups just build wrappers around Postfix or SES and call it innovation. The hard problems, such as spam filtering, deliverability, and auth protocols, never get touched. That’s why 80% fail.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- georgyo 1y agoLong article, but the fundamental premise is that IMAP, SMTP, and POP are all you need. And that email clients are good... This is just false IMHO. There is a reason why both Fastmail and Gmail implement their own protocols in addition to those. But fundamentally the "folder" view of email does not work. A single message often needs to be in several different folders simultaneously. And when the thread is spread across many folders, there needs to be a way to see the whole thread. The only way to accomplish this is with email tags or labels. These are implemented by nearly all successful email companies. Gmail, Fastmail, and Proton are examples. Labels are a fundamental feature in this day and age, and neither IMAP nor POP can handle them gracefully. Gmail is so big that when Outlook, Apple Mail, and even Thunderbird connect to it, they do an OAuth exchange and then talk over a proprietary protocol. JMAP may have poor adoption, but it's the only open protocol that understands labels well. The lack of adoption is mostly due to email providers not implementing it. There is not a lot of incentive for clients to implement it for the few providers. And providers would prefer you use their web clients anyway, as then they control access to your email.
- tlonny 1y ago> Gmail is so big that when Outlook, Apple Mail, and even Thunderbird connect to it, they do an OAuth exchange and then talk over a proprietary protocol. Can you elaborate? Anything I can read on this?
- georgyo 1y agohttps://developers.google.com/workspace/gmail/api/guides/sync https://developers.google.com/workspace/gmail/api/guides/syn...
- 1718627440 1y ago> A single message often needs to be in several different folders simultaneously. Citation needed. This has never occurred to me. > And when the thread is spread across many folders, there needs to be a way to see the whole thread. Already possible, at least in Thunderbird. > Labels are a fundamental feature [...] and neither IMAP nor POP can handle them gracefully. IMAP has user-defined labels, whats wrong with them? An underrated feature of IMAP is that you can attach notes to mails.
- taki 1y ago> Quantum-Safe Email Security: Forward Email is the world's first and only email service to use quantum-resistant and individually encrypted SQLite mailboxes lol thanks but no thanks
- AbstractH24 1y agoThis article makes some interesting points, but is clearly click bait (and written, gasp, a email company) How is this different than startups in any other space? How do you define success? Also, SaneBox has been around for a lot longer than they mentioned. And their criticism is it’s not revolutionary enfough?
- fwdemail 1y ago[dead]
- 1718627440 1y agoThat text reads weird. It is actually continuous text but randomly changes to headlines and inline notes and graphics.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoBeen There, Done That, Bought The T-Shirt. Around 2008, tried to M&A regional email providers that served commercial and government enterprises throughout UK and Europe onto a more secure, standardized, and centralized infrastructure with lower employee count. Totally obliterated by GMail and Hotmail because competing with (almost) free on something people really don't want to change once established is really, really hard even if you're gobbling up the supply-side. Maybe it scales where there are compliance aspects like ProofPoint, but otherwise people don't want to change utility infrastructure without a big win or significant existing pain. Times have changed but getting people to move on low cost commodity utilities with lots of options is almost like going into the restaurant industry.
- 0x445442 1y agoWhile it may be true most email startups fail, rolling over and saying the UI has been solved is a bit defeatist IMO. Does the author even know about hey.com?
- insane_dreamer 1y agoI wouldn't say Sparrow failed -- it got bought because it was successful. Did it reach its full potential? Certainly not. But certainly Google determined that it potentially could or it wouldn't have spent $MM to kill it.