7 ms·

Email-First Startups

137 points by rrhoover 14y ago

adrianhoward 14y ago
I'll add another "me to" to this. Diarysnap (http://diarysnap.com/ http://diarysnap.com/) started of as a greasy hack that plugged email surveys into an excel spreadsheet - initially manually.
rrhoover 14y ago
In many ways, it's never been easier to get validation and traction for your startup idea. Email-first is a good strategy for some but I'd love to hear other lean ideas and examples. Forum-first? SMS-first? B&M-first?
- moorage 14y ago
  Raise-funding-first
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  raldi mentioned Twitter as SMS-first: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5280081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5280081
- networked 14y ago
  Phone-first is still pretty much the choice in many places. It's frustrating how many businesses in Eastern Europe, for example, fail to have any other means of contacting them or first-hand sources of information about them.
- armenarmen 14y ago
  could you elaborate on phone first?
ThomPete 14y ago
This was exactly how I started http://www.weekendhacker.net http://www.weekendhacker.net I was manually going through mails both from project owners and helpers. Now it's more or less automated (and about to relaunch after a period of silence) but it was good to get validation easily.This was exactly how I started http://www.weekendhacker.net http://www.weekendhacker.net I was manually going through mails both from project owners and helpers. Now it's more or less automated (and about to relaunch after a period of silence) but it was good to get validation easily. Other startups that could have started as emails AirBnB Ebay TheFancy CraigsList
- jeffclark 14y ago
  Craigslist did start as an email. From wikipedia: "Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area, before becoming a web-based service in 1996 and expanding into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U.S. cities in 2000, and currently covers 50 countries."
  - ThomPete 14y ago
    ahh ok. There you go.
- michaelbuckbee 14y ago
  Craigslist did start as an email list: "Craig's List"
jonmc12 14y ago
Craigslist in '95 another example.
eli 14y ago
My former employer FierceMarkets was a very profitable email-only B2B publisher for years. Email isn't sexy, but it's an incredibly powerful and often underrated medium.
MattBearman 14y ago
While this is a good article, I feel like email first is just a specific example of building an MVP. I did a similar thing when launching BugMuncher - I bought a template from Themeforest, built a very minimal PHP backend, and put a paypal subscription button on to the website. When ever anyone signed up, I'd get a notification from PayPal, at which point I'd manually add the user's details into my database, and manually send them a welcome email. There was no where for users to log in an amend their account, instead they had to email me with the required changes, and I'd action it. This meant I could build the first version of BugMuncher very fast, and once I had my first 10 paying customers I felt it was validated enough for me to build the full, automated system. So in short, MVP's rock
bogrollben 14y ago
This reminds me of this article I read a month ago: The Most Underrated Digital Marketing Tactics. http://www.digiday.com/brands/the-most-underrated-digital-marketing-tactics/ http://www.digiday.com/brands/the-most-underrated-digital-ma... Surprisingly: 2 of the 6 marketing directors interviewed said "Email" was the most underrated technique. There could be something to this email-first idea.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  There is something to it: it works. But people here are blind to it due to various reasons. Such as the hate towards cold emailing (not spam, but cold), the focus on writing code to fix something that does not need fixing, the focus on problems rather than on the solutions, anod the inherent apathy towards marketing that a lot of programmers have. Something that keeps them busy building useless products that nobody wants.
raldi 14y ago
Let's not forget that this is how Twitter got started, too. (Though they used SMS instead of email.)
shanecleveland 14y ago
Despite the claims of email being dead and/or ripe for disruption, we all use it – a lot. And I agree that email is a great place to gain traction. There is a low barrier of entry by only requiring an email address to receive a newsletter, for instance. And there is no mystery how email works. The biggest thing may be the built in "stickiness." I enjoy trying out new web apps and services, but the hardest part about making an app useful is remembering to use it. That's not a problem if it ends up in a place I already have open and in front of me much of the day – my email.
swombat 14y ago
I'm paying an email-first startup £2k a month right now. In fact, it's not just email-first - it's still email-only. They don't even have a website. They are actually moving to email-first-and-now-a-bit-more tomorrow - from tomorrow onwards, there won't even be any email, as the data they're providing will go straight into another system through an API. From email-first to not-even-email.
- petercooper 14y ago
  Are you able to say who this is? It sounds very intriguing as a business model. Guessing it's some sort of business/financial data subscription?
- petercooper 14y ago
  Are you able to say who this is? It sounds very intriguing as a business model. Guessing it's some sort of business/financial data subscription?
- petercooper 14y ago
  Are you able to say who this is? It sounds very intriguing as a business model. Guessing it's some sort of business/financial data subscription?
swanson 14y ago
Email as the interface is really interesting to me. Users don't necessarily need a username/password combo. They don't need to learn a new workflow. They don't need to install any new tools. Company IT depts take care of making sure people can access their email on their phones/laptops. I've built a product that tracks team mood that is based almost entirely on email. Instead of having a team of 10 developers each make their own accounts, there is just one account for the manager - who manages the list of the team's emails. The team members record their mood by clicking one of three links in the email, no complicated forms or sliders. Usage and adoption rates have been beyond my expectations (~70% response rate to daily emails) and I think the use of email is a major factor. Email-first is very constraining - but ultimately constraints help spur creative and elegant solutions.
- scottmagdalein 14y ago
  Love this idea. Can I see it somewhere online?
  - swanson 14y ago
    Sure - https://www.moraleapp.com/ https://www.moraleapp.com/
    - scottmagdalein 14y ago
      Love it.
- shurcooL 14y ago
  > no complicated forms or sliders. I find this very interesting. What made you want to avoid use a slider? Personally, I really dislike such limiting options. Good, meh, bad? It doesn't let me express if I'm a little better than good or somewhere between Good and Meh. I'd often have to truncate my true expression. For myself, I would love a single simple slider. It would let me express myself with any degree of accuracy I want. Very specific, or just rough. Am I an exception from the average user? Because this bugs me in so many places. So many things are in or out. I want them to be a floating point value between 0 to 1. Website favourites. I wish I could favourite them by any amount between 0 to 1, etc. (Then you could do all sorts of things like display the higher-ranked items larger, or filter displaying only >= 0.75 items). Same goes for app/movie rankings. Why do I have to truncate my feelings to 1-5 stars instead of just dropping a slider to where I feel like?
michaelbuckbee 14y ago
I've built a number of sites/prototypes along these lines, two services (no affiliation beyond using them) that I've found useful are: http://www.postmarkapp.com http://www.postmarkapp.com and http://www.mailgun.com http://www.mailgun.com In particular they really are quite good at simplifying the parsing of inbound emails, which lets you get going quickly.
drewda 14y ago
Nathan Barry has been writing an articulate blog about the process of starting a SaaS business in this "e-mail first" manner: http://nathanbarry.com/ http://nathanbarry.com/ His product is (well, will be) to offer this as a service to others: http://convertkit.com/ http://convertkit.com/
jawns 14y ago
At Correlated (http://www.correlated.org http://www.correlated.org), the daily results email has been a key part of the user experience from day one. In fact, users can take part in the site's main activity -- responding to the daily poll question -- straight from their email. I've found that users tolerate a once-a-day email pretty well, and it's a little more noticeable than just an RSS feed. That said, here's how I think users respond to daily content delivered via email vs. an RSS feed: -- A handful of RSS feed updates a day: That's cool. -- A TON of RSS feed updates a day: Still cool. I'll get to 'em when I get to 'em. -- A handful of email newsletters a day: That's cool. -- A TON of email newsletters a day: Not cool, man. If I have time, I'll filter them. Otherwise, time to unsubscribe. So, yeah, right now, email might be a good medium ... but there is a saturation point.
- petercooper 14y ago
  So, yeah, right now, email might be a good medium ... but there is a saturation point. Long term it'll continue to be too, just as with anything else. There are only so many magazines, newspapers, TV channels, Web sites, foods, restaurants, drinks, etc, that we can cope with/consume each day too, but new ones come along and knock others out of business without breaking the tolerance for the medium (luckily!) :-)
bambax 14y ago
I just started a Posterous clone (just as in today) that tries to do most things via email (no login necessary... or possible). It uses Mailgun for email management and in my experience it works flawlessly. http://urgeous.com/p72t3aaa40h-mourning-posterous-how-and-why-i-built-urgeous http://urgeous.com/p72t3aaa40h-mourning-posterous-how-and-wh...
JacobAldridge 14y ago
Since I run an email newsletter startup (not quite the same thing as the OP is discussing)it's fair to say I believe in the value of email. Surprises me how many people though tell me we should build and sell an App instead. Which market would you rather gain traction in - people with smartphones or people with an email address?
- armenarmen 14y ago
  I think OP was right in saying that email can be used to later up sell on an app or other product. Once you've built a good list, you can even ask them if they would prefer a native app.
danhodgins 14y ago
Building a list and sending emails is an ideal way to start building an audience early and eventually, to test market your product concept. We expand more upon this idea in the following post: http://www.tinylever.com/building-an-audience-before-or-parallel-to-launching http://www.tinylever.com/building-an-audience-before-or-para...
philco 14y ago
TheLadders.com started exactly like this. IT was an email digest of 100k + jobs, went crazy viral.
sam1988 14y ago
Very interesting. About two weeks ago I coded up this one http://www.samsreminder.com/ http://www.samsreminder.com/ in a weekend for fun. (Not really meant to be a startup, but just a service that could be helpful to a few folks.) It is an almost-email-only solution.
KateKendall 14y ago
Yep! This is how we started The Fetch (http://thefetch.com http://thefetch.com) – a what's happening city guide for professionals to discover local events. I started it out of Melbourne, Australia and we've gone to 10 cities across the US, Europe and Asia Pac within a year. :)
gdonelli 14y ago
Building a Twitter client via email: http://essenceapp.com http://essenceapp.com To focus on the people you care about
- oron 14y ago
  Who produced the video for you ?
dreeves 14y ago
Beeminder started this way too (it was Kibotzer -- the kibitzing bot [http://blog.beeminder.com/beenamer http://blog.beeminder.com/beenamer] -- back then). Bot emails you asking for your number (eg, your weight) and sends you back a graph of your progress.
stormental 14y ago
Cloudability started this way too. It wasn't until the initial free email system broke and the people using it wrote in saying WTF that we realized we were onto something...
- Mz 14y ago
  Can you elaborate? I am having a hard time conceptualizing this.

137 points by rrhoover 14y ago

I'll add another "me to" to this. Diarysnap (http://diarysnap.com/ http://diarysnap.com/) started of as a greasy hack that plugged email surveys into an excel spreadsheet - initially manually.

rrhoover 14y ago

In many ways, it's never been easier to get validation and traction for your startup idea. Email-first is a good strategy for some but I'd love to hear other lean ideas and examples. Forum-first? SMS-first? B&M-first?

moorage 14y ago
Raise-funding-first
andrewflnr 14y ago
raldi mentioned Twitter as SMS-first: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5280081 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5280081
networked 14y ago
Phone-first is still pretty much the choice in many places. It's frustrating how many businesses in Eastern Europe, for example, fail to have any other means of contacting them or first-hand sources of information about them.
armenarmen 14y ago
could you elaborate on phone first?

ThomPete 14y ago

This was exactly how I started http://www.weekendhacker.net http://www.weekendhacker.net I was manually going through mails both from project owners and helpers. Now it's more or less automated (and about to relaunch after a period of silence) but it was good to get validation easily.This was exactly how I started http://www.weekendhacker.net http://www.weekendhacker.net I was manually going through mails both from project owners and helpers. Now it's more or less automated (and about to relaunch after a period of silence) but it was good to get validation easily. Other startups that could have started as emails AirBnB Ebay TheFancy CraigsList

jeffclark 14y ago
Craigslist did start as an email. From wikipedia: "Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area, before becoming a web-based service in 1996 and expanding into other classified categories. It started expanding to other U.S. cities in 2000, and currently covers 50 countries."
- ThomPete 14y ago
  ahh ok. There you go.
michaelbuckbee 14y ago
Craigslist did start as an email list: "Craig's List"

jonmc12 14y ago

Craigslist in '95 another example.

eli 14y ago

My former employer FierceMarkets was a very profitable email-only B2B publisher for years. Email isn't sexy, but it's an incredibly powerful and often underrated medium.

MattBearman 14y ago

While this is a good article, I feel like email first is just a specific example of building an MVP. I did a similar thing when launching BugMuncher - I bought a template from Themeforest, built a very minimal PHP backend, and put a paypal subscription button on to the website. When ever anyone signed up, I'd get a notification from PayPal, at which point I'd manually add the user's details into my database, and manually send them a welcome email. There was no where for users to log in an amend their account, instead they had to email me with the required changes, and I'd action it. This meant I could build the first version of BugMuncher very fast, and once I had my first 10 paying customers I felt it was validated enough for me to build the full, automated system. So in short, MVP's rock

bogrollben 14y ago

This reminds me of this article I read a month ago: The Most Underrated Digital Marketing Tactics. http://www.digiday.com/brands/the-most-underrated-digital-marketing-tactics/ http://www.digiday.com/brands/the-most-underrated-digital-ma... Surprisingly: 2 of the 6 marketing directors interviewed said "Email" was the most underrated technique. There could be something to this email-first idea.

orangethirty 14y ago
There is something to it: it works. But people here are blind to it due to various reasons. Such as the hate towards cold emailing (not spam, but cold), the focus on writing code to fix something that does not need fixing, the focus on problems rather than on the solutions, anod the inherent apathy towards marketing that a lot of programmers have. Something that keeps them busy building useless products that nobody wants.

raldi 14y ago

Let's not forget that this is how Twitter got started, too. (Though they used SMS instead of email.)

shanecleveland 14y ago

Despite the claims of email being dead and/or ripe for disruption, we all use it – a lot. And I agree that email is a great place to gain traction. There is a low barrier of entry by only requiring an email address to receive a newsletter, for instance. And there is no mystery how email works. The biggest thing may be the built in "stickiness." I enjoy trying out new web apps and services, but the hardest part about making an app useful is remembering to use it. That's not a problem if it ends up in a place I already have open and in front of me much of the day – my email.

swombat 14y ago

I'm paying an email-first startup £2k a month right now. In fact, it's not just email-first - it's still email-only. They don't even have a website. They are actually moving to email-first-and-now-a-bit-more tomorrow - from tomorrow onwards, there won't even be any email, as the data they're providing will go straight into another system through an API. From email-first to not-even-email.

petercooper 14y ago
Are you able to say who this is? It sounds very intriguing as a business model. Guessing it's some sort of business/financial data subscription?
petercooper 14y ago
Are you able to say who this is? It sounds very intriguing as a business model. Guessing it's some sort of business/financial data subscription?
petercooper 14y ago
Are you able to say who this is? It sounds very intriguing as a business model. Guessing it's some sort of business/financial data subscription?

swanson 14y ago

Email as the interface is really interesting to me. Users don't necessarily need a username/password combo. They don't need to learn a new workflow. They don't need to install any new tools. Company IT depts take care of making sure people can access their email on their phones/laptops. I've built a product that tracks team mood that is based almost entirely on email. Instead of having a team of 10 developers each make their own accounts, there is just one account for the manager - who manages the list of the team's emails. The team members record their mood by clicking one of three links in the email, no complicated forms or sliders. Usage and adoption rates have been beyond my expectations (~70% response rate to daily emails) and I think the use of email is a major factor. Email-first is very constraining - but ultimately constraints help spur creative and elegant solutions.

scottmagdalein 14y ago
Love this idea. Can I see it somewhere online?
- swanson 14y ago
  Sure - https://www.moraleapp.com/ https://www.moraleapp.com/
  - scottmagdalein 14y ago
    Love it.
shurcooL 14y ago
> no complicated forms or sliders. I find this very interesting. What made you want to avoid use a slider? Personally, I really dislike such limiting options. Good, meh, bad? It doesn't let me express if I'm a little better than good or somewhere between Good and Meh. I'd often have to truncate my true expression. For myself, I would love a single simple slider. It would let me express myself with any degree of accuracy I want. Very specific, or just rough. Am I an exception from the average user? Because this bugs me in so many places. So many things are in or out. I want them to be a floating point value between 0 to 1. Website favourites. I wish I could favourite them by any amount between 0 to 1, etc. (Then you could do all sorts of things like display the higher-ranked items larger, or filter displaying only >= 0.75 items). Same goes for app/movie rankings. Why do I have to truncate my feelings to 1-5 stars instead of just dropping a slider to where I feel like?

michaelbuckbee 14y ago

I've built a number of sites/prototypes along these lines, two services (no affiliation beyond using them) that I've found useful are: http://www.postmarkapp.com http://www.postmarkapp.com and http://www.mailgun.com http://www.mailgun.com In particular they really are quite good at simplifying the parsing of inbound emails, which lets you get going quickly.

drewda 14y ago

Nathan Barry has been writing an articulate blog about the process of starting a SaaS business in this "e-mail first" manner: http://nathanbarry.com/ http://nathanbarry.com/ His product is (well, will be) to offer this as a service to others: http://convertkit.com/ http://convertkit.com/

jawns 14y ago

At Correlated (http://www.correlated.org http://www.correlated.org), the daily results email has been a key part of the user experience from day one. In fact, users can take part in the site's main activity -- responding to the daily poll question -- straight from their email. I've found that users tolerate a once-a-day email pretty well, and it's a little more noticeable than just an RSS feed. That said, here's how I think users respond to daily content delivered via email vs. an RSS feed: -- A handful of RSS feed updates a day: That's cool. -- A TON of RSS feed updates a day: Still cool. I'll get to 'em when I get to 'em. -- A handful of email newsletters a day: That's cool. -- A TON of email newsletters a day: Not cool, man. If I have time, I'll filter them. Otherwise, time to unsubscribe. So, yeah, right now, email might be a good medium ... but there is a saturation point.

petercooper 14y ago
So, yeah, right now, email might be a good medium ... but there is a saturation point. Long term it'll continue to be too, just as with anything else. There are only so many magazines, newspapers, TV channels, Web sites, foods, restaurants, drinks, etc, that we can cope with/consume each day too, but new ones come along and knock others out of business without breaking the tolerance for the medium (luckily!) :-)

bambax 14y ago

I just started a Posterous clone (just as in today) that tries to do most things via email (no login necessary... or possible). It uses Mailgun for email management and in my experience it works flawlessly. http://urgeous.com/p72t3aaa40h-mourning-posterous-how-and-why-i-built-urgeous http://urgeous.com/p72t3aaa40h-mourning-posterous-how-and-wh...

JacobAldridge 14y ago

Since I run an email newsletter startup (not quite the same thing as the OP is discussing)it's fair to say I believe in the value of email. Surprises me how many people though tell me we should build and sell an App instead. Which market would you rather gain traction in - people with smartphones or people with an email address?

armenarmen 14y ago
I think OP was right in saying that email can be used to later up sell on an app or other product. Once you've built a good list, you can even ask them if they would prefer a native app.

danhodgins 14y ago

Building a list and sending emails is an ideal way to start building an audience early and eventually, to test market your product concept. We expand more upon this idea in the following post: http://www.tinylever.com/building-an-audience-before-or-parallel-to-launching http://www.tinylever.com/building-an-audience-before-or-para...

philco 14y ago

TheLadders.com started exactly like this. IT was an email digest of 100k + jobs, went crazy viral.

sam1988 14y ago

Very interesting. About two weeks ago I coded up this one http://www.samsreminder.com/ http://www.samsreminder.com/ in a weekend for fun. (Not really meant to be a startup, but just a service that could be helpful to a few folks.) It is an almost-email-only solution.

KateKendall 14y ago

Yep! This is how we started The Fetch (http://thefetch.com http://thefetch.com) – a what's happening city guide for professionals to discover local events. I started it out of Melbourne, Australia and we've gone to 10 cities across the US, Europe and Asia Pac within a year. :)

gdonelli 14y ago

Building a Twitter client via email: http://essenceapp.com http://essenceapp.com To focus on the people you care about

oron 14y ago
Who produced the video for you ?

dreeves 14y ago

Beeminder started this way too (it was Kibotzer -- the kibitzing bot [http://blog.beeminder.com/beenamer http://blog.beeminder.com/beenamer] -- back then). Bot emails you asking for your number (eg, your weight) and sends you back a graph of your progress.

stormental 14y ago

Cloudability started this way too. It wasn't until the initial free email system broke and the people using it wrote in saying WTF that we realized we were onto something...

Mz 14y ago
Can you elaborate? I am having a hard time conceptualizing this.