
Email-First Startups - rrhoover
http://ryanhoover.me/post/43986871442/email-first-startups
======
swanson
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.

~~~
shurcooL
> 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?

~~~
swanson
My take is that when you use a slider - or the common 5-item Likert scales
(strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree) - people will
waffle over their answer. The fewer the options, the lesser cognitive overload
of having decide is today a "great" day or just a "good" day.

I don't want answering the question "how is your day going?" to take more than
the 2 seconds it takes to move your mouse to the link.

The problem with the slider is that you have you interface with it. So the
workflow would be: get an email, click a link, move a slider (compared to get
an email, click one of 3 links). I know I'd want to avoid the extra step as a
user, so that's why I opted for that approach.

There is also an option for the user to enter an anonymous comment after they
have logged their mood - so if you want to express why today is bad or add
note that it is an especially excellent day you can do that.

At a higher level view, I think the value in this particular app is not a
scientifically rigorous computation of a teams mood, but rather as a
conversation starter ("why has there been a few 'bads' this week? let's talk
about it") and a general trend indicator ("morale is down since we moved to
the new office, what's up with that?").

~~~
shurcooL
Yeah, I think having more options (like 5-item Likert) would be worse for
exactly the reasons you mentioned.

It's a good point that you can't do a slider in email, I didn't think of.
Unless email allows embedding an html form that you can submit? I've never
seen anything more than static html in my email so I guess it must not be
possible.

Anyway, thanks for your explanation, it makes sense. I think I'll make myself
a 0-1 floating point favourites tracker and see how I like using it.

~~~
swanson
Yeah, forms in an email are tricky. Some clients actually do support them -
which was a big surprise to me!
<http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/forms/>

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

------
MattBearman
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

------
swombat
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
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?

------
ThomPete
This was exactly how I started <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>

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
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
ahh ok. There you go.

------
bambax
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-
wh...](http://urgeous.com/p72t3aaa40h-mourning-posterous-how-and-why-i-built-
urgeous)

------
KateKendall
Yep! This is how we started The Fetch (<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. :)

------
rrhoover
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
Raise-funding-first

------
shanecleveland
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.

------
bogrollben
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-ma...](http://www.digiday.com/brands/the-most-underrated-digital-
marketing-tactics/)

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
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.

------
michaelbuckbee
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> and <http://www.mailgun.com>

In particular they really are quite good at simplifying the parsing of inbound
emails, which lets you get going quickly.

------
danhodgins
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-
para...](http://www.tinylever.com/building-an-audience-before-or-parallel-to-
launching)

------
jonmc12
Craigslist in '95 another example.

------
JacobAldridge
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
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.

------
jawns
At Correlated (<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
_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!) :-)

------
sam1988
Very interesting. About two weeks ago I coded up this one
<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.

------
eli
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.

------
gdonelli
Building a Twitter client via email: <http://essenceapp.com>

To focus on the people you care about

~~~
oron
Who produced the video for you ?

------
drewda
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/>

His product is (well, will be) to offer this as a service to others:
<http://convertkit.com/>

------
dreeves
Beeminder started this way too (it was Kibotzer -- the kibitzing bot
[<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.

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

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

------
stormental
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
Can you elaborate? I am having a hard time conceptualizing this.

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

