
Kanban for E-Mail - humbfool2
https://kanbanmail.app/
======
neogodless
I'm not sure what the research shows on this sort of thing, but when I loaded
up the landing page on my desktop browser, I saw two buttons, and neither
applied to me. "SIGN UP" and "LOG IN". Since I did not yet know what this
thing is, beyond my vague knowledge of Kanban and email, I wanted it to
explain that to me. Instead, I have to take action.

Oh wait... after a while I look for a UI element - a scroll bar. And this is
the only clue I get to tell me how to navigate. Is this a good design choice,
to make it appear like your only options are one of two actions, while relying
on a native browser control to hint to the user that they can scroll to get
down to the information they are going to need to start making decisions?

(I'm not arguing that this can't be a good design choice, but at least for me,
personally, it seemed pushy, while also being unintuitive if you're not there
to take one of those actions.)

~~~
jakobegger
Typically there are two affordances that tell the user he can scroll:

1) A scroll bar

2) Clipped content

Many browsers hide the scroll bar, so the only thing left is 2).

For some reason designers think that it's a good idea to scale the content in
such a way that the initial page load looks like a complete page.

This is so idiotic! You are actively misleading the customer! You are hiding
all the marketing copy.

Some designers have realised this is a problem, and they add a little arrow to
indicate you can scroll. Nobody understands those weird arrows except other
designers.

The easiest way to tell users that there is more content is to show it! Make
it so that part of the second headline is visible, and noone will miss the
fact that there is more content below!

If you go for sexy screenshots, sure, go make your first section fill the
browser window. If you want your visitors to read your page, don't do that!

~~~
jehlakj
Interesting. I’m pretty sensitive to UX but this has never been a problem for
me. I don’t come across single non scrolling static websites that often, and
knowing that the entire content will most likely never be at the top, I
immediately scroll down without thinking.

I find it extremely fascinating that some people actually have to look for a
scroll bar or clipped content (spoon fed) in order to scroll down. Sometimes I
don’t even know there is one unless I have to speed drag on a long page.

~~~
wpietri
The "spoon fed" bit is insulting. People are not infants if they don't guess
that there's an invisible thing.

If designers want people to know something exists, they should generally make
it visible. Especially given that with pages like this one, deemphasizing or
hiding things is a common dark pattern to force people to think there are no
alternatives.

------
lucisferre
This is neat, and I could see it potentially being a useful way to categorize
and organize e-mail, though I personally find e-mail clients that allow for
deferral/scheduling sufficient for my needs.

However this trend of using lean and Toyota production system terminology to
sell stuff that has no real relationship to it is starting to get tired.

None of these card column systems has any real relationship to the Kanban
process outside of the use of cards. The similarities tend to end at a
completely superficial level.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban)

Rule #1 of Kanban is that it is a "pull" system. By design e-mail is push. It
would also be difficult to limit work-in-progress here, which is another
cornerstone feature of a Kanban system.

~~~
nck4222
>Rule #1 of Kanban is that it is a "pull" system. By design e-mail is push. It
would also be difficult to limit work-in-progress here, which is another
cornerstone feature of a Kanban system.

I was actually just thinking about this the other day. To rephrase it
slightly, an email inbox is essentially an opt-out model. Any person anywhere
can put something in your inbox, and after reviewing/getting sufficiently
annoyed you can opt-out from receiving their emails (marking them as spam,
forwarding to trash, etc.)

Personally I've been interested in seeing how an opt-in inbox model would
perform. Every email goes to spam and/or a review bucket, and then once a week
(or whenever you feel like it) the user can skim the bucket for emails from
people/lists they actually want to see, and approve them. Follow up emails
from those address can then go straight to the inbox with out need for review.

This might not work for every use case, but I suspect I'd like this for my
personal email use. No matter how many times I unsubscribe from an email list
or service, a new one takes its place without me signing up for it. I think I
would find significant less frustration being able to opt-in vs opt-out.

~~~
mxwsn
Google Inbox basically does this automatically for me. It has learned which
email addresses I correspond with for work and other important topics, which
it pushes directly to my inbox. It also automatically bins other emails into
categories such as forums, commercial promos, social (newsletters and what
not), which arrive in a single bundle each morning or each Monday morning.
These bundles can be opened to see individual emails or archived as a bundle
with a single click.

Definitely feels like an opt-in experience to me, and far better than previous
email solutions I used.

------
insensible
As Getting Things Done taught us, our inbox is not our to-do list. For
example, in the screenshot at the top of the landing page: what action do I
take on "Jennifer: Privacy Policy draft #3"? So in this state this would not
be a benefit to me.

But a fairly simple tweak would change the equation: a feature to process
emails by converting a message into 0, 1, or multiple actions that would then
go through the board. Those actions would include the email for context.

A card board that allows me to stay on top of my duties without a separate
email client (and without turning my inbox into my todo list) could be a
_very_ nice tool.

Congrats on shipping this!

------
mikegerwitz
Most of my communication with various people/communities is done via mail. For
those using Emacs:

I use a Kanban (or GTD, depending)-style workflow using Org mode and Gnus. Org
mode recognizes `gnus:'-prefixed links. For certain types of mail, I use an
Org capture template within Gnus which inserts a TODO item into an Org
document, along with a link to the original message (which can be opened in
Gnus using C-c C-o).

You can then go through your usual workflow as you would with any other item;
mail is just another source of data.

Considering that the task originated via mail, chances are it'll require some
back-and-forth, potentially over the course of weeks and perhaps with a
handful of people involved. I also keep detailed timestamped logs of
correspondence and my actions, linking to important messages as needed. This
is particularly useful for large threads, since I highlight the most important
information. Since I'm logging via Org mode (and not my MUA), my logs can also
include any other additional information and time tracking that has nothing to
do with mail, so this creates a useful timeline that combines both actions and
correspondence into a single view.

Because this is married with the rest of my Org-based task management, my mail
also shows up in my agenda and reporting.

~~~
nextos
This is a great setup. I used to have the same configuration, but ended up
replacing Gnus with Notmuch.

I'm far from a Gnus guru, so perhaps I'm missing something, but why do you
prefer Gnus to Notmuch or Mu4e?

IMHO Notmuch has a very clear MUA model. Plus it's extremely fast and simple.
Everything is done via tags. Notmuch never ever touches your email. This is
the task of a backend, which has to translate tag changes into Mailbox
actions. I do this using a few trivial Bash one-liners, which accommodate for
Gmail's unusual IMAP implementation.

Mu4e is more similar to Mutt, as it does touch email directly, allowing you to
move emails across folders or delete them. I also found the interface a little
bit less snappy than Notmuch.

Gnus has some great ideas, but it's quite slow and the internals are a mess.
It needs some serious refactoring.

~~~
mikegerwitz
I haven't researched Notmuch, but I've heard some interesting things about it.
I used to use Mutt back in the day. Whatever I use would have to have Org
integration, though.

Tbh, I just haven't researched other things and I haven't had the time. But
Gnus does seem to fit well how I organize my mail: I subscribe to a lot of
mailing lists, each of which are filtered into their own folders via Sieve
scripts, before they touch my MUA. I also organize normal mail similarly.

~~~
nextos
Yes, I used to deal with email like that. Gnus + Dovecot + Sieve.

I find Notmuch + mbsync more satisfying because of efficiency and simplicity.
It's a serverless setup, config files are small, and it's very quick.

Both Notmuch and Mu4e have good Org integration, so if you want to explore
that route it shouldn't be a show-stopper.

~~~
mikegerwitz
This is a late reply, but thanks for your input. I'll look into them further.
What interests me is your replacing Dovecot + Sieve with your MUA; I'll have
to see if I want to do that or not.

~~~
nextos
No worries. For some time, before fully transitioning to Notmuch as a MUA, I
was running Gnus with just Notmuch (using nnir notmuch search backend). So no
Dovecot or Sieve. A pure Maildir.

I'm not sure whether you'd loose any feature like this, I don't think I did.
But perhaps it's much simpler and quicker to switch to Notmuch for Emacs.

------
bachmeier
Let me state my personal experience trying something like this. I get a ton of
email on all sorts of different topics and projects that may be old or may be
currently in progress.

I did something like this inside my file manager. Just download all new
messages into a directory a couple times a day. Delete the junk. Put email
needing to be processed into one directory. Put processed email into a
different directory.

The system didn't work at all. Sure, it works great for certain tasks, like
responding to "What time will we meet for lunch?" I had to add extra
directories to allow archiving messages by project. An email is a piece of
reference material. You appear to be constructing a walled garden that makes
it hard to do anything with messages once they're inside your service. What do
I do with messages that don't need a response but that provide information?
How do I view past email related to a project? Hopefully the answer is not
"use your regular email client".

Looks good but unless there's more than shown on this page, I don't see it yet
being a solution for the people that would be willing to pay for it, if it
does nothing more than sort through messages needing a reply.

~~~
ScoutOrgo
I already do something like this, but with a lot of success: anything that
requires an action on my end stays in my inbox and anything that I get done or
is purely informational goes to a folders (typically project related).

All this seems to do is break out my inbox/"to do" into "uncategorized" and 3
other "to do" categories. I don't know if totally needed. If someone already
has a problem organizing their main inbox, how are they going to stay
organized with this kanban flow?

~~~
bachmeier
> how are they going to stay organized with this kanban flow?

That's exactly right. Processing your email does not mean you reply to every
message. It means every task related to every email has been completed and you
have access to that information everywhere its needed - even if you forget
about it.

------
athenot
This workflow can already be done with good old Apple Mail. The ability to
open multiple windows all showing a personalized view (both in the selection
of emails and what you want to see about them) allows for this flexibility. As
a bonus, the views can be compact and take up very little screen space.

~~~
mattl
I miss Lip Service from NeXTMail. The ability to quickly add an audio note to
an email was very useful.

------
TomAnthony
Congrats on shipping this, it looks very intriguing!

A few thoughts/ideas:

\- It would be helpful to see more product screenshots/videos of it in action.

\- It would also be useful to get more info on how this works and interacts
with email services - perhaps easiest to add an FAQ page (this discussion
thread should help get some ideas for the questions).

\- I echo what some others say - that I don't necessarily know whether this
would work for all my emails. I tend to find some emails would suit this
process. Therefore, I'd love a Chrome extension into this, where it is a tab
added in Gmail. I could process emails and move some to the kanban board for
when I'm in 'action things' mode, and they are out of sight when I'm
processing emails - sort of a two step process. If you had that I'd sign up to
at least try this right now.

Good luck with it!

~~~
bastijn
For what it is worth, this is how I use Todoist integration with my mail
clients. I made categories according to GTD and assign emails to the right
category. I tag them with my tags like "read/review", "reply", and other tags
useful to me.

Next to that I use Todoist for regular task management. Works quite well for
me. Made all these additions to email clients like "snooze" redundant.

P.s. key is to have the task management app with proper functionality which is
available on your phones email clients as well as you read quite a lot of them
there. This is why I chose Todoist as it integrates with my Newton email app
which I use for my work mail.

------
omot
Cool idea, I would like to challenge his $12/month price point.

Subscriptions I could get cheaper than $12 a month:

Netflix

Youtube Red

Amazon Prime

Dollar Shave Club

All of which provide higher value than reorganizing email. I think he should
price in relation to other subscription services that exist.

~~~
tyrex2017
i take the opposite side:

even saving one hour per month with this tool is worth more than 12 usd, to me
(compare hourly wage).

i just want a free month to be sure i am not giving out money to a bad
product.

------
stockkid
I love it! The thing I would like to improve is that there as a user I am a
bit confused about what it is and how it can provide value to me when I land
on the product's page.

* Pricing is hidden.you can only view it when clicking "join" but I do not want to click join until I know that price.

* When I land on the page I see two calls to action ("join" and "login") and no indication of if there is more content. Naturally I'd bounce from the page most of the time.

Good luck!

------
mattl
“Indie Maker” —- is this a new term or am I missing something about this?

~~~
Alex3917
It basically just means that the product isn't made by a VC-funded company.
C.f.:

[https://www.indiehackers.com/](https://www.indiehackers.com/)

[https://indieweb.org/](https://indieweb.org/)

As a customer, the main advantages of using indie products is that there
aren't investors telling the founders that they need to shut down if they
don't get millions of users in the next 18 months, or that they need to start
selling customer data. And if you're a big enough customer, it means
potentially being able to own part of the company. (Since turning a business
into a co-op and selling shares to the existing customers is a common exit
strategy, but is rarely possible once a company has taken venture capital.)

~~~
cabaalis
> As a customer, the main advantages of using indie products is that there
> aren't investors telling the founders that they need to shut down if they
> don't get millions of users in the next 18 months, or that they need to
> start selling customer data.

I get that, but companies exist to get paid. And therefore a successful
product will attempt to grow, which often means a change in business processes
or pricing. So if I make a product like this indispensable to my workflow or
company, I could be faced with a change being forced upon me when they go to
scale.

All that to say I'm not 100% it's effective marketing.

~~~
Alex3917
> So if I make a product like this indispensable to my workflow or company, I
> could be faced with a change being forced upon me when they go to scale.

Sure, that risk still exists. But with indie products there are essentially
three groups of stakeholders (founders, employees, customers) instead of of
four (+investors), so that risk is greatly reduced.

------
apatters
Congrats on shipping an MVP! In my humble opinion however Kanban and email are
not a match.

In fact for most people (definitely for me) I believe email is a very poor
backend for a todo list.

My reasoning is that your email inbox is something that anybody can add items
to -- even if those items start out as uncategorized, you still need to decide
whether they deserve action or not. And when you receive 100+ emails a day,
that's a job in and of itself.

The essence of any prioritization system should be that it helps you focus on
the most important things first. And you already know what those things are --
you don't need dozens of people proposing them to you.

My personal system is to sit down every Monday morning, think about the
absolute highest impact things I need to accomplish that week, and write them
down in an old fashioned paper notebook which I refer back to any time I feel
like I'm spinning my wheels.

Fundamentally the value I generate doesn't come from reacting to people all
day, it comes from identifying outcomes that truly matter and doing whatever
is necessary to advance those outcomes.

There absolutely _are_ jobs where the inbox-as-todo model makes sense:
customer service agent and certain kinds of sales rep come immediately to
mind.

But I think this model where externals just keep on pushing new tasks onto you
is fundamentally not a great tool to help most people generate value. Also not
good for mental health.

If you have a boss, a personal assistant, a spouse or kids those are people
who should probably be able to reach you immediately and easily. Outside of
that I think we should generally start at zero and have to whitelist specific
people. In the old days this was accomplished by giving them your phone
number.

~~~
schwinn
> Fundamentally the value I generate doesn't come from reacting to people all
> day, it comes from identifying outcomes that truly matter and doing whatever
> is necessary to advance those outcomes.

Amen. I've never written a performance review (or received one) applauding
email reaction time. Think about it. The stuff that gets accolades are
accomplishing the things that "truly matter."

------
marrone12
You don't list anywhere on the site how it actually works. Is it IMAP?

~~~
appleiigs
and are there rules for sorting or do I manually move all of them? Can the
columns be customized?

------
TrevorAustin
Lol that the hero quote is just by the founder

~~~
sakopov
Yeah that's a little awkward. Should've just made it a statement instead of a
quote.

------
cranjice
This seems useful in concept but $12/mo is more than I'm willing to pay for
email.

It's also unclear to me if this is a browser based email client (using
imap/smtp etc.) or if it comes with it's own email address and handles final
delivery/storage.

------
giancarlostoro
Pictures are huge and font is huge on my 1080p display. Is this just designed
for a 4K audience or something? Starting to feel like the whole move towards
supporting mobile should include 4k devs supporting lower resolutions too? Or
is it just me...

~~~
anothergoogler
The header font is huge and doesn't scale with the viewport, that is not a
requirement for mobile/responsive design though.

------
vxNsr
I do this already with categories in Outlook, plus I use the single line view
so I can see all my tasks on one screen.

I hate the trend of apps following google's lead and putting eons of white
space in their apps forcing tons of scrolling to get anything done.

Chrome apparently will be updated sometime soon with a UI that adds two or
three horizontal lines of white space above the tab bar, and they will be
totally changing the way tabs look in general to make it much harder to
differentiate different tabs. I will probably be moving to firefox after
that...

------
meesterdude
Well done! I would disregard much of the criticism on here as bikeshedding and
not worth much merit. Reminds me of the dropbox HN thread.

I often "hold on" to certain emails for certain reasons. Because I need to
reply to them, or read them more, or am waiting on reply. I can see breaking
it out into a kanban could be beneficial for that.

I would never use though; because the service will never do what I need from
an email client. It'll be more like an email backed trello, and even then I
would bet the providers it works with will be gmail and gmail. Even then there
are things like PGP, search, exporting, that a good client offers, and then
issues with data security and exposing your inbox to a third party who could
do anything - from data mining, to theft; with or without intent.

But... as an app? I'd be down. Maybe not $12/mo down... but $4/mo for an email
client that's both good and being improved upon would not be a bad deal for
me. Maybe do personal/corporate licensing, as companies will have more money
to throw at software; which would help with reaching sustainability.

Anyway, great idea and I hope it really can become something. Launching
anything is hard, doing it alone even harder. To deliver something that isn't
completely nonsense is almost a feat in itself.

------
Gertig
This looks nice and kudos to the team (Ethan) behind it for shipping it!

I have tried similar tools in the past that convert Gmail into a Kanban board
([https://www.sortd.com/](https://www.sortd.com/) and
[https://www.dragapp.com](https://www.dragapp.com)) and have not had much
success with that method of triaging emails. Perhaps it's a personal failing
of my own.

------
jscholes
This sounds like it could be potentially useful, as an alternative to
unopinionated productivity tools which force you to make far too many
decisions upfront. On the other hand I've never heard of Kanban and I'm not
the only one. I feel like the name alone is intended to communicate what this
does to a core part of your target audience, but if you've never heard of
Kanban explaining that it's a "Kanban board for your emails" in the tagline
doesn't make it that much clearer either.

Either way, good luck with it! I'm a screen reader user so would be interested
to see how accessible and usable it is from the keyboard alone. That's also
why you should read what I've said above in the context of not being able to
see your visual design, which might instantly make it clear what it does.

------
eksemplar
The efficient ways of handling emails is to do it a few times a day, and then
either deal with them to the point where you can delete it, or turn it into a
task. (I have employees who are masters of efficiency and lean and this is
their thing, but I’ve seen the benchmarks on departments where it was
implemented, and it works.)

I can see how you could use kanban to do this, but most offices already have
dedicated systems for handling their tasks, and honestly, even outlook tasks
are better at this than a kanbanboard.

Why would you need multiple lines for an email? And why would you keep you
emails on your email account, where no one else can get it, client if it’s
important enough to archive?

Best of luck though, maybe there is a usecase I’m not seeing.

------
jtth
The privacy policy is a blank page.

~~~
gtdawg
Exactly. If this thing is accessing my email, I need to understand more about
it, especially the privacy policy. A blank privacy policy page doesn't instill
confidence.

------
rcdwealth
Full privacy? LOL!

People don't subscribe there, they will steal all your emails.

Just use secure email provider like protonmail.com or even better, register
your domain, and fetch emails offline to your computer as soon as they arrive.

Don't addicted to "online" storage of your personal data. Do you know those
people? You have to be independent.

Who does that server really serve? [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-
that-server-really-se...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-
really-serve.en.html)

And use mutt email software, the best in the world
[http://www.mutt.org](http://www.mutt.org)

------
hknd
This looks nice!

I'm using gmail exactly like this with the "multiple inbox" experiment. I'm
triaging my mails a couple of times per day and assigning them to the correct
inboxes via labels (ctrl+l).

------
tejasmanohar
Nice job getting a landing page on the front page :-)

This is an interesting product. I've been using Google Inbox at work for the
last ~6mo. I really like the snooze feature that removes an email from your
inbox until a set time. I check my Inbox every few hours and try to keep it
squeaky clean by snoozing emails until I plan to attack them. When something's
snoozed over and over due to procrastination / poor time management, you
really feel it.

How does everyone else manage their email? I don't get that many emails,
probably < 10/day.

~~~
tofflos
I read them and mark them as unread until I have time to deal with them.

Every once in a while I try to clear out "sections" of time such as the
current day, week or month by either responding or by performing the requested
task - hoping that one day I'll get my unread count down to zero. ;-)

------
golem14
I wish there were more information on how data is accessed / stored. The site
claims that the only thing that is stored is the email address of the user,
the rest lives in gmail.

Is there an app that can read all the email and then store metadata back into
each thread ? Can this app 'tee' my data somewhere else without me knowing?

I guess a lot of people are not excited to give anyone else access to their
email.

------
pknerd
I use Trello for my day to day official/personal task. This idea looks good,
especially when dealing emails with clients related to tasks

~~~
addicted
You can use Trllo for this as well. Each board has an associated email which
converts any messages sent to it into a card.

I've created a hotkey for my email client so any email that may require an
action can easily be added to the Inbox list on my GTD Trello board.

It works really well as long as I am maintaining it.

------
tehabe
This would be neat if it were a local application.

------
menacingly
I saw "kanban for email" and thought "ugh.", because it sounds like a very "an
engineer thought of this" idea, but then I saw the product shots and the
usefulness of it did jump out at me. This looks handy.

Email-based task systems tend toward clutter, but if you have some way to deal
with that onslaught, this could be really useful

------
rjacksonm1
What a fantastic idea! I know many folks, especially in small business, who
would get a massive productivity boost from something like this.

I'd recommend explaining how the service integrates with people's emails,
before asking them to hand over any details. That's the only thing that would
stop me from giving it a go.

------
mezzode
Using this workflow for email is pretty interesting. I'm currently relying
heavily on snoozing in Google Inbox to manage email tasks, but this takes
things a step further. I will say though that $12/mo is too steep compared the
upside for me when you can hack together a workflow for free relatively
easily.

------
yannovitch
I would be very interested by this if it was opensource with integrations to
major clients and open source web clients like Roundcube. But until then, I
don't want to give always more private information to any new third party,
even very cool Indie Maker ones.

------
oyebenny
Damn, nope. Gotta spend $12 a MONTH?! I don't even pay that for my Netflix or
Spotify.

------
dawie
My biggest question is: Does it work with Gmail, but this is no answered
anywhere, so I am not keen to sign up. (I also don't really know what I am
signing up for.)

------
sam0x17
This is a really good idea. If it works well, this is a god-send for product
managers. I've forwarded it to my company's product slack room.

------
Operyl
Cool looking project, but I'm not about to give a third party that I know
nothing about access to my emails since this is a hosted service.

Good luck.

------
nodesocket
Late to the party, but if this is going to be a commercial product here are my
thoughts:

    
    
      1.) Add a quick 30 second or 1 minute demo video
      2.) Pricing should be a visible (in the header) and a dedicated page
      3.) Pricing of $12/mo seems high. I'd recommend something like $4.99/mo early adopter pricing. Then if demand, increase.
      4.) How it works. Show technology and how you don't store sensitive e-mail details like subject and body.

------
ronreiter
An MVP to check if there's product market fit for something like Drag. nice.
how's the stats? :)

------
randoramax
This proves again that software engineers have a strange understanding of
kanban :)

------
lurkman
This community can be fucking toxic sometimes, at least this person created
something.

Get off your high horse and write positive criticism / offer help / suggest
improvements or just stfu.

~~~
EpicEng
>write positive criticism / offer help / suggest improvements or just stfu

Interesting that you did exactly zero of the things you suggest (and used a
throwaway knowing you'd be downvoted.)

~~~
FPGAhacker
What do you mean? Aside from the stfu, you quoted their constructive
criticism.

I don’t know what posts they were talking about though. I came late to this
conversation and voting moved the interesting posts up already.

------
adreamingsoul
I wish this was open source.

------
nautilus12
I find that for email the Getting Things Done framework works the best.

------
echan00
cool stuff, i actually do kanban on my gmail by tagging them with different
colored stars. i'm not sure i want the UI though, but maybe because i'm
already used to my workflow

~~~
devm33
Yeah, I have a very similar set up to this on gmail using labels and the
multiple inboxes feature. Which also has the benefit of working with filters
to automate some sorting, e.g. certain emails going straight to todo.

------
wizardofmysore
Hahaha the landing page quotes the creator of the app.

------
cryptozeus
Definitely add video showing how it works. Great job !

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lowonkarma
A todo app where anyone can put shit in

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some_account
Hn went down the rabbit hole and got stuck on Gui design...

Did anyone try it? To me it seems like emails are long, have images and
attachments and are part of a conversation. The home page just shows almost
tweet like emails in those boxes, without pics or attachments or threading.

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s73v3r_
The concept is cool, but the website needs far, far, far more information. And
having the very first thing you see is a giant "SIGN UP" screen is a pretty
big turn off.

