
Startup idea: short, paid email - nachopg
http://diegobasch.com/startup-idea-short-paid-email
======
ef4
The biggest problem with this idea is that it violates people's expectations.
People already know how email works. They don't expect to hit a character
limit. They will simply get annoyed.

If you want to "take features away", you need to create a completely separate
concept in people's minds. Twitter works because people _don't_ think of it as
"email that's limited to 140 characters". They think of it as a completely
separate category.

~~~
diego
That is a good point. However, this already happens. How often do you email
support@somewhere only to get a response that says "your email has been
received, we'll process it within 24 hours?"

In some cases you'd like to have the option to pay something so that it's
processed in one hour.

Also, some people don't care if you're annoyed. VCs, celebrities, etc. get
tons of email that they can't read anyway. What if Lady Gaga received 30 short
emails per day from fans who paid $100 (adjust the numbers until it's
manageable for her) instead of 100k emails that go to /dev/null ?

~~~
true_religion
> What if Lady Gaga received 30 short emails per day from fans who paid $100
> (adjust the numbers until it's manageable for her) instead of 100k emails
> that go to /dev/null ?

Fanmail is a part of being a celebrity, and managing your fans is what keeps
them happy and giving you money in innumerate ways.

Asking your most fanatic to pay you more money just to email you would be
insulting and might trigger backlash.

------
carlsednaoui
Something like this? <https://shortmail.com/>

~~~
diego
Yes, I wonder why it hasn't taken off. Perhaps lack of word of mouth, or the
fact that it's lacking the "paid" component.

I would feel bad about telling people to email me at shortmail.com, but a VC
who receives tons of unsolicited pitches wouldn't. Some would love charging a
fee to get pitched over email. If it takes 30 seconds and they pay you 20
bucks, why not.

~~~
nollidge
Probably because that landing page doesn't tell me much about how it works.
It's "limited to 500 characters"... for the sender? What happens if it's more
than 500 characters or has an attachment? Or wait, is this a walled garden
thing? I can't tell.

So I check the "Why shortmail" page (which 99% of visitors will not do), and
I'm still not sure what happens if incoming e-mails are longer than 500 chars.

~~~
soulashell
The sender gets a notification that you only receive messaged shorter than 500
characters, and you have the option to forward larger messaged to another
email address.

~~~
nollidge
My point (probably didn't make that clear) is that might be a reason it's not
more popular - because it's not really obvious how it's supposed to work.

------
melvinmt
The truth is that only the Robert Scobles in this world are affected by head-
aching e-mail management problems. For the rest of the 99% it simply isn't
that MUCH of an issue. That's why I don't think it will catch on. But nice
idea though.

~~~
drumdance
Hmm... but Robert Scobles, and more to the point, Beyonce, Jay Z, Lady Gaga
etc might be willing to use the service as a screening tool for all the promo
pitches they get. Or at least their agents & publicists might.

~~~
AdamFernandez
That may be true, but that would be a pretty small market.

~~~
shreyansj
What if you market it as some high end service? I mean exotic cars and luxury
handbags have a pretty small market too, right?

~~~
ceejayoz
"Any idiot with money can send you an e-mail directly" doesn't scream high-end
to me.

------
stcredzero
I think there is something to this idea. It's wrong to call it "email" though.

This would be something for celebs to get brief, easily digestible feedback
from their fans. Right now, this either means going through lots of messages,
or relying on social media to filter the message for you, but the former takes
time or money, and the latter results in only the loudest voices being heard.
The proposal above would cause people to filter and edit themselves.

This is precisely why calling this "email" is wrong. It would be like the
counterpart of twitter, going the opposite way. It would be the multiplexer to
the Twitter demux. It would not be email, however users could possibly access
it through email.

Maybe call it "Faninn" "Feedforward" or "Feedgram?" I would allow messages to
be marked private or public, with the public messages appearing on a white-
labeled website, subject to a reddit or HN style upvote system. (Private
messages would be subject to the fee.)

Think of it as a way for any celebrity to have their own HN-style site and
executive ombudsman, without the work or expense of setting it up themselves.

------
a5seo
Linkedin has sort of tried this w/ premium accounts. 3 InMails for $20/mo. Not
sure if premium accounts are really driving their revenue as much as recruiter
solutions.

~~~
diego
In Q2 premium generated $43M. Not the $121M that Hiring Solutions made, but
still not chump change.

<http://press.linkedin.com/node/1223>

~~~
corin_
Worth noting that "InMail" credits aren't the only benefit of a LinkedIn
premium account, and in fact of people I know with paid accounts very few of
them care about this particular aspect.

------
dools
This is somewhat tangential to the post but isn't the 140 character limit on
Twitter messages directly related to the fact they started it as an SMS
service and couldn't figure out how to stitch together multipart inbound
messages?

I personally think having the character limit that low is horrible but even if
you love it, it wasn't some brilliant design decision imposed by Jack Dorsey
it was just a limitation of the technology they were working with initially.

~~~
001sky
Yes, this is correct about the SMS. Its also a love it/hate it element, but at
the end of the day that's what makes it. Its the unique rule, the constraint,
the sine-qua-non that defines what it is. Like haiku: without rules, a non-
idea.

At functional level, forcing people to "think small, think short" actually
works. Where people have short attention spans. As a mode for a 21st century
communication.

Over time, people adapt and "think" thoughts in the language that they
express. Be it poetry, or visually, etc. Or, if you speak a second language,
you learn to think in the constraints of what works to communicate.

------
Rudism
I don't imagine this would take off, especially once people realize they can't
receive any automated emails anymore (sign up confirmations, email validation
requests, e-bills, reciepts for online purchases, any kind of service
notification, etc). It would require probably maintaining a second email for
those kinds of things, and then you've got the same problem as before but now
with a second (extremely limited) email on top of it to worry about as well.

Something a little less extreme such as a whitelisting system might work
better (only people on my whitelist may email me... if you email me and you're
not on my whitelist you have to fill out a captcha or something in a response
before I ever see the email, and then I have the option of either whitelisting
you, doing nothing, or adding you to a permanent blacklist). That would allow
me to whitelist the addresses I really care about while cutting out all other
unwanted content. Main problems I see with something like that would be that
email becomes even more asynchronous and unreliable than it already is.

Best solution is to just tear it down and replace it across the board with
something better like XMPP. (A man can dream.)

~~~
jiggy2011
The problem with that of course is that automated emails won't get through
unless they can also solve your CAPTCHA or you have whitelisted them in
advance which would either make usability worse (when you sign up for a
service you have to remember to go and whitelist them) or your CAPTCHA has to
easy enough for a bot to break which basically defeats the point.

~~~
Rudism
Agreed. You would have to pre-whitelist, or at least have a junk folder you
could look in where non-captchad messages get stored for a certain amount of
time before being purged so that you could fish out the emails from non-
whitelisted addresses that you're actually expecting to get (and then
presumably whitelist them from there for future emails).

~~~
jiggy2011
The problem with that is that you're actually going to look at email in your
junk folder. Spammers would love this because they know that there's a chance
that you'll actually see their crap even if it gets filtered.

The entire point of having a junk folder is you don't have to check it apart
from the rare occasion you get a phone call saying "hey , I sent you an
important email why haven't you replied?"

------
skizm
How about an app that donates the 20 bucks it costs to send someone an email
to charity? Seems like it would have a built in marketing strategy.

~~~
jbigelow76
This is somewhat orthogonal but am I the only one that usually finds
businesses built on "do X and help charity at the same time" as pretty weak?
It's strikes me as though the business operator doesn't believe in the value
they are providing so they piggyback off the value of donating to charity.

There are exceptions, things like the Humble Bundles, but I tend to buy those
primarily as call to actions for charity donations themselves. Out of two
bundles I've only ever played one game. I never got the sense of the value
piggybacking (maybe determining how things get split is part of it).

I just get wary when charities are thrown into the mix with these things. It
seems like something bolted on at the last minute to boost conversions.

~~~
corin_
The selling point here would be that the charity donation isn't thrown in
there as a value-add, it's that the cost is a necessary feature and to prove
the case of necessity over greed the money will be going to a good cause
rather than the receiver's bank account.

~~~
jbigelow76
That is true, and my point was more an aside about businesses that have a
profit motive and incorporate a charity component to it so this probably
wasn't the best thread to muse in.

That being said, I don't know if the charity aspect would still accomplish the
desired goals. What if the recipient started skimming emails, with no real
intention of following through, just because they want to see their favorite
charity get a few more bucks? If the money went to the recipient instead I
would probably think there would be a greater likelihood of it being read as
anybody I'd be willing to pay to read my emails would stand lose only their
sense of integrity but the charity aspect might make it easier to blow off.

I might be splitting too fine a hair here.

~~~
corin_
Interesting thought, but if your aim was to get as much money as possible for
a charity then a.) skim reading as opposed to reading fully doesn't earn your
charity any more and b.) if anything, people are more likely to spend money
again if you pay them attention and respond fairly

~~~
jbigelow76
Hmm, you've got a point. I didn't think about the possiblity of email
conversations and how that would impact any cost imposed as well as whether
charity was involved.

------
djensen47
What do you do when you're trying to explain a technical issue that can't be
explained in 500 chars or requires code snippets? Maybe move to a different
medium? A different email address?

A codepaste might work for snippets as long as it's not sensitive. You still
might need a way to explain how to reproduce a problem.

Maybe these are all just add-ons for such a service.

~~~
mikle
I don't think he means you replace your email with this, just have this as a
public email. You will still give coworkers or collaborators your regular
address and they could send you long code and messages, but strangers wouldn't
be able to.

And obviously if you are in a position where strangers __should __send you
random unsolicited code or long messages you should just not use this.

~~~
jiggy2011
The problem is that it's difficult to know if a stranger might send you a long
unsolicited email. Perhaps one of your friends meets somebody who might have a
job for you and gives out your email address or whatever.

The majority of the spam I receive is under 500 chars anyway so it wouldn't
really help in that regard.

~~~
mikle
I think the point is that that stranger should introduce himself first in less
then 300 chars and then you can decide whether it is important enough to hear
him out fully.

Your last sentence makes me feel like you didn't understand the idea at all -
it is not to fight spam, but to help you manage communication with real people
that you don't know. The basic example is a VC flooded with long copy pasted
pitches instead of a poignant and succinct pitch.

------
001sky
Paid email? Regardless of the merits of the idea here, its worth looking at
history. The idea "if I could charge 1 cent for every e-mail" is the most
scalable business model. But every Mckinsey consultant and two-bit MBA has
dreamed of this "Goose" that lays the golden egg, since the dawn of the
internet. So has every tax-seeking government. But it has not happened. There
is a deep seeded respect online for 0 marginal cost communication. Large
enough to even hold off the shadowy forces of very powerful monied interests.
At least to date. The idea is in a certain way disrespectful to the
foundations of online culture. LIke asking, what if PG charged for every post
on HN? This is not passing judgement on the idea itself, more raising context,
unintended consequences and other latent forces at play. In other words:
overcoming this inertia, would be part of the challenge.

------
shalintj
Hi Diego... Yes, heavy inflow of emails is a great problem to solve... Also
because this problem gives birth to another bigger problem - the problem of
managing email inboxes effectively and locating and retrieving information
from email. Though a raw thought and suggested by the likes of Michael
Arrington and many other known Silicon Valley faces, I don't think charging
senders for emails will ever gonna work. I wrote a pretty long post on the
same last month when I started out to work on MetisMe...
<http://j.mp/problemwithemail>

------
bensw
This reminds me about [http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/the-morning-mail-
is-my-...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/the-morning-mail-is-my-
enemy.html) \-- where E.B. White sends back an aggressive letter to a kid's
piece of fan mail (The kid questions why he hasn't written another book, he
claims that he could write another book if only he didn't receive as much fan
mail).

What I'm getting at is that your current idea has more applications other than
a simple VC pitch -- but expanding it to celebrity's sounds more like a Mickey
Mouse Fan club subscription than email.

------
paulsutter
I like the idea for length-limited emails, it's original and clever. Unlike
shortmail, this limits people who aren't on your whitelist.

Automated response email (good catch Rudism) could be handled via some sort of
separate inbox or UI organization.

One counterintuitive thought: this may work even better within corporations.
My external email isn't bad, but company internal email has always been a few
hundred messages a day for me. A length limitation might put the onus back on
the sender to be efficient.

------
chrito
The Marc Andreessen scenario aside, sounds like the right direction for some
future of consumer direct marketing... rather than the $s going to an
intermediary... it should ultimately transfer to the consumer (assuming said
marketplace is sufficiently designed to minimize the aggregate effect of
people trying to hack the market without ever consuming).

------
fluidcruft
Oh, you want all the noreply@ receipts to just bounce and disappear?

No thanks.

Maybe the other way, though. Paying as the sender for longer messages. But I
don't understand what advantage this would possibly have over the free email
services.

------
lazugod
Ew.

Accept and master the limitations that come naturally to you or your
technology, sure. But don't go _looking_ for ways to limit yourself.

------
jiggy2011
This is pretty dumb and reflects the increasing mentality of "it's like X with
the useful functionality removed".

Email is nothing like twitter at all, twitter became popular because it
allowed celebrities and the like to share their thoughts with their fans
without feeling like they had to maintain a longform blog.

Email is used for 2 way communication, yes companies like to build email lists
and use it for push marketing but that's usually seen more as a nuisance to
email users.

If somebody is going to charge me in order to send them an email the message I
read into that is "My time is so much more valuable that if yours that if you
want me to read what you say then you better make it worth my while".

And sometimes emails need to be long, am I supposed to maintain 2 separate
email accounts?

In reality, legit commercial mass mail usually does have to pay to send
because if you want good deliverability you are probably using mailchimp or a
similar service.

~~~
diego
_"In reality, legit commercial mass mail usually does have to pay to send"_

The point is that they don't pay _you_. It's an externality:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality>

~~~
jiggy2011
I don't really see how paying me would help though.

Either I want to read your email or I don't, paying me $1 a time to read all
my viagra spam isn't going to help anyone.

Plus what happens if I really want to send you an email but I don't want to
hand my credit card info over to whatever payment provider you use is?

