
Submittable (YC S12) raises $750K to replace email - kirillzubovsky
http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/09/submittable-raises-750k-to-replace-email-for-real-this-time/
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jacques_chester
I am finding it really difficult to understand what this tool is or does from
the hand-wavy description in the article.

The part where it turns out "replace email" actually seems to be "replace
usage of email for an apparently narrow document-editing task" is some good
old-fashioned link baiting.

Anyhow, I'll bite.

What does this tool do that SharePoint doesn't? Or other email-integrating
document management tools such as (shudder) TRIM?

~~~
citricsquid

        it turns out "replace email" actually seems to be "replace 
        usage of email for an apparently narrow document-editing 
        task" is some good old-fashioned link baiting.
    

From what I understand of the description the idea is that it becomes a
management layer on top of email for submissions (hence submittable) that need
some collaborative management. Similar to how google docs forms work, but
instead of the results ending up in a spreadsheet they end up in the
collaborative document editing system.

After looking at their website the use cases seem clear, the Pandodaily
article does seem to lack a simple explanation: <http://submittable.com/>

~~~
jacques_chester
Yes, the website is definitely better at getting the gist across -- a document
management tool with email integration.

There's definitely a market here, as the zillions of DMS vendors have
demonstrated.

I guess I'm a curmudgeon who feels annoyed when people pass off as
REVOLUTIONARY HYPERNEW AMAZING ZING BOOM CRASH things that, upon closer
inspection, turn out to be nice implementations of a known genre.

(I hasten to add that the blame, if any, seems to rest with the journalist,
not the Submittable team).

~~~
citricsquid

        (I hasten to add that the blame, if any, seems to rest 
        with the journalist, not the Submittable team).
    

I went back and read the article again and it really is quite questionable how
the company is presented. The author seems to have tried to spin some sort of
"email is terrible" narrative and got lost along the way.

I think the author should have tried to explain how Submittable would provide
value to a company like Pandodaily and that would have been better at putting
across the value. For example Pandodaily has a "tips" email which would be the
__perfect __use case for the editorial portion of Submittable, yet that is
unmentioned and instead the author tries to explain what seems to be a summary
of watching someone use the site for 10 minutes.

They also do not seem to have mentioned any of the other specific _types_ that
Submittable cater to, which includes resumes, audio / film submissions and
grant applications, all of which have their own systems to enable proper
management.

Hopefully Submittable will be covered again by someone else and properly so
they have a fair shot at being exposed to the masses, because this article is
really doing a poor job of even hinting at what Submittable is about.

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anonymouz
Why is it taken for granted that everyone hates email? I love it. Its only
problem seems to be spam. Otherwise it's a simple, standard way of
communicating with great interoperability. If anything will replace it, it
most probably won't be a closed ecosystem built by a single company.

That said, as others have already pointed out, Submittable seems to be
something completely different anyway, with no ambition to do what email does.

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UnoriginalGuy
We aren't going to replace e-mail. It has been tried countless times and
failed countless times. But e-mail is problematic simply because it has
stopped evolving as a technology. It is static. It is like HTML/JS back in the
IE6 era. Just stuck in a rut.

E-mail needs two things done to it but they're difficult to wrap one's head
around.

The first thing it needs is to get more simple. E-mail has a lot of quirks,
crust, special cases, and other things. This applies to SMTP but also to
addresses (TO, CC, etc). Just as one example did you know that technically
almost any character is valid in an e-mail address? Did you also know that
EXAMPLE@ and example@ are two totally different addresses (case is as equally
differentiating as characters)?

I liken this to the XHTML effort (to make HTML more strict). We need to take
e-mail as it is used today, and essentially call the "edge cases" illegal.
This would be compatible with 90%+ of existing implementations but would make
future e-mail implementations (both client and server) far more straight
forward. As it stands today you cannot build an effective client or server
e-mail system by just looking at the respective spec's since there are so much
strangeness.

Secondly AFTER the above has been done AND adopted they need to develop a new
standard to replace HTML as the display format for e-mail (XML based). This
should include things like signatures, quoting, in-line pictures, tables, and
a small subset of text styling. Essentially take HTML, remove 50%+ of the
functionality and then ship it as a standard people can cheaply implement.

~~~
icebraining
_Secondly AFTER the above has been done AND adopted they need to develop a new
standard to replace HTML as the display format for e-mail (XML based). This
should include things like signatures, quoting, in-line pictures, tables, and
a small subset of text styling. Essentially take HTML, remove 50%+ of the
functionality and then ship it as a standard people can cheaply implement._

Why? People who like HTML emails are happy with it; people who prefer plain-
text emails (like me) won't like your solution either, since it's XML.

I think we already have a decent format for lightly formatted email, and it's
the plain-text conventions (in which Markdown was based). Or Markdown itself,
if you want something closer to a standard.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
Because the HTML supported by e-mail is too massive. It makes writing an
e-mail client too expensive and also means that security issues are more
likely to creep in.

Plain text should stay as is. HTML is the problematic format that needs
addressing. When they first started using HTML for e-mails it was just the
natural thing to do, but with the benefit of hindsight it was a mistake.

So I am suggesting we take a subset of HTML, add a very small set of e-mail
specific features (signatures, quoting, etc) and then deploy. This format
should be entirely display-able with a single XSL (as the easiest
implementation).

~~~
anonymouz
> It makes writing an e-mail client too expensive and also means that security
> issues are more likely to creep in.

I disagree: Libraries to render HTML already exist and will continue to be
developed, since they are used in web browsers anyway. The development effort
would be greater if we introduce another (new) format specifically for email.
Every E-Mail Client that wants to do so already implements HTML display.

Most of the security issues are mitigated by not running Javascript and
disabling loading of remote resources, by default. Then it's as safe as a web
browser with NoScript.

The problem with HTML mail in my opinion is simply that it is overused. Often
it is unnecessary bloat, and plain text works just fine.

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robryan
From what I can see this product wouldn't be replacing email for a single
person. Only possibly for narrow use cases of email where you are accepting
and managing submissions of some sort.

Also I would assume that the product also uses email, or does the person
submitting go through a web app for the whole process.

I think this is purely a case of a link bait title and an article that does a
poor job of explaining what the product actually does. Which isn't ideal as
the method your startup first gets exposed to a wider audience (first time I
have seen it anyway).

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rdl
This has nothing to do with how I use email, but does look like a useful tool
on its own. I don't understand the "replace email" branding at all -- maybe
it's "replace email for people who are currently abusing email in bad ways".

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etherealG
their homepage doesn't even mention email. talk about a linkbait title

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JoelMarsh
I think we should pause before having a serious discussion about an interface
replacing a protocol.

This is like Google's pitch being "Our search will dominate because we use a
single text field, and we have a 'surprise me' button."

If you want to "replace email" you have to replace its infrastructural value
to the internet too, not just the superficial day-to-day convenience of
messaging. As long as every website requires email to register, messaging is a
secondary consideration.

I think that 750k could have been used for a failure-less-obvious.

EDIT: for tone.

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ikawe
I don't think there will ever be a single "email killer".

Email is a really general purpose tool, but I think we will continue to see
tools that take out a small chunk of email use cases.

e.g. google docs, IM, facebook messaging

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jrockway
Sounds like Google Docs?

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awayand
whatever

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rorrr
This will NOT replace email, especially in the corporate world. You only need
to spend a week at a relatively large corporation to clearly see why.

Look at what we have now - basecamp, all kinds of free instant chats, group
video chats, all kinds of organizational SaS, etc etc etc. Yet we still have
ridiculously long email chains that often branch off and start to have a life
of their own.

Why? Because

1) Everyone knows how to use email. Most employees don't want yet another way
to communicate.

2) Your average office employee is pretty... average. And roughly half of the
employees are dumber than that.

3) Training is expensive. One quick demo on a projector will not train your
employees to use some new software. It's like half-life, 50% will learn after
a month, 75% will learn after another month, etc.

4) You will always have employees who don't get this new software, many will
probably not give a shit about learning a new tech, while they have a
perfectly working way of sending a message. They will realize that when they
change jobs, chances are, they won't be using this new software. But email
will be there.

5) It is similar to the craigslist syndrome - it's awful, but everyone uses
it, because... everyone uses it.

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cdent
> 1) Everyone knows how to use email. Most employees don't want yet another
> way to communicate.

This simply isn't true. Most people don't know how to use email, which is why
these stupid memes of "everyone hates email" and "email must be destroyed"
persist. What people hate is email being used in a dumb way. Or to be more
blunt: People hate dumb people. No surprise there, really. So a solution is to
get better at getting rid of dumb people. One way to do this is to persist in
using email well, and demonstrating (with persistence and persuasion) the
better way when rolling across crap use.

This is one of those (rare) situations where the technology and infrastructure
is fine; the people using it are the problem. Email can be incredibly
effective when used correctly.

Mind you there are certainly email clients which make it far too easy to use
email poorly.

~~~
pork
I think there's a vast sea between "people who don't know how to use email"
and "computer literate", and it's disingenuous to make that a false dichotomy.
There's a large population of people within biopharma, manufacturing, tech,
and financial corporations, software engineers included, who are really fine
tweaking and managing their email filters and don't give a damn about "email
killer X", the reason generally being that the cost of learning a new "email-
replacement" system often outweighs its benefits.

Which is not to say that you don't have a point either, but rather just that
your assertion of "simply isn't true" well...isn't true.

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drivebyacct2
Is that a wise tag to lead with? Even if it were better articulated or better
designed?

