
Ask HN: Idea feedback – Service where people pay to reach your inbox - dsinecos
Problem - The bar to sending an email is too low resulting in casual low-effort messages. These messages take up time and attention and are difficult to filter. For instance, recruiter spam.<p>Solution - A service where a person pays a nominal amount, say $2, to land in your inbox. These messages will have &#x27;PRIORITY INBOX&#x27; in their subject. This lets you filter the high-effort messages at a glance.<p>Possible use cases<p>1. Recruiter spam - This will let you filter the serious from the casual requests at a glance. Messages with &#x27;PRIORITY INBOX&#x27; in the subject tell you the recruiter paid to get your attention and likely worth your time.<p>2. For an influencer - Say you run a blog and review developer tools every week. If you get tons of requests to cover different tools, you could use this service to filter out low-effort requests<p>3. Mentor-mentee - As mentor you can filter high-effort queries via this service. As the sender pays to reach your inbox, the messages are likely to be more focused so that you respond<p>This model can apply to other types of unsolicited messages where<p>a) Sender wants to stand-out from the generic low effort messages<p>b) Receiver wants to quickly filter high-effort and casual messages<p>I&#x27;d like to get HN&#x27;s thoughts on<p>1. If you see value in such a service<p>2. For what type of messages, filtering quality and low-effort messages is of most value to you? (like developer-recruiter, mentor-mentee)<p>3. What concerns about this service would keep you from using it? (Assuming privacy and mail deliverability are handled to your satisfaction)<p>I&#x27;ve started work on this product. If you want to join private beta, signup here - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;airtable.com&#x2F;shr6ifqw3468JFT0H
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quickthrower2
The problem is if it’s worth $2 to send me an email then I’m worth a lot, so I
don’t care about receiving $2, is rather just not receive those emails at all.
I can just subscribe to the emails I do want, and would be happy to do that
for no payment.

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psv1
So the receiver pays you for access to the service and the sender also pays
you for access to the receiver?

I hate everything about this double-dipping-middle-man-in-an-otherwise-free-
interaction business model.

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verdverm
Same post from yesterday
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22137578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22137578)

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Alex3917
Lots of startups have already done this.

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dsinecos
I did a quick search but couldn't find any. Can you share a few names of those
startups?

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erikbrodch
Earn.com did that, but since acquired by coinbase

