Unfortunately there's isn't much I can say until we launch, but here goes: we've created a social network where email is the mode of communication, and everything is organized around people and organizations.
There isn't a single inbox as such, there are people, and groups of people, with correspondence between them. Like in Facebook or a CRM system.
What Gmail query do you have to do to see the correspondence between you and PG, assuming PG has 3 different email addresses? How do you find that email from some company you don't remember the name of?
These are just some examples of things that are truly intuitive on our system. I don't mean to sound snobbish, but it's a bit like trying to explain the first iphone - its like a PDA without a stylus. But we all know the iphone is ultimately so much more. So you really have to try it for yourself.
I understand that claiming to be better than Gmail leads to lots of scepticism, and I have a huge amount of it myself every time I see a new email app. Luckily, noone has quite done what we're doing just yet, but its only a matter of time.
All I can promise is - its better for me and all my friends that have tried it. But that doesn't mean it will be better for you, or for some insanely heavy email user like PG, but I sure hope so.
Oh and in terms of speed, yeah its faster. In fact we've just had to rewrite everything from scratch to make it blazing, moving almost all the logic to javascript and caching everything client-side. And did I mention its awesomely beautiful compared to Gmail? :) But really thats the low hanging fruit - Gmail looks awful, more so every year it seems. Sure some people don't care about that, but I'm a horrible perfectionist which is why we're probably the oldest startup still in stealth.
I don't know what your product is or does, but from what I just read, it doesn't seem to be very innovative.
You're building a faster horse instead of a car.
The solution lays in semantic communication. As long as you mainly communicate with text that someone has to read, analyze and understand, you're doing it wrong.
The problem as we see it isn't so much email's fault. The problem is that the number of contacts we have is growing exponentially due to the introduction of "white pages" (linkedin, facebook and the internet fall under this) - you no longer have to meet someone to find out their email address and email them.
Chat / IM is text and yet that isn't a problematic communication medium because there is a small set of people you chat to. The problem isn't the number of emails, sentences or words, its the number of people we are connected with, its relationship management.
Sure some magical AI to read emails and books for you, summarize them and even reply for you may be great. Or organize your mail into folders for you based on clustering or some ontology. The problem is these solutions never work.
Our focus is on organizing mail around people, and in turn organizing people into groups, which is not some magical silver bullet, but still a radical improvement over an unorganized mailbox.
Thanks for the reply. It would be really cool, when you guys are ready to go public with the product, to post a youtube video of a split screen of your app and gmail; going over killer features that might get people to actually sign up and try it out.
I think many people need to actually see it first and then be motivated enough to play with your public beta. If your want lots of people to try , keep the video as simple as possible.
You can't explain the iPhone with words, to someone who never seen it before. They just wouldn't be interested.
In what ways will your service be faster than gmail? How much time will I save?