The Mailbox growth hack strategy is fatiguing. Mailbox happened to be a truly superior app, but successors that implemented the same invite strategy have been sub par (remember Hop?). The bar is set very high for me when you make me wait.
@ryanmac
This could get into a long winded discussion about app discovery problems, independent 3rd party developer support environment/why we can’t have nice things, and more... but I'll try to keep it focused.
Oh how I wish it was a a clever and intentional growth hack. I didn’t believe the other companies in the space like mailbox when they seemed to play off their waiting lists as matter of necessity until our team dove into building an email client…I’ve dove into this with friends at the original reMail which was acquired by google, with Hoa and Dom who sold Sparrow Mail to google (advisors to Geronimo), the fluent.io guys who were some of the original google wave team but decided to fold shop, and about a dozen other founders or primary operators of email clients over the past few years. It’s a smaller group than you’d think. And sadly, none of them have a "how I’d do it differently now” that fixes this problem.
We need push notifications, cross platform syncing of very customized user data (we allow rearranging of the full order of a users emails), fast search, lightning fast ability to open/reply to/send emails, and finally never-ending bidirectional syncing which means an open imap connection for every single account at all times to google’s servers. Those are table stakes before we do anything cool or unique which is why most people will avoid this space (I would too if I didn’t have this unrelenting vision).
- IMAP is let’s say a primitive protocol to deal with at best.
- Add in the extra layer of google’s servers which can have varying throughput depending on the cohort a users account is part of.
- Add in another intensive layer to ensure threads are properly formed. This is not self-serve done after syncing.
- Add in a final intensive layer to process and create photo thumbnails for thousands of attachments per free account so they’re easier to access on mobile
And things get… heavy.
The bar should be set high. I agree on that though. It’s not worth the effort to build something in this email space unless it’s going to be be truly different imo. I think we’ve done that and happy to stand behind it but unfortunately, it shall take a little while.
We tried to offer a little more transparency by giving users insight into the velocity we were letting people in and using some cheeky language but it was more just a decision about what to do after the fact that our servers were getting overloaded.
@erik_lukas Thanks for your detailed response. I'm very impressed with your comments. And it inspires confidence in the product. Looking forward to seeing in next week.
@talkaboutdesign you should see the cutting room floor….
I think one thing that’s not evident is that almost all of the features that jump out as complex in the video are optional settings that can be turned on or unlocked. It’s a fine balance between playing up how wildly different what we’re doing is and handholding to assure people there is an easy way to start and find an effective new way to deal with mobile email (timeline + a few custom corners & leave it at that).
Every engineer who looks at the problem immediately thinks “email should be a pay to email protocol/let’s change the protocol by making people pay bitcoins to send email”
Every designer who looks at the problem immediately thinks “well, we have to keep it simple” and then eyes widen at the 20 expected table stakes from normal users. They then go through a few big concepts that don’t fit real usage cases in my experience. I could mock up 5-10 mind-blowing dribbble exercises in this space that we’re actually prototyped and dogfooded and found to come up lacking.
What we’re bringing out now with Geronimo is the the offering we found through beta use to be more effective than the standard mobile email apps in usage. The novel elements are tools to that end vs ends in themselves.
With mobile email until now, we’re looking at an underinnovated space where photos can’t be annotated, it takes 5-6 taps to add a photo to an email, and I’m looking at the same vertical chronological order list translated from the desktop.
I find it particularly interesting that we are visual, physical creatures and haven’t explored that way of existing more deeply in the realm of productivity apps for mobile. This iPhone in my pocket knows what angle it’s at and the velocity associated it along with itself at all times…. and yet, we use none of that except in temple run etc
Geronimo by Jumpin Labs
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Geronimo by Jumpin Labs
PumpMyGas by Optimist
Geronimo by Jumpin Labs