EXPERIMENTS

#084 The Case for Email
    Progress
by Anupam, 09/28/23

We’re back

Y’all - I can’t begin to share how excited we are to be posting here again.

A few months ago, we paused our regularly scheduled experimenting to embrace a period of more open, free-flowing exploration - with continued, spontaneous, experimenting sprinkled in, of course. We’ve tried a lot, learned a lot, and want to briefly recap what we’ve done and where we’re going.

Recap

Following a

  1. Research (talking to people)
  2. Discovery (building an MVP for those people)
  3. Launch (sharing that MVP with a larger audience)
  4. Test (feedback and $$$ value)

process, we’ve cycled through about a dozen micro-products, including:

Each was a rapid research / discovery / launch / test of a tiny product for a small but passionate audience - the result of a friendly conversation or user interview that turned into our first customers. For those that we’ve endlessly bothered for feedback, thank you.

And while each of these micro-launches has plenty of room for refinement and growth, none of their initial users reflected a level of passion that exceeded the bar for us to continue pursuing. Each was conceived, born, launched, and paused within a week. Except for one -

Email: The Angry and Habitual

What started as an experiment to scan your email inbox for previous orders & issue instant cash offers turned into folks ranting at us about their inbox. From confusion to boredom to anger, I have never seen individuals express so much disdain for something they use for at least 5+ minutes (personally - non-work) a day.

Folks told us:

Email is the most boring thing I do every day

I hate clearing my inbox

I am currently doing a [Civilization V style] infrastructure project to fix my [email]

I get random notifications all day that distract me

But also said:

I use my email to keep track of stuff I’ve bought” & “I mark [orders] unread so I can track when they’re arriving

I know I have free stuff in my email I can just never remember

I really love getting updates from the LA Philharmonic… and half my time is spent sorting those out from the junk

It’s the only place where I can get through all of my news in the morning [and forward them to my daughter]

…I set reminders in Superhuman for tasks I have to do later… [like] emailing my leasing agent or tracking a check I’m expecting in the mail

This is conflicting: people hate their email inbox, but still

  1. Open it every day
  2. Use it for tasks and info they can do / get elsewhere

A few more examples from sales / business development conversations:

Email is for to-dos. We have a to-do app [Wrike] and Slack but not everyone uses it so we all just put [tasks] in emails to each other

We add subject lines like Client Off to sort email chains

I use a lot of external tools [like Copy AI] to write outbound emails since they’re up to date but it doesn’t have context

TL;DR: People use their email daily for things they can do without email. And they hate it. Why?

What’s Exciting to Us

Both Personal and Professional Email:

  1. Consistent daily ritual
  2. High willingness to explore alternate clients / apps (we consider Gmail / Outlook as ‘defaults’)
  3. Frequent hacks to hijack default inbox behavior (plugins, external tools, subject lines, marking as unread, reminders, labels, etc.)
    • GenZ friends building custom tools on top of their email
      • I.e. friend built a web app that aggregated and formatted their newsletters
    • Consultants adding “Client-Off” to designate breakaway internal threads
    • Using email as a task list
    • Using email for file storage

Personal Email

  1. Few senders, high volume. I.e., a few senders do most of the sending volume in an individual’s personal inbox.
  2. Little overlap between two inboxes. In the top 15,000 emails in 6 inboxes tested, there was only a max overlap of ~100 senders between them.
  3. Clustered by category. Like transactions on a credit cards, most email in an inbox could be sorted into one of five categories: orders, promos, newsletters, notifications, and comms
  4. Your last 500 emails say a lot about you. In searching through our design partners’ inboxes, you can capture a pretty clear snapshot of a person - their demographics, interests, personality, etc - from their last 500 emails.

Professional Email

  1. Fragmented (i.e., lots of niche and particular use cases depending on segment) with high $$$$$$ value problems
    • Average email ROI is approx. 37:1 in outbound sales
  2. High competition in email tooling but no dominant email client (outside of standard Gmail)

There are compelling problems in both consumer (personal) and enterprise (professional); we found personal email more exciting and started there.

Wrap Up & Methodology

There’s a lot more to share here but this post is already getting really long!

As we move forward, we want to focus more on publicizing our methodology. In other words:

Sharing publicly (reddit, hackernews, twitter, discord, etc.) Higher craft and quality (thorough, clear, polished) Posting conclusions (take a stance, see things through)

We focus on a cycle of research / discovery / launch / test. This post is strictly in the research phase. Next week will be focused on translating that research into a discovery with early prototyping of Soar V1.

Til then!

(Wouldn’t be an experiment post without a teaser for next week 😉. See below! )

Soar v0