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Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

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Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#81

Post by dmarlow »

martinesko36 wrote: post #68

Disclaimer: I work on Emailio ( https://emailio.com ), a YC company that is a direct competitor to Front. We help you build healthy email habits. Slack is detrimental to team communication in several ways, and bringing it to email is a mistake imho. Slack combines the stress and urgency of text messaging with the importance of email. Your Slack becomes a Facebook or Twitter feed - another infinite feed that addicts y…

I haven't looked too deeply into emailio or front, but the solution to me looks a lot more like a mix of reddit and discourse (community/forum) than anything else. I'd love to see something that looks and feels like a forum than IM/chat. Systems like Slack are great for quick collaboration, but not ideal for persisting and disseminating information across diverse/large teams and organizations. I want to go to my messaging platform and see the topics that have been started and the discussions within them. This reduces all of the banter and chatter that endlessly goes one each day that just adds to the noise. I can go on and on, but maybe someday I'll get to see what I'm envisioning come to life.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#82

Post by ra »

martinesko36 wrote: post #68

Disclaimer: I work on Emailio ( https://emailio.com ), a YC company that is a direct competitor to Front. We help you build healthy email habits. Slack is detrimental to team communication in several ways, and bringing it to email is a mistake imho. Slack combines the stress and urgency of text messaging with the importance of email. Your Slack becomes a Facebook or Twitter feed - another infinite feed that addicts y…

FYI - your home page doesn't load properly for users with (e.g. nextdns.io) tracker blocking.

On your point, slack has brought fluidity and lightheartedness to our internal comms. IMHO less demanding than "chat apps" and way better than email chains for internal comms.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#83

Post by gnicholas »

I can imagine that there is something better than email for many people, but the problem is that people have optimized their lives and companies have optimized their processes around the fact that email is a key mode of communication.

So even if you knew what would be better for people than email in the long-run, it's not clear that it would be better for them in the short-run. And even if it is actually better for people in the short-run, you still have to convince them of this in order for them to try your new thing.

So to disrupt email you not only have to 'skate to where the puck is going', you also have to convince a bunch of other people to skate away from where the puck is now.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#85

Post by martinesko36 »

dmarlow wrote: post #81
martinesko36 wrote: post #68

Disclaimer: I work on Emailio ( https://emailio.com ), a YC company that is a direct competitor to Front. We help you build healthy email habits. Slack is detrimental to team communication in several ways, and bringing it to email is a mistake imho. Slack combines the stress and urgency of text messaging with the importance of email. Your Slack becomes a Facebook or Twitter feed - another infinite feed that addicts y…

I haven't looked too deeply into emailio or front, but the solution to me looks a lot more like a mix of reddit and discourse (community/forum) than anything else. I'd love to see something that looks and feels like a forum than IM/chat. Systems like Slack are great for quick collaboration, but not ideal for persisting and disseminating information across diverse/large teams and organizations. I want to go to my mess…

That sounds really cool. As a kid I built my own PHP forum system and have great memories from early internet forums. Bringing that to workspace is a really interesting idea. One of my fundamental problems with Slack and any new method of communication is, if you already use email daily do you really want another feed that you have to check? So, combining the workspace forum as a Subreddit or a Discord server, services which people perhaps already use, is a perfect solution! We may try this for Emailio's employees down the line by making a private subreddit. Thanks for the idea!

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#86

Post by mfkp »

martinesko36 wrote: post #80
mfkp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies are still launching with iOS/Mac only? Very Silicon Valley of you. Ignoring Windows and Android is just silly these days.

I don't really like Silicon Valley's mentality either, but no need for judgment. I totally feel you, and for us as a very small company we had the choice of either a) building a great native iOS/Mac app or b) Electron that runs everywhere but is ultimately a poor experience. We want to build a sustainable business not fueled by VC money, so our bandwidth is very limited. We decided to go the native route and work wit…

Fair enough, it's great to have polished apps. But I was going to "request access" until I saw that your service won't be supporting any of the devices I use, so there's one potential customer down the drain. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

For context, my company (https://prestodoctor.com) has spent tens of thousands of dollars on Front licenses, so I'm not just some random nay-sayer :-)

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#87

Post by sandGorgon »

Fyi - this blog post is a misssell and that's why the comments are so inflammatory.

Front is a competitor to Salesforce. And much nicer/simpler. It does that by creating a shared inbox. And it creates an entire workflow around that. Even though it's a shared inbox...who gets what.

It basically makes your support@ address better. I'm super unsure on why it's even being called as "slackifying email", because that's not what it does. I'm not sure what "ephemeral conversation" means...but Front treats a support email as a ticket. So your internal teams can comment on an email and discuss what action to take,etc.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#88

Post by ornornor »

martinesko36 wrote: post #75
kilburn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, asynchronous communication has proven poor for wellness and worklife balance. I think you meant "synchronous" here ;)

Can you elaborate? Slack's async feed used to ping me every 5 min and distract me from coding. I also found myself having OCD about going through each and every message that was sent to all channels - very low ROI obsession. I like the slightly higher barrier of having to send emails and refresh your email inbox :) EDIT - thanks to everyone correcting me on the sync vs async! I fixed it in the original comment.

I’m confused as well. FWIW, I always disable notifications, have a filter on my email for “you missed this message” emails to go to a separate inbox, only use slack/matter most in the browser, and only open it a few times a day.

I have trained my colleagues and boss to never expect a response right away. We’re also forced to use Skype at work which is a plague because people are lazy and will call about anything and everything without thinking it through. So same thing there, I’ve disabled all sounds, filter notification emails away, set my self to busy all the time, and never answer calls when they come in except it it was agreed upon beforehand (so, like a meeting)

I try and force these incurable skypers to send an email instead: it forces them to really think their stuff through, organize it in a more structured way, and takes me two minutes to answer instead of having a 15 min call that is all over the place.

And I don’t get interrupted while trying to visualize complex things in my head.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#89

Post by Throwaway1771 »

dmarlow wrote: post #81
martinesko36 wrote: post #68

Disclaimer: I work on Emailio ( https://emailio.com ), a YC company that is a direct competitor to Front. We help you build healthy email habits. Slack is detrimental to team communication in several ways, and bringing it to email is a mistake imho. Slack combines the stress and urgency of text messaging with the importance of email. Your Slack becomes a Facebook or Twitter feed - another infinite feed that addicts y…

I haven't looked too deeply into emailio or front, but the solution to me looks a lot more like a mix of reddit and discourse (community/forum) than anything else. I'd love to see something that looks and feels like a forum than IM/chat. Systems like Slack are great for quick collaboration, but not ideal for persisting and disseminating information across diverse/large teams and organizations. I want to go to my mess…

It doesn't capture the original questions, but good organizations use a self-hosted internal wiki for this.

Re: Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email

#90

Post by teleforce »

martinesko36 wrote: post #75
kilburn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, asynchronous communication has proven poor for wellness and worklife balance. I think you meant "synchronous" here ;)

Can you elaborate? Slack's async feed used to ping me every 5 min and distract me from coding. I also found myself having OCD about going through each and every message that was sent to all channels - very low ROI obsession. I like the slightly higher barrier of having to send emails and refresh your email inbox :) EDIT - thanks to everyone correcting me on the sync vs async! I fixed it in the original comment.

This, and ten times.

In my part of the world people will cringe and frown if they heard I am not using WhatsApp. I can understand them, I'd probably do the same thing if I heard someone does not use email. Personally I have trouble and probably mild OCD just to check every emails in my few email accounts, imagine going through all the Whatsapp groups messages. I'd rather voluntarily go to hard labour rather than reading the WhatsApp group messages.

What we need is an email++ with asynchronous nature of email and the convenient but not the intensity of WhatsApp, if that makes sense. Google Wave probably come close but it came earlier than expected and gone as soon as it arrived. Perhaps someone can utilize CRDT/Automerge to make it even better than Wave by going local-first.

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