Email First Startups
isachin.com
Email First Startups
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Email First Startups
#2Is this resuming http://ryanhoover.me/post/43986871442/email-first-startups ?
It's getting noisy in here.
Edit: Here's the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279590
Re: Email First Startups
#3I am trying this with the reboot of my project http://cluedb.com/ - it's a daily tip project. It efficiently reuses old content so it isn't strictly a mailing list.
Re: Email First Startups
#4Account creation by email was the reason I started a Posterous blog, then they moved away from that focus.
Re: Email First Startups
#5Account creation by email was the reason I started a Posterous blog, then they moved away from that focus.
I just launched a (very minimal) clone of Posterous that tries to do everything by email ("no login necessary... or possible!"): http://urgeous.com/
Would love to hear what you think!
Re: Email First Startups
#6I'll add another one:
Email users stick around.
I've seen a lot of web companies fail because their retention sucked. Even users that absolutely love your products forget about you because they are being bombarded with noise from everyone else.
Re: Email First Startups
#7>His awesome points:
Can we stop putting 'awesome' everywhere?
Re: Email First Startups
#8I'm the founder of a stealth startup that focused on email first as a key part of our product.
Swombat was one of my early adopters (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5280289). Hopefully I'll be launching as a Show HN sometime next month.
Email first allowed me to quickly validate the business and generate revenue without having to worry about anything other than the core value proposition.
Re: Email First Startups
#9A bit of shameless self promotion: Haraka is a great mail server for coding up systems for processing incoming email, including parsing out attachments. We use it at Hubdoc for streaming attachments directly from email to S3.
Re: Email First Startups
#10Solving problems around email has a wide audience.
After our startup launched a private and secure messaging service, we weren't able to drive easy and repeatable traction.
We broadened the appeal to include email privacy which not only got press but created a ton of sticky users. Eventually, we turned it into our first point of revenue.
Email allowed us to reach a wider audience while still preserving our focus on privacy. While we weren't technically "email first" it was a big second that ultimately served our primary focus.