Last month, Ryan Hoover had a great post about building email into your startup first, before moving on to other platforms. His awesome points:
- Email lets you validate ideas quickly
- Since email is async, you can fake functionality with manual processes
- Forces focus
- Email is a part of users daily habits
- Email is ubiquitous
- You can use email to upsell users to other platforms when you’re ready
Posterous was the ultimate email first product. I started the project because I wanted to email photos from my iPhone to my blog. I wrote thousands of lines of email code, which posted to my Blogger blog, before I ever wrote a line of web code.
There are a few other reasons why I think email an amazing platform to build on top of:
- Email has identity built in. Email is identity. Whether you’re sending or receiving email from users, you don’t need a login system. Posterous was able to completely eliminate signup from our flow.
- Email is mobile. It’s on every device, including super low end feature phones. Even people in developing countries on slow internet connections can use email.
- Email isn’t blocked in China. You open your service up to another billlion users.
- Email is integrated in all the apps you use. You can email photos from iPhoto, or a link from Safari, or a Tweet from Twitter.
- Email supports rich content. You can send photos, documents, video, audio, and any arbitrary attachment. There’s nothing email won’t transfer.
- iPhones will send email in the background. If you’re sending a video and your internet is slow, the iPhone will keep uploading while Mail is in the background.
- Users get notifications instantly, on all devices, without managing extra notification permissions or settings.
- So easy, your mom can do it.
Email is a powerful and flexible platform used by billions of people around the world. Start your company with email first in mind, and integrate it deeply in everything you do.
‘Email isn’t blocked in China.’ – killer point !Everyone who looks at Facebook’s user numbers should remember that it is blocked in China. Good post, but here is the reality of doing email first: most of your email will land up in your users’ spam folder.Little old stats on these: http://statspotting.com/texting-email-and-twitter-statistics/
Completely agree with you. Couldn’t explain this as ’email first’ to people when questioned before but now I just need to direct them to this post. Here is what we just launched http://www.scholarshippost.com/
Sometime the best technology is the tried and true!