I enjoyed reading Gentry Underwood’s analysis of “Why No One Has Tamed Email ” in TechCrunch. Over the past year, 3 or 4 articles/blog posts/user forum posts have been written a day lamenting email overload and the drain on productivity that is our inbox. I know this because, as co-founder of PhilterIt, my inbox fills up daily with Google Alerts for “email overload”, “inbox”, “email organization” and other key words related to this problem. The most interesting question he poses is, “Why, if there’s so much opportunity, are there so few real attempts to rethink the inbox?” But what he’s missing is the term successful, as in, “why are there so few successful attempts to rethink the inbox?”
The general premise of the argument for why email overload is a huge problem centers around the following thesis: the structure of the inbox hasn’t changed in 20 years, but the volume and type of communication we receive has changed dramatically. Therefore, we need a new inbox. It also rests on an even more important assumption: the average user not only has this problem of email overload, but that the tools available within the current inbox are insufficient to combat this problem and, most crucially, that they care enough to adopt a new technology to solve it. In this case, it’s a not lack of supply – for the sea is littered with the broken hulls of email clients smashed against the rocks of email innovation – but rather an apparent lack of demand. And it’s the demand that is so important to the success of a rethought inbox.
So before you set out to build the next great Gmail killer on a bootstrap budget, consider the following:
Gmail and Outlook are table stakes
For every post that bashes Gmail – or AOL, Hotmail/Outlook or Yahoo Mail! for that matter – it’s important to remember just how critical email is to the fabric of daily life. Asking someone to change email clients is like asking them to change their blood type. Why is this? Because, email has evolved from a simple protocol of sending and receiving discrete messages to an incredibly versatile ecosystem that manages and stores a tremendous amount of sensitive data. And this data isn’t just new data – there is legacy information stored within each email client that makes it incredibly hard to abandon. So if you hate the interface and are stressed out by the disorganization, then fine. All a new entrant has to do is replicate the speed, security, spam-fighting, storage, extensive menu of email features, multiple platform syncing (PC, Tablet, Mobile) and ancillary functionality (calendar, chat, docs, etc.) that we have come to rely on from an email client. Oh, and top of that, offer the value-added UI/UX/Functionality that will make users’ lives DRAMATICALLY easier. And, it’s important to note, that even if the incumbent clients are deficient in any given area (say they offer a crappy mobile client or no chat), they still offer a surprising depth of other functions that users may not even realize how frequently they rely on them until those functions are taken away.
Organization may be DESIRED but not NEEDED
Every advice blog on entrepreneurship starts by exhorting the entrepreneur to focus on the problem rather than the product. It’s all about the pain. And what’s more painful than email overload and a crowded inbox? Except when it isn’t. What’s often missed when people consider pain is the cost of that pain. What does a crowded inbox cost a user? Well, at work, that question is somewhat straightforward – lost productivity and frequent interruptions can be measured in dollars per hour. Losing client messages can result in lost business. But on the personal side? What is the cost of missing an important message from your mom or a 50% off deal? And how frequently does this happen such that you would be willing to pay for or adopt an entirely new solution? A great analogy is your closet. Everyone has a closet. Everyone wants their closet to be clean and organized – it’s aesthetically pleasing, it reduces stress, and it makes finding the right outfit more efficient. The current structure of the closet was probably designed sometime at the turn of the century when clothes started to become mass produced and large department stores emerged. And yet, here we are, stuck with the same big hole in the wall with a beam, a few shelves, and hangers. There’s GOT to be a better way, right? I mean, Clueless showed us the joys of a self-organizing closet system.
So why aren’t we all watching our clothes come perfectly pressed off of a conveyer belt? Because that mess doesn’t really cost us anything more than mere annoyance. So, every once in a while, we spend the day cleaning it out, giving away boxes of clothes and resolving to keep it clean from here on out. Back to email – sure there are edge cases with exploding inboxes that will sacrifice most anything for a new inbox – but how many are there? Even AOL has 25mm+ users – could a new entrant really hope to attract more than a hundred thousand or so users, simply by offer a better system of organization?
Users don’t want to unsubscribe
One thing that is fascinating about email is how strong FOMO and the endowment effect are when it comes to brand email. FOMO – the Fear Of Missing Out – means that if any message, no matter how insignificant, misses the inbox, then it becomes out of sight, out of mind. So all of those great rules, folders, filters and labels require users to check multiple entry points for their messages. In some cases, messages are so important that we can autofilter into a given folder and modify our behavior to check that folder every day. But, in general, the more clicks to get at information, the less likely that information is to be accessed unless there is a reason (most often, retrieval). So even though users say they want those messages gone, they kind of don’t. Which brings us to theendowment effect , a concept from behavioral economics which (adapted for this example) states that a person’s unwillingness to part with something they already have is greater than their willingness to adopt it in the first place. Said another way, once you have subscribed to a brand email, you are far less likely to unsubscribe than you are to subscribe in the first place. So when asked why they don’t unsubscribe, aside from the usual answer of “I’m lazy”, users express a fear that maybe the nextmessage will be important. Even when they don’t remember how they were subscribed in the first place.
People are different
Finally, one man’s problem is another man’s ideal state. Some users love labels and some hate them. Some like to mark unread and others to star. Some keep inbox zero and others are happy to have 27,892 messages in their inbox. The inbox is like Microsoft’s Excel – it’s bland and versatile enough that it can be shaped and suited to whatever needs its user has…to a point. That’s what makes it a universal tool. Any new email client that attempts to rethink this structure has to offer a solution that will be universally accepted – or try to create a solution specific to an industry or demographic vertical.
So where do we go from here?
None of this is to say that we should stop trying to innovate around email; rather, we should stop defining the problem/solution as “The inbox is broken and we need a new one to fix it.” That’s like saying that, because we have traffic, we need to uproot our entire interstate system and rebuild it to handle the different types of transportation patterns and uses that exist today that didn’t in the 1960s. That won’t fix traffic. And even if it would on paper, it certainly wouldn’t in practice.
If the incumbents were truly interested in revolutionizing the inbox, they would treat their email clients like operating systems and charge developers a % of revenue to build versatile applications on top of them, rather than generating meager revenue by annoying users with intrusive ads. The incumbents would guarantee speed, security, deliverability, cross-platform functionality and spam-protection, while the broader community could offer the solutions that users would love but can’t be bothered to dig for. Certainly, there are a number of great companies leveraging Google’s Chrome and Gmail APIs to build solutions, but the average user is ignorant of what a plug-in is or how it works. If Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft would create an easy to navigate storefront from which users could pay to customize their inboxes, then perhaps the quixotic efforts of under-capitalized start-ups trying to build new email clients from scratch would be better diverted to seamlessly solving the myriad issues that users have within their existing clients.
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