Why email startups fail

> Electron Performance Crisis: Modern email clients built with Electron and React Native suffer from severe memory bloat and performance issues. These cross-platform frameworks, while convenient for developers, create resource-heavy applications that consume hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes of RAM for basic email functionality.

No (real) customer has ever, or will ever, care about this. Discord and Slack are pretty much case-in-points: bloated Electron apps that just about everyone on the planet has installed on their computers. I personally hate React, but technology decisions are irrelevant to the long-term success of startups. (As long as they don't grossly interfere with customer experience, the feature set, etc.)

> Final Warning: After analyzing hundreds of email startups, the evidence is overwhelming - 80%+ fail completely. Email isn't broken, and trying to "fix" it is a guaranteed path to failure.

First, I'd bet money that figure is actually wrong: the failure rate is likely way higher than 80%. And I'm honestly not sure how anyone could seriously think a 20% exit rate is bad in just about any vertical (but especially a "boring" one like email).

> Resources: Volunteer developers can't sustain enterprise-level software

What am I even reading here? Author does realize openssl[1], Linux[2], and many other "enterprise-level" pieces of software are entirely (or almost entirely) maintained by volunteer developers, right?

Anyway, the post had its opposite intended effect on me: it made me think about ways I could reinvent email.

[1] https://github.com/openssl/openssl

[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux

I am a real Discord customer who is actively looking for an alternative due to how terrible the performance is on my M1 MacBook and on my gaming PC. I'm just one person—I'm not claiming to represent the 'average' customer. But I am part of the average.

The other part of the average is the 200m+ monthly active users who can't seem to find the uninstall button.

> bloated Electron apps that just about everyone on the planet has installed on their computers

i guess im the one guy left that has neither

edit:quote

> No (real) customer has ever, or will ever, care about this. Discord and Slack are pretty much case-in-points:

This is just flat out false. Even my girlfriend - the least tech interest person I know - complained to me how its possible that a damn chat app (teams) is bad enough to make her entire computer feel slow.

So yeah, average users maybe don‘t hate Electron or React, bad many people hat the bad user experiences these solutions often entail.

It really depends.

If all you do is run games and discord on your home PC memory consumption won't matter.

If you have multiple uses or work from home ... Discord expanding to 4 G to display the meme channel with all those cat photos will be annoying to say the least.

Case in point, I stopped running Discord on my laptop. Still run it on a desktop to keep in touch with some people, but it's not my default goto for any communication.

Also, just because most users don't know better, it doesn't mean that Electron apps aren't basically disrespecting the user's resources and passing needless costs to them. Especially if you have hundreds of million users the extra cost they pay dwarfs whatever you the app developer would have paid for a working native application.

There's a slight difference, real customers care if the software feels slow, not if its using Electron or React. You might argue that they're one in the same, and I wouldn't disagree, but they don't know that (or arguably care about that), and so don't know what to look for and what to avoid. By the time they realise the software they're using is slow, they're often too embedded in it to quit for that reason alone.

The real question is; has your girlfriend stopped using teams since finding out how slow it is?

> No (real) customer has ever, or will ever, care about this. Discord and Slack are pretty much case-in-points

Worked at two companies full of "real" users who cared enough to look elsewhere.

Yes I know it's easy to find exceptions to every argument, but it's worth pointing out that it's such a bad experience that even some "normal" people care.

The argument was the slowness, not the name of the technology. He only mentioned named it because _we_ all know the relationship.

> The real question is; has your girlfriend stopped using teams since finding out how slow it is?

Don't know about his girlfriend, but two companies I was at did (one stopped with MS Teams, one with Slack).

The whole thesis OP is making is that this isn’t really true, evidenced by real world behaviours. Electron apps have some of the highest market share, even the worlds most popular ide is an electron app.

The amount of people who won’t adopt based on pricipal is exceedingly small.

Yeah. "No (real) customer has ever, or will ever, care about this. ", in fact means "No (real) customer has ever, or will ever, knows how to care about this".

And because they don't know, the heat is in somebody else. Like the tech support, or windows, or internet, or the anti virus or whatever (because even some tech support, if even exist, don't know but surely have a theory about it).

Let me tell you an example: When the local network, cloud flare, printer, windows, their firewall, etc fails and by coincidence they are using our app. they call US.

And blame US.

A sizable portion of the support calls that are handled by any provider of tech for small companies is about other peoples software.

> The real question is; has your girlfriend stopped using teams since finding out how slow it is?

That is the neat part. Teams, Slack and some other applications within that realm aren't actually something that we're choosing to use. It usually is something that is imposed onto us by the organization you're working for. With discord the effect is different, but the consequence is the same. Network effects basically force you to be on Discord.

At least in my department, Microsoft Teams is universally hated by everyone (that's only n=60). But we don't really have a choice in using it and we never had a say in the matter when the software was bought. With teams especially, it's basically an open secret that Teams is frequently only bought because its basically packaged in with an Microsoft 363 subscription.

And because of how software like this is imposed, I don't think the size of the user base serves as a good proxy to judge how well liked a piece of software is, at least in the enterprise space. For B2C apps, the effect may be less strong to non existent, but I would argue that the network effects of some apps can act as a similarly strong force.

> With teams especially, it's basically an open secret that Teams is frequently only bought because its basically packaged in with an Microsoft 363 subscription.

In our case, we see Salesforce as our biggest competitor, so we did not want our corporate history on Slack (I don't think that's particularly a high risk issue, but our leadership does, so... Teams it is.)

> Author does realize openssl[1], Linux[2], and many other "enterprise-level" pieces of software are entirely (or almost entirely) maintained by volunteer developers, right?

And, even more on point, so is Postfix!

> The argument was the slowness, not the name of the technology

I disagree. The crux of his argument was slowness, sure, but that's not why these applications fail because as I said, unless you know what to look for (Electron and React being the two main offenders), by the time you've found out that the application is slow, you're "locked in". Leaving these kinds of software after you've got setup with them is a lot more effort than starting with them. Email arguably more than any other, but messaging apps like Teams and Discord also suffer from this network effect.

Yes, but couldn't you to market it as 'four times faster than teams', 'no action will ever take longer than 5 ms' 'enables cross-referencing many e-mails without delay-- other software can take half a second to bring up an e-mail', etc?

That's very true, I suppose my point was less that these kinds of software are well liked, but more so that the effort of leaving them outweighs the gains in the performance alone for a lot of users. But you're right, the argument doesn't really hold up for Teams because you rarely have a choice in the matter. Discord there is some choice, you can organise your friends and groups to leave, but its a monumental effort.