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Why email startups fail

(forwardemail.net)
140 points skeptrune | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.716s | source
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dvt ◴[] No.44430898[source]
> 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

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egglemonsoup ◴[] No.44430914[source]
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.
replies(1): >>44430953 #
1. CaveTech ◴[] No.44430953[source]
The other part of the average is the 200m+ monthly active users who can't seem to find the uninstall button.
replies(1): >>44431359 #
2. nottorp ◴[] No.44431359[source]
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.

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3. CaveTech ◴[] No.44434800[source]
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.