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Why email startups fail

(forwardemail.net)
140 points skeptrune | 2 comments | 01 Jul 25 00:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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dvt ◴[01 Jul 25 05:36 UTC] 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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moooo99 ◴[01 Jul 25 06:35 UTC] No.44431204[source]▶
> 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.

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1. mamcx ◴[01 Jul 25 15:26 UTC] No.44434874[source]▶
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.

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2. impossiblefork ◴[02 Jul 25 08:24 UTC] No.44441312[source]▶
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?