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

> 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.

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?

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).