Thanks for giving it a read! Honestly, I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I think for the most part, the things that people talk about and try to predict don't usually come to fruition. It could be that I'm just completely off my rocker and absolutely wrong, in that case, great. Or, it could be that the things we talk about, people internalize which enables us to sidestep the bad reality. Who knows!
Predicting the future is hard and people are never 100% correct.
Yeah you might be right. I typically am a lot more bull than my other colleagues lol. I don't think I'm far off though. I might be several years off, but definitely not 10s of years IMO
Author here. Thanks for reading. I've been thinking about this for a long time. I used to work at Snapchat where a lot of the talking points were still centered around the "Social Dilemma".
As I've transitioned to working on AI, I think the average person doesn't understand how there's a gigantic underbelly that's just purely dedicated to pornographic use – whether that's in erotic roleplaying with LLMs, or generating pornographic images with diffusion models. It's massive, but largely not talked about and remains out of view.
From my experience, when you go from text to image, it's basically an order of magnitude change in the dopamine response.
When you go from image to video, it's essentially another order of magnitude.
What I'm trying to say is... I don't think we're ready for what's to come...
(FYI, your data is only saved on localstorage for now)
I basically just wanted an excuse to create something fun this weekend. I struggled to find a very simple to use app where I could just start writing for the sake of writing. Some other problems I have:
1. Full text indexing isn't great on many of these writing apps (not like I have that right now though lol)
2. Using google docs at night melts my eyes
3. Other writing apps focus too much on publishing, which detracts from writing
4. I want more tools to eventually help me write (no idea what this means)
Yup. Acquired for $101M then subsequently shut down in 1-2 years (just kidding of course).
I don't know if it's in my best interest to answer this publicly, but screw it. The honest answer is I'm not entirely too sure, but an acquisition is always on the table for any startup IMO. I think whenever you ask a founder, "If someone offered you $100M, would you take it?", it's a pretty loaded question.
There's really three outcomes to a startup: They die, they get acquired, they IPO. The thing is, if you think your company is valued at $1M and someone offers you $100M, of course you're most likely going to take it. It's 100x what you were expecting and it would be unwise not to take it. However, if you deep down believe that your company is worth more or can be worth more than the offering price and you have the proof to back it up, then it'd be unwise to take the offer.
For me, I strongly believe that email has A LOT to go. I mean, it's nearly 2016 and I still can't connect my Dropbox to my Gmail app client or send stuff into Evernote / Trello? Given all the time we spend on email, shouldn't we at least have some better automation / AI integration by now? Something smarter and more contextually aware that can make my life a bit easier?
So many people use email in the world. Literally everyone that has a Facebook account has to have an email account. I think the reason why we haven't seen a billion dollar plus company yet is that it's very ubiquitous and it's hard to build solutions for the masses. So companies give up, sell out, close down, and then we have to start again at ground zero.
So to your question, what's the end goal? Well, if we're right about our beliefs, hopefully we can become the next billion dollar company. If not, then it's the other two options: get acquired or die. Which one will it be? No idea, but we're just working our butts off right now.
Yeah, it's frustrating. I was using Sparrow until it got acquired and then shut down. Then switched to Mailbox... which then got acquired... Whoops.
I ended up so frustrated I created my own email client in my spare time and half accidentally got into YC S14 haha. You can check it out here: http://www.slidemailapp.com
I'll admit, as a previous poster said, it's not without it's flaws but we try hard and we really do spend all our waking hours improving it since it's our baby and we love it to death. We've been beta testing the private current release with a lot of Hacker News users and I think we're fast approaching something really awesome!
Feel free to email me at [email protected] for a beta invite and would LOVE to hear your suggestions of what you'd like to see in an email client!!
Vu, the founder here. I wanted to take the time to thank all of our amazing beta testers who kept coming back to use the app even though there were bugs. You guys are the real MVP! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Email is hard and there will still be some bugs, but our heart truly bleeds for our users. Whenever we see a crash report, it feels like physical pain and we'll work tirelessly to address these issues, day and night. Thanks you guys!
Vu, the founder here. I wanted to take the time to thank all of our amazing beta testers who kept coming back to use the app even though there were bugs. You guys are the real MVP! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Email is hard and there will still be some bugs, but our heart truly bleeds for our users. Like whenever we see a crash report, it causes us what feels like physical pain and we'll work tirelessly to address these issues, day and night. Thanks you guys!
Yeah, totally. I think with these features, one group that it has resonated with that was unexpected were college students and people that are less tech saavy like my mom and my dad.
They still use Yahoo mail so Inbox / Gmail just doesn't work for them. SlideMail sort of brings what the Gmail app has to offer, in my opinion, enhances it and provides it for IMAP in general as well as other services.
I'm a developer and my email habits are absolutely horrible. Whenever I put in long hours of coding, I feel like the time it takes to context switch between development and doing email is way too high.
Because of this, I'm notorious for missing emails, flights even or just not responding to emails as it gets lost in my inbox forever.
I essentially started making this email app for myself and it's finally working quite well. There have been times where I've completely forgotten about a meeting and it's reminded me to show up on time. The sorting uses a lot of NLP magic and I find it to be pretty accurate too for me to take back control of my inbox. I just want to see how far I can run with it and already working on trying to suggest replies to emails.
There are a lot of email apps on the market and I think their concept is "how do we incorporate better design and work flow to solve the email problem"? My notion is rather, "how do we use technology to solve the email problem?"
Other than that, I'm also really excited with the privacy route I decided to take. The downside is that deploying across multiple platforms will be more challenging without a central server side component, but if the plus is that if one chooses the option of going "private" (essentially this turns off server side push notifications) there won't be any communication with my server at all.
It's been a real struggle these past few months so I'm super excited!!
Predicting the future is hard and people are never 100% correct.