I enjoy using Polymail. It has a very nice user experience, in fact probably one of the best experiences of any email app I have used personally. I have been using it for 3yrs at least.
That said, Polymail does nothing for me business wise. I don't use it for my team, nor do I intend to any time soon. It serves me well as a simple email client for personal needs, but that's as far as things go.
They, along with a few other SaaS companies seem to be intent on solving problems I don't need solving or prioritising the wrong ones.
It's all good and well to say that other apps failed in this space because they didn't have a strong business model, which is fair enough but if you're not solving the right problems for your users, you're not going to get very far.
I really can't believe, that in 2018, we still dont have decent solutions for email collaboration for teams and for customer relationship management. We have one app in this space that has done a half decent job , which is Front but I still can't persuade myself to move to it. It has a confusing user experience and is not well priced.
So we're left with stitching things together through various tools which Polymail claims to solve but doesn't.
The biggest reason I believe for there to not be a unified tool at this point is that requirements are superficially the same, but when you dig deeply almost every company has a different set of needs, even locally contradictory ones
So you have stuff like Salesforce, with huge barriers to entry... But you can basically do everything. Sure, you might still need a Salesforce expert , but that's easier than 2 or 3 developers for a hand rolled thing that doesn't really integrate with anything.
Say what you will about paper workflows, but being able to paperclip stuff together, copy, write anywhere, etc. makes it pretty flexible. Lots of the cheaper tools with "easy onboarding" on the other hand...
I really liked Contactually as a personal CRM because it could look into all the different messaging systems and tell me when I talked to someone last, but then I believe Facebook / LinkedIn etc shut down that functionality.
Is there anything of this sort out there for individuals for networking purposes? Not trying to sell these folks anything. I want to be told what my last touchpoint with someone was, when, where, regardless of what platform that was done on. That would be so useful.
I think Accompany was supposed to do that originally but they pivoted into something else?
I’ve found good use of Polymail and pay $20/m for team pro. It’s a love-hate relationship though due to small but disruptive UX patterns. Some examples:
The MacOS app does not follow normal keybinding conventions. Specifically, ESC causes the app to exit full screen and cmd+shift+f doesn’t enter full screen. No option to customize either.
The iOS app will instantly show notifications for new emails, but upon opening up the app you have to wait 5-10 seconds for the emails to appear (while gmail is instant).
That said I enjoy the inbox zero image, snoozing of messages, and overall style.
That said, Polymail does nothing for me business wise. I don't use it for my team, nor do I intend to any time soon. It serves me well as a simple email client for personal needs, but that's as far as things go.
They, along with a few other SaaS companies seem to be intent on solving problems I don't need solving or prioritising the wrong ones.
It's all good and well to say that other apps failed in this space because they didn't have a strong business model, which is fair enough but if you're not solving the right problems for your users, you're not going to get very far.
I really can't believe, that in 2018, we still dont have decent solutions for email collaboration for teams and for customer relationship management. We have one app in this space that has done a half decent job , which is Front but I still can't persuade myself to move to it. It has a confusing user experience and is not well priced.
So we're left with stitching things together through various tools which Polymail claims to solve but doesn't.