[dmitryminkovsky]

> I am reading Cal Newport’s new book Digital Minimalism that is making me realize that I need to be more focused in how I spend any screen time.

To this end I am launching an email service that sends and receives messages once a day. The idea is that with one delivery each day, you don’t need to regulate or discipline yourself as much, and you get a lot more space to think and enjoy your communication. It’s called Pony https://www.pony.gg

[newscracker]

I have a few questions and suggestions since I didn't clearly understand what your service does.

1. Does your service create a new email address for the user (something like <emailaddress>@pony.gg), requiring users to update all their contacts with this address so that correspondence gets sent here? Or does it work with existing mailboxes?

2. What is the business model and pricing? I couldn't find any pricing links or any FAQs talking about whether it's free or paid or has free and paid tiers.

3. Please copy some of the content from your About page into your homepage to make it clearer. The homepage should have more information so the potential user knows what it does.

[dmitryminkovsky]

Thank you for your feedback and questions.

1. Yes, each Pony account is a new email address @pony.gg. I think of this as a feature. You start with a brand new space separate from your existing world of instantaneous messaging. Of course you can use it for anything, but the idea behind Pony is it provides a special place for your correspondence, so starting blank and with a fully fledged, separate email account is what made sense to me. There are other services that let you do similar things with existing email providers but that didn’t make sense to me: if you can still get and send mail at any time by circumventing these wrapping services, you need to exercise mental discipline to obtain the sort of experience Pony provides without any cognitive load at all (which is the whole point).

I considered adding a contact import feature but decided to collect feedback first.

2. The business model is TBD, with users being the requisite first step for any business model. But user privacy is paramount and the privacy policy lists all third parties (currently only Google Analytics, and at that, proxied through Pony so you the user do not expose yourself to Google and we get less information as a result). We’re free now and would like to continue offering a free tier in the future without turning our users into the product at the expense of their privacy. That seems possible to me!

3. Improving and expanding the home page. Thank you for this feedback.

[mark_l_watson]

Cool idea. I like to ‘go dark’ and not receive emails or phone/text while I am working but I don’t know if I could do once a day email. Nice idea though.

[dmitryminkovsky]

Thank you!

> but I don’t know if I could do once a day email.

Maybe you’d be surprised? There is a notification you can get if you get anything in our daily delivery, so you don’t completely forget about it.

[dmitryminkovsky]

EDIT: in your daily delivery

[mch82]

Cool idea. There’s no contact info on your website... how can people interested in this concept get in touch?

[dmitryminkovsky]

Thank you!

And thanks for asking. Just swapped home pages yesterday and the contact part got dropped. Bringing it back today. In the mean time it’s:

- dminkovsky on twitter

- [e-mail]

- [e-mail]