Feedback for an email alternative service

[davebaines]

Hi everyone!

First of all, HN is awesome and I'm really excited to learn about and join this community of fellow entrepreneurs; to receive and provide feedback on our ideas is such a great feeling. Secondly, I want to disclose that we applied to YC for the S15 class and didn't get an interview... although disappointed, we're actually really motivated by that. Hear me out.

We're developing a service that is an alternative to email. It's unbelievably ambitious and I'm jealous of the folks that have visions that are far easier to implement. With that said, Lucolo believes that email communication needs to be made more efficient and we believe that we're the masochists that were born to give that a try. We're developing a super simple service that enables folks to start conversations online, have full control over the conversations' participants and content, and even how those conversations are viewed. We've studied real-life conversations and have basically mirrored their nuances for the internet. I know - we should've started an IoT company.

Anyway, we're trying to determine if we're onto something. If you agree we're even sniffing at a problem that needs to be solved, please head to www.lucolo.com and sign up for an invite. I'd also love any feedback you have - either leave a comment or send me an email to [e-mail] and it'd be great to hear you out.

Best, Dave

[penguinlinux]

I've seen 3 companies that tried to disrupt email and bring alternatives to email and they all failed, they had great developers, great ideas but they still failed.

My question to your team would be, why do you think people want this. Are you seeing people claiming that they wish email was better? It is hard to change people's behaviors and this is the reason why these companies failed. I agree that there are better ways to communicate now, slack, hichpchat, facebook, but why try to reinvent the wheel.

People are not going to drop something reliable as email for a new fad. what would make your product different that would make me want to use it?

Cheers

[davebaines]

You're absolutely right about the problem we're solving (which is the cause of many sleepless nights).

Hopefully it's Lucolo to do this, but we believe that this idea will win on a strategy that alleviates perceived (or real) switching costs (possibly through integration) and has a feature set that is simple, effective, and obviously superior over email for the user. We have to be careful to not work to "replace" email but simply build an alternative that users couldn't imagine not having before. Kind of like the iPhone, or Dropbox, even Google, or - dare I say - the car.

It's ambitious for sure, but we don't believe the answer is IRC-like XXMP services since they don't provide the same experience and value as email. We want to hit a larger audience than those that are familiar and see value in chat-based architectures (like me as I'm 27 and grew up on AIM and loved it).

Lastly, we're really going to rely on our first few batches of users for input and feedback on how Lucolo makes the feel about communicating via the internet; it sounds obvious but the closer we get to creating a communicative experience that adds the most value and reduces the most noise and pain, we think we'll have a winner.

These are great questions you pose and not 5 seconds goes by without me thinking about them....

[zarajanssen]

Clickity Click - http://www.lucolo.com/

Advice

- You mention what Lucolo does not do - but it is not clear what it does do, o make it a viable email alternative. No mention of any features either.

- If you are not comfortable providing screenshots, a simple mockup would do as well. This works wonderfully on conversion rate (in your case visitor to email capture)

- Have an "about" page on the website, that gives us some information on who you are and why we should trust you with our email addresses.

All the very best!

[davebaines]

This is great advice - thank you for it! I'll add the "about" page to give the project context, a differentiating feature list, and a "preview" page that is a duplicate of what the conversation page looks like in the application.

Thanks for your input!

[pranavpiyush]

happy to provide feedback... just got on the list.