Threadable (YC W14) makes mailing lists more awesome, less noisy

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/19/threadables-mailing-list-for-teams-makes-your-inbox-less-noisy/

by nicoles • 12 years ago

122 49 12 years ago

neilk• 12 years ago

What I like about Threadable is that it's both obvious and contrarian. Startup people usually turn their noses up at mere email. Not sexy enough. Except, everyone relies on email, and everyone hates their tools for managing it.

raindrift11• 12 years ago

Thanks, neilk. People say they hate email, but we see that as an indicator of its utility: "I hate this but use it everyday" sounds like an opportunity for improvement. As Elie Wiesel said, "the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference."

aaronblohowiak• 12 years ago

As I pithily mentioned on Twitter, Email is the once and future king.

Robin_Message• 12 years ago

This feels like a lot of the good stuff Google Wave promised (and failed to deliver) but implemented with e-mail, in a way that will scale. Very nice, and I hope they get good adoption, because whilst most e-mail list web interfaces are terrible, keeping e-mail for casual contributors is invaluable.

nicoles5• 12 years ago

Thanks! We're super excited about the possibilities here.

raindrift11• 12 years ago

Hi, everyone. I'm Ian, one of the Threadable founders. I'd be happy to answer any questions.

tghw• 12 years ago

What's the plan for a business model?

raindrift11• 12 years ago

Our current thought is to charge for business features. A Threadable list is a pretty open place by default. Lists are all members-only, but once you've been added you have a lot of control. Private (within the team) subgroups are a feature we'll likely charge for, along with Google Apps integration. We've also seen a lot of interest in a product that can be installed behind a firewall, but that's a little further off.

One thing we know for sure is that we won't charge based on the number of users in your organization. We really value people being able to use Threadable for large-scale organizing outside of the business context, and we don't want our pricing model to limit that.

TheMakeA• 12 years ago

What was your solution to Django's unreliable collectstatic?

raindrift11• 12 years ago

Heh. Threadable's actually Rails on the backend, but last time I had a problem with collectstatic being slow, I used this: https://github.com/antonagestam/collectfast

rguzman• 12 years ago

From the screenshots the emails look like they have dynamic elements in them ie buttons that do stuff. I imagine that they aren't links that just point to your site, but that you have figured out a way around no-JS in emails. How? Gmail/gapps plugin? Or...?

jaredgrippe3• 12 years ago

They're a combination of mailto: links and links that point back to threadable.com. There's a delicate balance there, since we want to make things as usable as possible, but we can't embed auth tokens (we need to preserve forwardability). Cross-client compatibility is a big deal since it leads to inclusivity. Right now, we're focused on making something that works for everyone.

In the future, we have plans to do client detection, so that we can offer more advanced features to users with more modern clients.

aytekin• 12 years ago

We use Google Groups a lot. The Techcrunch article was not very clear. What would be the main reasons to switch Threadable from Google Groups?

raindrift11• 12 years ago

There's a number of reasons, but our groups implementation is the most compelling one for me:

A threadable list can be divided easily into subgroups with their own subset of the list membership. Any member can create a group, and you can move threads between groups, even after they start.

In practice, this means you don't have to anticipate which groups to create in advance. You can just let discussion happen, and when critical mass around some topic is reached, move it off into a group without the overhead or interruption that comes from making a whole new mailing list.

This leads to more organic discussion, and also makes it possible for group members to help one another determine relevance. It's sorta like crowdsourcing your mail filters from the rest of your team. We've noticed that people are less likely to filter a Threadable list into another folder, so they participate more.

It's also more friendly to newbies, since there's less worry that a thread will end up in the wrong place. If it does, you can just move it.

djcapelis• 12 years ago

As someone trying to work to get my lab to migrate our lists from Google Groups to Threadable (I've used both and really want to see my group switch) it is mostly that Google Group's UX is infuriating and using it often makes me want to throw something out the window. Also I miss not having threadable's groups features on my google groups lists, where we have to create a bunch of different separate google groups lists for various things in our lab. With threadable we we could just have one list and a bunch of different subgroups.

mbesto• 12 years ago

Very interested in your API!

Here's my requirement:

I have a lot of groups on my website (sports clubs in fact) and I want to roll a feature that they can use an email address (like google groups) to manage their teams via email. Is this something we can tap into on threadable?

Is that something you guys can do? How do we work with you guys to make that happen?

raindrift11• 12 years ago

Hey mbesto, our API is really early right now, but we'd love to work with you to make this happen. You can find my email in my profile, I'd love to discuss how you'd like to make this work.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC• 12 years ago

How do you handle plaintext-only mails?

The article reads a bit like reinventing usenet in the most complicated and difficult to use way possible ...

colinaut2• 12 years ago

We've been using it for our non-profit for the past few months as an early beta tester. So far I love it. Clean reinvention of mailing lists. I'd say mailing list on steroids but that's wrong as while it is more feature packed it isn't overwhelming with options. The added features are built on where needed in and intuitive way. Of course as with any new product, It's not without it's issues of course but it's been amazing to watch the progress and improvements they've made in only a few months. The people at Threadable are very responsive and open to comments and ideas.

colinaut2• 12 years ago

Oh I should add… Full disclosure: I am friends with the people at Threadable, hence getting on the early beta. However, I am if anything more critical of my friends so all that I wrote is honest. Also, the people at the non-profit I'm part of are not friends of theirs so their opinions are less biased. And so for the other people in the non-profit like it too. There was the initial "oh no I hate switching!" But it went smoothly since all the features are intuitive.

yukichan2• 12 years ago

I agree mailing list software is terrible and neglected and this is an improvement, and mailing lists are useful so Threadable is definitely creating value. I can see the vision in the product and you can imagine how it will just get better. What I wonder though is what path this kind of a product could take to achieve success on the scale of Stripe or even Mixpanel. I could see it achieving small team/business profitability, but I don't see how a mailing list manager can become an Atlassian or Fog Creek. Also this product kind of competes with Streak, another YC company.

As an engineer what bugs me most in this space is the terrible email related protocols. They are broken and burdensome to deal with. I wish someone would attack that problem.

As a user what bugs me are the terrible native apps for email. I think this stems from the previous problem, few people innovate in email because SMTP and IMAP etc are terrible protocols. It explains why there aren't a thousand mail clients in the way there once were a thousand Twitter clients.

I don't know if Threadable has any plans of going beyond managing lists but those problems ^^^ really need solutions.

nathancahill• 12 years ago

"there aren't a thousand mail clients like there are Twitter clients."

Of course there are thousands of email clients! And sure, SMTP isn't as simple as a RESTful API, but it's been a standard since 1982! Backwards compatibility is a huge win for email.

If you don't want to deal with "broken" protocols, there are services like Mailgun and Sendgrid that wrap it up in pretty API calls.

tshn• 12 years ago

Could you please give examples of how SMTP and IMAP restrict client innovation despite high-level libraries and classifiers?

yukichan2• 12 years ago

I don't know what you mean by classifiers. This is a good video to watch on the topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s9IjkMAmns

raindrift11• 12 years ago

I agree, email is sort of a morass of old, incompatible clients and aging protocols. They need work, but the installed base is huge, so it's a hard problem. The solution is probably to build a layer on top of all that to simplify it, much like jQuery did with incompatible DOM implementations.

So far, a number of companies are doing well with abstracting the protocol layer away to make focusing on building good apps easier (see mailgun.com for SMTP, context.io for IMAP, etc).

As to Threadable's long-term strategy, it goes further. :) Right now, we're building a great mailing list. As it gets further along, we plan to make it into a platform so that other app developers can use us to do all the difficult parts of managing threaded discussions, client compatibility, etc. The idea is to turn every app and website's isolated comment stream into a threaded email discussion, so people can engage using the tools they're already used to.

There's already millions upon millions of mailing lists out there, but nobody's made major changes in this space in a decade or more. We think we can add enough value that people will be happy to pay for it, and make group email collaboration more popular at the same time.

Our overall goal is the engagement and inclusivity that comes from making key information available in the way that people expect. Team collaboration tools only work well when the whole team uses them. The mailing list is just the best way to get there.

swanson2• 12 years ago

I love seeing new "email-first" apps - most of the mailing lists I've used have now moved to either G+ discussion groups or Discourse, so will be interesting to see if this sticks.

Are all email clients supported (Outlook, native mobile, Gmail)? From the screenshot it looks like there are HTML buttons to do most of the commands - will these work outside of Gmail or do they rely on some kind of browser extension?

jaredgrippe3• 12 years ago

Hey Swanson, I'm Jared, another Threadable founder.

The email buttons are HTML. We test them using Litmus, and they work well across all major clients. We need to do a bit more styling for older versions of Outlook, though. That's on the road map in the next week or two.

swanson2• 12 years ago

So I assume the buttons are just links then? Can't submit forms in most email clients :)

jrochkind1• 12 years ago

This actually sounds like a great product.

I can find no pricing information on their website. Is it all free right now? Or does it not even exist yet? What's the deal?

raindrift11• 12 years ago

We exist, but we're still figuring out pricing. ;)

As I said earlier, our plan is to charge for business features, and not by restricting the number of users in a given list. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429550

jaredgrippe3• 12 years ago

Hey everyone, This is Jared, another founder of Threadable. We’re eager to respond to all of your comments but our accounts are reaching their comment limits. We’ll answer each one of you as soon as we can — Threadable Team

glasser• 12 years ago

Threadable is like Google Groups, except that whether or not the default reply-to is "all" is a user preference rather than a group preference, which made me so happy.

(There are other features too, which I entirely ignore without missing anything. In fact, other than "there are some HTML buttons in the email", which will probably also eventually have an option to turn off, our transition from our prior mailing list service was almost unnoticeable for somebody like me who didn't want to use the extra features. And that's a compliment.)

raindrift11• 12 years ago

Thanks glasser!

One of the key changes between how Threadable works and previous mailing lists is that we can actually customize fairly deeply each message to each user, rather than simply reflecting the same thing out to the whole list. This trickles out into a bunch of interesting use cases and features, which we've only just started to implement.

aaronmarks• 12 years ago

Feels like I've seen that logo somewhere else...

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_litovxgoHb1qz7ewm.jpg

sfslim• 12 years ago

It wasn’t intended to be derivative, but yeah, our current branding is extremely MVP. We’ve been much more focused on building the product and learning how to delight our users. We’ll likely revisit this once we have some more bandwidth.

sunir• 12 years ago

Hey, please replace Google Groups. It's the worst best solution out there. We use Google Groups a lot for our b2b software trade association (http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com)

One key question. Typical startup conundrum. How can I rely on you to keep the discussion archive alive for the long term when you're just starting out with no revenue? Are the archives easy to export and rehost?

raindrift11• 12 years ago

Good question! At the moment, getting at your archives is about as easy as with Google Groups (which is to say, not very). Right now, you could use our webhooks to funnel all email into an archiver, so you have it. That's not a good solution for most people, though.

Going forward, we're very committed to data portability. Your data is yours. We want to keep your business by regularly delighting you, rather than controlling your content. The plan is to make it possible to export your list in a couple formats, probably JSON and mbox to start. This is down the roadmap a bit, probably June or so. However, if anyone needs their archive in the meantime, they can contact me and I'll make it happen.

In the slightly longer term, I want to build a feature that automatically syncs your list archive to your dropbox, so you can search it using tools like spotlight, and easily read it offline.

jeff18• 12 years ago

Are you guys aware of Stripe's mailing list philosophy? https://stripe.com/blog/email-transparency I think it is genius, theoretically, but it is a bit difficult to get right technically. If you guys could implement a way for companies to adopt that without the need for lots of filter wrangling, that would be epic!

raindrift11• 12 years ago

I agree completely! We're really excited about email transparency. Supporting it well has been one of our goals from the beginning. We have a few users who practice it (including us!) with whom we're working very closely to make sure we meet their needs.

For that matter, if anyone reading this is working with an organization that implements this philosophy, I would love to talk to you!

andylash• 12 years ago

mailing lists are so unrelentingly painful. So stoked to see Threadable take on a hard problem and make something really awesome.

pseudotrue2• 12 years ago

Does this work with custom domains, or are all the lists @treadable.com?

nicoles5• 12 years ago

You can set up custom email aliases per group, but we've only just started building it out. More fully fleshed out custom domain support is on the way.

pseudotrue2• 12 years ago

That's awesome. Thanks for the reply, I'll check it out.

vraa• 12 years ago

Is the Help/Feedback button not supposed to do anything in Firefox?

nicoles5• 12 years ago

Its a uservoice widget, which has a habit of getting blocked by some privacy-focused extensions. You can also email support@threadable, or you can reach out to me directly if you'd like. My email's in my profile.

hendry• 12 years ago

Great to see there is demand to improve mailing lists.

Though IIUC Threadable latches onto Google Groups? That sucks. How about a clean break guys?

I'm working with the opensource http://github.com/kaihendry/imap2json & mlmmj, and I'm pretty happy.

And I have my data too, to boot.

Threadable (YC W14) makes mailing lists more awesome, less noisy

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