richardesigns

Actually yea it is a bit much. Wow. And I ‘am’ European.

Nude sunbathing etc has been a feature of model railways for as long as I can remember.

All goes over you head until your 15 anyway. The adults chuckle knowingly and quietly, you don’t have to draw your children’s attention to it if you don’t want to.

And anyway, she’s probably just ‘kissing it better’ lol.

I am so keen to visit this attraction. Pecorama was just the tiniest bit of a disappointment!

+1/ YouTube is the worst rabbit hole on the internet. Hugely addictive and yet full of so much valuable content. Good work.

I like how you can have titles half way down the columns.

Well this has all the hallmarks of being very cool.

Straw poll on teams in our batch, yes they are 'raising successfully at demo day' roughly in line with previous batches. Far fewer in-person investor meetings as you would expect. Yet more Zoom calls of course.

This is a cool idea and an interesting insight. Glad to hear about what a 'normal' YC interview is like. Reminds me of amateur theatre, waiting in the wings to go on. YC could do the random '10 in a call' before the interviews, although I suppose there are thousands of people being interviewed.

Agree completely. One thing is for sure, I Zoom a lot less now! I guess the imperitive to build a strong company remains the same, there is just no substitute for going out into the world and meeting people.

Thanks so much :-) The pins will definitely do this. I didn't quite manage to get it to work ahead of the video but the idea is each pin is a link back to the message from where it was pinned.

I'd like the same to be true for the quote. So much easier than writing 'I'll reply in line' and the copy/pasting all the time.

You're so right. They would get hugely annoyed. Plum Mail isn't a messenger really, I mean sure you could use it as such but then you could use email like that too and cause just as many notifications.

We're planning daily digest emails to group together multiple messages with individual reply buttons.

Showed it and explained it to my gran and she seemed to get it just fine. This is a woman that couldn't understand why her iPad wasn't charging until I explained it did actually need plugging into the wall. lol.

I think anyone would get confused and irritated by some weird confusion over email and Plum Mail. I think the next step is to ship v1 and see how users get on with it. I'll try to remember to report back what we learn.

All good points. Plum Mail is B2C and HN is a well-informed technical audience it's probably fair to say. We felt we needed something less abstract than just a fruit in the name to explain what you do in this application - i.e. you write to people and they write back like when you send and receive mail (distinct from 'e'mail).

We toyed with using the word 'messenger' but that's much less representative of the longform way in which Plum Mail nudges you to write. Messengers are synchronous, one liner, emojis etc.

At least with the word mail in the name, anyone hearing about it for the first time can have a pretty good guess at what it does. The technicality of using the email address as the identifier and passwordless authentication etc is important (but probably only really interesting to a technical audience).

Thoughts?

Thanks Adontai. Agree on the video. Not made a video like this before! It was a fun experience but there are certainly improvements to be made there. Thank you.

Yes it could. That's a little way down the road development wise but sure, cool idea. Version 2 of the pins will include links back to the text in the email thread. If you've got 100 messages in a thread this is essential.

The skimming you mention is the level of efficiency we are trying to get to. i.e. surfacing the key pieces of information.

Nice looking site. Plum Mail just isn't an email client or a shared inbox. We can offer shared inbox functionality in Plum Mail if users would like it but you can also do simpler public support channels.

Hi again, I answered this one up above too.

Free to all (system is open to all) with premium features for a modest fee.

Agree. A system with none of your friends or colleagues on is pointless because there is no one to talk to.

I'll try to be really clear about what Plum Mail is and is not! We haven't done a great job of communicating this thus far.

Plum Mail is NOT an email client.

Plum Mail IS a communication platform using a central server similar to how an instant chat platform works.

Where we differ is that Plum Mail isn't a 'walled garden' where you need to invite users in to use it.

Users are identified in the system by their email address. If you write to someone that is not a Plum Mail user, then we send that message out as an email to that user with an option to reply. That reply button gives the user immediate access to Plum Mail in order to write back to you. We're doing this passwordlessly. Right at the genesis of this idea we didn't want to build a system that required you to invite all your friends to it before it became useful.

Revenue wise, referencing the above point, Plum Mail has to be free. We will offer premium features for a modest fee.

Fair comment. I'll work on this.

Sound summary. You're welcome.

Thanks for your constructive feedback on the video. We realised yesterday the video says literally nothing interesting until 30 seconds in! Had quite a lot of flak about this lol.

Still, there’s a first time for everything and I hope the video can be succeeded by a V2 in fairly short order.

Thanks for your congratulations.

Thank you. Keen to agree with the point that email is useful and good at in the right place but groups certainly needs work!

SMTP is not used under the hood. You can send messages to anyone with an email address. That person may not have accessed Plum Mail before. In that case, the message sent to that person is sent as an email with the option to reply.

So you can stay within your email to take part in that conversation or you can access it in Plum Mail for the full feature set.

Similar in that you can contact anyone with their email address without that person needing to 'sign up'. This openess is important.

The format in Plum Mail is more longform rather than chat as such. Delta Chat is a cool service.

Thank you. You certainly can test it, thanks for joining the list. Your situation is exactly the kind of thing we'd love to solve. We had a similar experience communicating with accountants. Plum Mail is not a shared inbox as such but it is a shared platform so the features you probably need to make life easier talking to multiple people are then possible.

This post resonates with me completely. Products need to solve problems people other than ourselves actually have. We have not always been perfect at this and started like you have here, by speaking to people, then we got too into the code to hear what users were saying, now we're back on the straight and narrow! Set up a public roadmap the other day, this is now working very well and we are shipping features genuinely requested and upvoted by users. This has taken all the guesswork out of product development. I'm happy to share for reference: https://did.nolt.io/ https://did.app/

This is a worrying thought! Does someone like Twilio do this? Might be worth having a look. We grappled with the same problem because we do device authentication as a single factor of authentication. In a SME setting, ideally the business signs up using ops@example.com and then they can register any number of devices to carry out the device authentication and remove any device remotely if, say, Barbara from accounts retires on Tuesday.

There was a really good article on 'locking down' voice assistants I read recently in Make: (Spring 20) where the author proposes 3d printing 'hats' that sit over your Alexa / Google Assistant and has electronics inside that listen to you and pass your message on to the voice assistant. Their approach was to stop the device from listening to you all the time.

IMO Alexa and Google are useless, half the time they don't hear you, half the time they hear you when you're not even talking to them and respond with something completely random. Google now refuses to talk to me because we messed up the personalisation and can't work out how to go back to just being anonymous.

Apple's Homepod however can't access the internet for answering questions but has a far far superior ability to hear you and respond.

We basically use our voice assistants to turn music on and off. Honestly that's all my friends ever seem to use these evil privacy invading devices for!

I trust Apple a bit more with my data than I do Google or Amazon.