Cool! This is something I've been thinking about and wanted to build too.
I don't want it to be like I'm a valuable person and lower people pay for the privilege of my attention, but I do like the idea of making it so that senders have skin in the game and can't just infinitely generate emails that waste other people's time.
What I'd like to see is different costs based on how I classify the email.
So, everyone except trusted contacts pays $5 per email to me. If I think your email was pure spam, I keep the $5. If I reply, you get your money back. If I do nothing and never classify the email, you get back $4 after 30 days. And I can manually override like reply and keep the money, but those are the defaults.
$5 is probably too much, tho. I'd be looking more at the $.2 to $1 range.
Maybe a 3 to 4 tier inbox. Known and trusted user being able to contact you without paying, a high value inbox for the $1+ range, a low value inbox for the $.2 range emails wont be auto-deleted in and a very low value inbox emails will be deleted in depending on the amount paid, with free mails being gone within e.g. an hour, all the way up to e.g. a month for $.19 mails.
Then unify those inboxes and set up notifications to the users' likings.
Also, I'd normalize e.g. 10% going to the e-mail service providers and enshrine that amount into the protocol right away. Otherwise the protocol wont get a lot of attention from the major providers and if it does, the provider taking his share is going to become normalized anyway. But then the split isn't going to be in favor for the users. Which isn't negative per-se, but it'd be nice to have at least one type of service where this is split is reversed. And it is fair to assume whoever takes the larger split has more influence on the prices, potentially either making this feature useless or pricing very casual users out of the service.
I'm obviously biased as a small business owner, but I think that logic assumes that the market is perfectly efficient, when it obviously isn't. Large companies have massive advantages in so many dimensions.
As a simple example, imagine that I built a site for buying ebooks that's better in every way than Amazon. I pay authors more, readers pay less, the ebooks are compatible with every device, and it's easier for both authors and readers to use my site than Amazon. I still probably couldn't survive against Amazon because they'd tell their authors that if they sell with me, they can't sell on Amazon.[0] They have such a market dominance that authors would lose money by using my platform, even if it's a demonstrably better product in every way with better pricing.
But it goes beyond that. Big businesses have all these other huge advantages so that they can succeed not because they're offering the most value but because they have a pre-existing advantageous market position:
- It's a small percentage of their costs to hire attorneys to look for tax loopholes
- They can manage the overhead of abusing the H1B visa system to hire workers at below-market rates
- They can sue people and get sued and still have 98% of their employees not paying attention to any lawsuits
- They can afford to sell things at a loss just to choke out smaller competitors
Look at trillion dollar industries where 95% of money goes to just 2-3 companies. The iOS/Android duopoly, the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. Do they control the market because they're just so great at offering value? Or does their market position and terrible government policy prevent anyone from competing with them effectively and offering consumers better choices?
> Q for OP: looking back at your 8 posts, I don't see you ever reflecting on loneliness (or lack thereof) as part of your founder journey. Yet both founder friends and anecdotes always emphasize this as a big weight.
Honestly, it hasn't been a problem for me.
I'm atypical in that I enjoy solitude more than the average person. I had a mild illness once when I was living in NYC so I stayed home from work and had groceries delivered, and when I went outside again, I realized it had been a week since I'd seen another person, and I hadn't noticed until then.
I do like working with a dev team, but I don't necessarily need to be in person to do that. I enjoyed working with other remote devs for TinyPilot and getting to teach and learn from them.
I host an indie founders meetup in my area every other month. That's been a fun way to meet other founders and swap ideas.
Take my advice with a big grain of salt because I'm by no means an expert at finding customers. I can just say what's worked for me.
The thing that's been successful for me is to figure out who my customers are and find ways to show them I have something valuable to offer.
My most successful example was TinyPilot, where I wrote about how I built the first prototype,[0] and that post had an extremely positive reception on HN[1] and reddit[2]. I continued writing about my homelab because readers who were interested in learning about homelab were also people who had a use for TinyPilot.
I did the same thing when making my blogging course a few years ago. I joined a community for developer bloggers and gave people constructive feedback when they'd ask for notes on their drafts. Then, I approached the community manager and asked to pilot the course in the community for free (she actually insisted on paying me because she didn't believe in asking for free work). But the community liked it, the manager liked it, and it was great for me because it gave me feedback and testimonials for my course.
I've used ads but never as a first step. I think the first step has to be highly personalized where I'm out there meeting customers where they are and showing I can offer something useful.
>Looking back, how do you feel about your slate of past projects?
I feel like I learned something valuable from all of them.
The ones I'm most proud of are TinyPilot, my book, and my blogging course (in that order). Those are, uncoincidentally, the ones where I found product-market fit, whereas the rest never really achieved that.
TinyPilot was business-oriented by mistake. When I initially made it, I thought the market was entirely hobbyists who would rather make a DIY KVM than buy a $600 enterprise-y device. As I continued working on it, I found that my customers were much more interested in paying a higher price for a pre-made device than saving money with a DIY solution.
But yeah, I think the fact that it appealed to businesses made it more viable than my other business attempts that were consumer-focused.
>> I found that my customers were much more interested in paying a higher price for a pre-made device than saving money with a DIY solution
This could have been a 50-yr-old comment about the Apple I computer! Lol
>> Wozniak intended to share schematics of the machine for free; however, Jobs advised him to start a business together and sell bare printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the computer, without any components soldered on.
...
Terrell told Jobs that he would order 50 units of the Apple I and pay $500 each on delivery, but only if they came fully assembled – he was not interested in buying bare printed circuit boards with no components.
$200k really isn’t that much in this context. Less than a year’s income for a good developer in the US. Even if you haven’t worked for a FAANG, in the software industry in the US it’s not that difficult to find yourself with that amount, or more, available for investment after working in the industry for a while. Similarly, an amount like that isn’t necessarily going to take you very far.
out of curiosity, which one is the bigger part of your "financial cushion" nowadays? is it still mostly the ex-Google income/savings or has the TinyPilot exit taken that place?
I recommend having an initial talk with a broker if you're thinking about it at all.
The brokers I've met are happy to talk if you have a profitable business, even if you don't plan on selling anytime soon, and you don't have to sign anything to commit to them. They can talk to you about what you can do to prepare for an exit even if you don't expect that to happen for several years (and it might take you several years to manage yourself out of the business).
I personally liked the broker I worked with and recommend him.[0]
This is a really good idea, similar to raising money when you don't need it. It could help prevent you from making a mistake or getting into a unattractive position for when you are thinking of selling. I've seen this with one & few person companies, everything from messy ownership & cap tables, to tax obligations, to the structure of multi-year sales or contracts. This is why even big PE portfolio companies start planning for a sale years in advance; the difference (making it harder for you IMO) is that they have a pretty good idea when the sale will happen.
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