The Unbundling of Email
Every feature of email is becoming its own startup.
Think about what email does: messaging, file transfer, task management, scheduling, newsletters, notifications, identity verification, and document signing.
Every single one of those is now a separate product. Slack for messaging. Dropbox for files. Asana for tasks. Calendly for scheduling. Substack for newsletters. Push notifications for alerts. OAuth for identity. DocuSign for signatures.
And yet we still use email for all of those things too. Email is the cockroach of the internet. You cannot kill it by building better alternatives, because email is not one thing. It is the default protocol for "I need to send something to someone."
The startup idea here is not "kill email" (people have tried, people have failed). The idea is: what is the next feature of email that becomes its own product?
I think it is receipts. Every purchase confirmation, shipping notification, and return label sits in email. Someone will build a product that is just "all your receipts, organized" and it will be worth a billion dollars.
- Mohan
- Mohan