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.
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.
> "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.
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.