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People in my company have been telling me for years to switch but I just too stressed to do it.

My reasoning was i don’t have much email.

Actually not true. Email is a source of a lot of stress for me.

I have great respect for this company. They have good ideas and make beautiful products.

It looked great except i didn’t use it for the same reason as everyone else. Jason Fried read this. No one wants to give up complete control of their email and switch to using your server.

Your product is never going to be more than a niche product if you don’t get your head out of your butt and pay attention - this is the bottleneck limiting your growth.

First i tried TrimBox - i bought a license. Initially was not impressed until i found a different mode to sort by largest sender:

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No reply. Next!

I think this was quite helpful for deleting old emails from my inbox. I has over 180,000 emails - mostly junk.

Still this app was going to make cleaning email my new flossing routine and I suck at flossing my teeth like most people.

Next!

By Eliot’s Law.

If Eliot thinks of an idea someone else has had the same idea and might have done it already.

With a bit of help from from ChatGPT 4 which can use bing to search the web which is a game changer for me finding stuff I found Mailtime.

It was cool! They raised a lot of money.

But clearly squandered it because the implementation sucked.

Next!

And it was heaven. Knocked it out of the park:

https://www.spikenow.com/

Make email feel like texting.

After several days of usage I couldn’t find anything that felt annoying. Quite something for me.

I started to get my friends and staff to install it.

OMG this company has solved another huge pain area - with Apple Mail I could never find anything! I had to do all sorts of tricks to find old receipts etc for Dale.

I could not switch off beeps when sending an email. So I enrolled in the beta program with some help from Chat GPT to figure out.

I thought about it because our beta is usually better than our ‘shipped’ version.

I am using the beta from now on!

It would be much better since you can easily add customers.

We have tried so many ways to create groups to interact with our customers. The last abysmal failure was using Slack. We got all our users from our user conference to join and then crickets. No real engagement. Just too much friction - this screen shot gives a clue why. It’s too bloody awkward to switch from one workspace to another so everyone has the same high hopes - like Peerscale my technology peer association.

But it doesn’t work for anyone. I probably should find time to look at the client my kids use Discord - I am sure it’s not an accident that people like OpenAI use discord for their developer channels.

I notice people talk more in small groups - the communication is better - I think Spike might lend itself better to creating real community. Not an easy task.

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But I don’t see why Google or Apple are intrinsically more trustworthy than Spike. Spike is an Israeli company. It thing of all countries they understand the need for safety and security.

I think they have the potential to grow into something huge. Just they hope they stick it out and grow up into what they could be and don’t sell out for a quick buck to become another ho-hum division of Salesforce.

So far I think there major bottlenecks for growth are all going to be about trust.

• Trust from consumers that their data will be confidential

• Trust it won’t be hard to switch - it really isn’t

• Trust from businesses that they will be around in the long term - that this isn’t a made to flip business that won’t be finished before it becomes part of Salesforce.

• Trust from large inflexible institutions to adopt a new technology.