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Thoughts on Google’s new Inbox

It started with this:

Looking at the timeline, it seems I’m not the only one who got an Inbox invite I’m the last hour

Summarising what I’ve been tweeting about my early impressions of Inbox.

First impression

Started off being surprised by the app speed, both on the laptop and Nexus 5. The Gmail app had become laggy on the N5 recently, and has been slow for a long while on the web. Inbox was pleasantly, surprisingly fast. (Aside: Gmail on N5 may be slow because of the amount of email that I’ve marked for offline storage. No such setting in Inbox).

Getting used to the new sorting concept takes a little effort. While I’ve been using, and loving, Gmail’s automatic labels, they were always hidden away from the view in the main Gmail apps. In Inbox, by default, they’re right there on the main screen, with older email from the primary inbox shoved further down. This can, and needs, to be fine tuned for each user’s taste, but I wonder how many regular users will know how to, or even bother?

Second impression

After more fiddling around with Inbox: I like it on the phone. It’s fast, it’s clean, and gets right to business. On the PC, I still prefer the good old Gmail. Mainly because I’m over dependent on keyboard shortcuts for everything – actions and traversal – which Inbox doesn’t support very well yet.

Another observation – people like me who delete unwanted emails, instead of archiving them, might have a few OCD issues with using Inbox. The default ‘mark-it-done’ action just archives the email. Doesn’t even mark it read before archiving. Very bad for my inbox hygiene OCD.

Aside

Inbox feels like a great tool for people who get large volumes of email. Those with fewer mails may find it an unnecessary complication of the simpler Gmail client.

Which makes me wonder, is the Google Inbox a product that answers the need of valley/tech users, or did Google actually research ALL its Gmail users’ behaviour?

Treatment of email inbox as a to-do list, and focus on quickly dealing with larger volumes of email, shows Google is trying to respond to the chatter around ’email overload’ and ‘disrupting email’, and building up on work that apps like Mailbox are already doing.

My worry is are the chatterati who this app responds to really that big a target market¹, or could Google be ignoring the silent masses? The pickup of Inbox, and continuing development of default Gmail app might help answer these questions.

Aside:

.@julykatrae on Inbox: Google is solving the problem it created by giving away so much space with Gmail. Before it we kept our inboxes lean.

— Aditya B (@adityabhaskar) October 24, 2014

UI Hiccups

I abandoned the Inbox web app on laptop after the first night. It’s become my default app on the N5, though. The UI of the Android app still feels a bit broken, though.

The first big negative, for me, was discovering that we can’t share links (using Android’s share intents) in emails using the Inbox app. The default Gmail app allows this nicely. It’s sad that Inbox had to break this link sharing facility – can’t add articles directly from newsletters to Pocket anymore, and so can’t quickly mark them done! :(

Another UI fail that slows me down quite a bit: Can’t quickly run through emails by swiping right-left from an open email to next-previous email. This swipe-traversal made quickly running through the updates folder so easy in the Gmail app – start at first email, and quickly read through all before archiving/deleting them all. Doing the same in Inbox app, requires a lot more tap actions!

A final, small hiccup – In the Gmail app, users could save any attached photos directly to Google Drive. This too seems to have been broken in the Inbox app.

Summary

I like the direction Google has taken with the Inbox app. It may not suit all Gmail users, but for those like me who get a lot of email (and are willing to tune the app to their needs), it’s perfect. It also helps that it isn’t replacing the original Gmail app, which may still be a better option for a lot of users. There are still quite a few UI gaps, which I hope will get filled quickly since the app is still in its early roll out phase.

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The Risk in Venture Investing

As Bill Gurley of Benchmark says…

“You can only lose your money once” if you invest.
If you don’t, you can effectively lose that would-be appreciation many times over.

– Sarah Lacy

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Lean Product Management

Struggling to fit the product inside time and budget? Reduce the scope, not increase time and budget.

– Laurence McCahill, on Lean Product Management

Distribution versus Product

What comes first – distribution or the product?

To most businesses, this isn’t even a question – there’s nothing to distribute without the product, so it comes first. But in the new era of lean startup, it’s something to ponder upon for those starting up today.

In the established, fast fading way of building startups, the distribution problem is generally tackled after the product-market fit has been achieved. The focus is on iterating the product based on customer feedback(?) till a P-M fit has been achieved, when you switch to focusing on distribution.

The problem with this approach is demonstrated by the thousands of untouched, unloved landing pages littering the Internet. How do you get valuable, and wide-based customer feedback on your MVP, if you have no distribution – no way of reaching a large number of users.

Low, and reducing, cost of developing MVPs means the battle line is shifting. It’s not as much about building the product right any more, as about getting the right product to the correct, target market. And while the cost of developing that MVP (whether a landing page or more full formed) is coming down fast, the cost of reaching a large number of relevant, interested users (to get the feedback from) is actually increasing due to the large number of MVPs seeking them out.

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Successful Startup Code: Courage > Genius

Courage is in shorter supply than genius.

– Peter Thiel, at LSE

Peter Thiel, talking about Zero to One, at LSE

Equity Funding – Additive, not Dilutive

Matt Robinson GoCardless - Raising Money Additive Not Dilutive — Matt Robinson, from GoCardless, at Google Campus’ fund raising #campusedu event

What?

Dilutive = money out (previous stakeholders cashing out)
Additive = money in (to company’s coffers)

Continue reading Equity Funding – Additive, not Dilutive

Just another day in the life of an independent developer

Me: “I can’t release the update yet, I need to fix X and Y first!”

Me: “Listen dummy, yes they need doing, but X and Y are already that way in the latest build and you’re sitting on fixes for A, B, C, D and E, do a release.”

Me: “I can’t release the update yet, I need to fix X and Y first!”

Chris Lacy, on Google+

Technology bypass

Will thousands of spying, interfering nanosats nullify China’s satellite killing missiles?

Risk – Statistics, norms & decision fatigue

They wouldn’t think of preventing many statistically riskier parenting decisions so long as those decisions jive comfortably with social norms.

Source: Working Mom Arrested for Letting Her 9-Year-Old Play Alone at Park – The Atlantic

This problem is everywhere – social behaviour decisions, government policy implementations, day-to-day corporate decision-making. The reason, hinted at in the quote above, is two-fold:

Strength of ingrained social norms
Mental effort required to understand statistical risk of decisions

Other potential reasons, I guess, are:

Decision fatigue, or coping mechanisms for it – people avoid making decisions requiring involved thinking if they can get away without them , and
Conflict avoidance – going with less controversial, more socially accepted option, even if it may be the worse/wrong choice.

What can (should) be done to overcome these hurdles? (Other than defining regulation more rigidly to take decisions out of hands of people, and/or ‘educating’ people)

New user sign up – do it later

A sample new user signup flow

This post refers to my work with a startup. Like with all work and consulting projects, I wait at least 6 months before writing/tweeting about them.

I’m not a fan of the usual sign-up flow that most web products & services employ. In its most primitive form, the the flow goes something like this:

New user visits website
Clicks ‘try/sign-up’ button; is asked to fill a form providing certain details¹
On successfully filling up the form, shown a message asking to verify email address
User goes to their email, clicks on the link
Shown a page saying email is verified. Asked to login to continue…

As a part-time marketer, more than as a user, I hate this flow. It is filled with user drop-off opportunities/hurdles (#2, #4, even #3 & #5 occasionally), and sacrifices quality for quantity (of captured user details).

Instead, here’s an alternate flow for an imaginary developer-focussed API service/platform:

Visit the website
Click ‘try/use’ button
Go straight to new user’s custom dashboard (create a temporary random user id for them)
Let the new user play around with the dashboard, with the api playground (similar to what google has) – get to know the platform
When they want to generateanapi key for their apps, show them the simplest sign up form which gives them immediate accesstoapi keys (without email confirmation).
- Inform them on the page that they’ll need to confirm email within X days, or keys will be disabled.
Separately, send them an email confirmation link saying they need to confirm email in x days, or keys will be disabled.
As a precaution, set really low, check-features-out level api limit on the keys till email is confirmed.
Even if users leave after playing with the dashboard, but without trying to create a key (and providing an email address), store a cookie in their browser with details of the temporary user id. So, if they come back, you can still let them continue from the same state they’d already explored instead of starting again.

Now, here are some benefits from the marketing perspective:

Fewer / later hurdles for user, higher user engagement
Users get to experience a lot more of the product, and get engaged closely with it, even before they’re asked to do uncomfortable things like fill a form or confirm an email address. Playing with the dashboard, or creating API keys and testing the API also create a small lock-in for the user, by making them comfortable with your API.
A lot more of the funnel becomes visible.
Instead of seeing a large set of users drop out without signing in, and wondering why, you’ll see some of them filtering in to later sections of checking out the dashboard, using api playground, and signing up for keys. This is valuable feedback in refining your product, as well as the sign-up funnel.
Higher quality user data
The user data (mostly, email addresses) you’ve now gathered, are of users who checked out your product at a deeper level than just some marketing literature, and decided they wanted to play with it so needed the API keys. A much more relevant target audience to engage, and likely to upgrade, than the current one – where everyone who even wants to know what your product looks like has to first sign up. Also, no more dealing with lists of [email protected] email addresses.

If you’re using advertisements to increase sign-ups, Isn’t it even more imperative that you reduce all possible hurdles, and create all possible incentives for the new visitor to spend as long as possible on your product, sign-up and continue using your product? (Side note: Could I have created a longer sentence?)

Posted from WordPress for Android

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