What are the main challenges in creating a new email client in 2022, and what is the most difficult aspect?

There's such a broad feature set, so there are lots of parts. You think about a tool like Gmail. It’s a set of a ton of different features, and you can build your own workflow on top of it. Some people heavily use 'stars.' Some people archive everything in their inboxes. Other people keep things in their inboxes and use the unread status. Other people use labels. There are so many different features that you can build your own workflow. So, when you're trying to build something that is to replace Gmail, and you want people to migrate to your tool, you have to make sure that they can migrate their workflow onto yours. We’re trying to go with a very opinionated workflow that we think is the best way for the average person to manage their inbox.

It revolves around our 'pin,' 'snooze,’ and ‘done’ features. In order to do that, though, we still need to understand how everyone is using labels, how everyone is using stars, and how we can map them into our system. I think migrating workflows is a big piece here.

The other piece is there are large technical challenges. Every time someone signs into our service, we have to pay a large upfront cost to import a lot of their email and store it. This is not a small expense and is also not a small amount of work to import years and years of people's emails. There are a ton of technical challenges here. We have offloaded a handful of these by building on top of Gmail. They handle spam. They handle deliverability for us, and this allows us to focus on the actual user experience. We’re trying to differentiate ourselves in this sea of many different email clients.