What problem does Shortwave solve and who is the primary target customer for the product?

At its core, Shortwave is an email client designed to make you actually enjoy your inbox. 

You bring your existing Gmail or Google Workspace account, and we give you a fresh user experience on top of it. Our main features are around helping you organize your inbox. 

We want to make it so you can easily understand your inbox at a glance by bundling up your emails in these things we call bundles. We want to give you control over how many notifications you're getting and when you're getting them. We want to provide an opinionated workflow that will help you get through your email and feel like you are organized: not necessarily at inbox zero, but organized. 

There are two main problems we're trying to solve.

One is that email is overwhelming. People are drowning in the amount of email they have, and it’s stressful to keep up-to-date with it. 

The second thing is that email is losing communication market share to messaging apps. 

On the business side, you have things like Teams and Slack that are eating into email use cases. On the personal side, you have iMessage and WhatsApp. 

Our core thesis is that the reason email is losing these use cases is because the user experience is not as good. We want to bring lessons from messaging apps to email and build an email client that’s as easy and as intuitive to use as modern messaging apps.