Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

Sparrow did everything right. They built an incredible email app

I would say they did everything right except choosing to build an e-mail client. The days of paying for e-mail clients is long gone. The days of even using a local mail client are over for most people. It's just a tough sell to make money selling a paid client to a free service. I use Sparrow and will continue to use it but I can understand why they were going to have difficulties making any real money off it. Way too small of a market.

View on HN

> The days of paying for e-mail clients is long gone.

I'm not sure I totally agree with that. My first example is the ridiculously wide-scale enterprise adoption of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange -- sure, there's a bunch of features that are piled onto those "email clients," but at the heart of it, people are still paying for this stuff.

The second example is Sparrow itself. If people weren't paying for e-mail clients, then would Sparrow have such a huge, dedicated userbase? Or is this just the vocal minority we're hearing from?

I agree - people are no longer willing to pay for the little bit of the client that connects to a server, downloads the email, and renders it, because all of that is widely available for free.

What they are willing to pay for is a value proposition that goes beyond the mere mechanics of email. Outlook succeeds because it integrates email with calendaring (so does GMail, with less success), does a fantastic job with sortation, filtering, and highlighting, and also is a champ when dealing with unmanageably large address books.

The market for an amazing email management service is absolutely existent. The market for a rubber-stamp me-too mail client is not.

I agree that if someone could improve email management they would indeed make more money. However, I still feel that sparrow was able to become so popular because it's iPhone interface was so much nicer to use than both Google's and Apple's free alternatives.

> sparrow was able to become so popular because it's iPhone interface was so much nicer to use than both Google's and Apple's free alternatives.

Sparrow became popular way before the iPhone version. Anyway, how is making an app more convenient supposed not to be an improvement worth at least a couple of bucks?

BTW, "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."

Even in that example, the real product being sold is the Exchange server. The Outlook mail client is essentially a freebie.

> My first example is the ridiculously wide-scale enterprise adoption of Microsoft Outlook and Exchange ...

Yes but there is a completely different dynamic driving those sales: top-down adoption mandated by people whose main goal is not to get fired. Same reason as why you see so many middleware posters in the airport raving about security. Most users, given the choice, would not choose to use these products.

Humans don't buy Outlook. Selling to humans (like Sparrow tried) is categorically different than selling to organizations.

I took a more general message: a $3 app cannot sustain a funded startup in any field.

Why was this even funded? It could have been a nice business if they built the app and sold it through the app store, it seemed to be making enough money to support the team (based on the fact if was highly ranked in the top grossing sections of the App Stores).

Because some investors don't mind 4x returns when the company exits to Google.

I understand why investors might want to get in but why would a company like this take investment? It seems like it would be pretty easy to bootstrap and build a sustainable business from. If they had given it away for free I could understand the need for investment but not when they were making money from the day it launched.

Maybe they perceived they could win more money by selling the assets the company, one of Sparrow guys came from Apple and Amazon so I really think this was the case, or maybe they perceived that at some point in the future a single software would not be sustainable at all, and since with app stores you cannot charge for upgrades this would be on their way, that's why the majority of OS X indies I know have a couple and not a single software selling at each time.

Who knows, ultimately it probably has to do with personal projects of theirs and I think it would be paternalistic to have a say in their lives.

There are people who really do not wish to have the lifestyle business life, it's not evil to seek more money as long as it's not something immoral that they're doing.

It is an interesting point, investors may have been looking for this type of exit from the start.

Doing an email client in a dying (but far from dead) market is quite alright. They even made loads of money !

The problem is how they would continue to make money - next year, the year after and 10 after that - what plan did they have in store? If all they had was "better mail app", then sure, as you summarised it, the writing was on the wall and selling while still being hot property was the best decision to take.

I don't believe that's true. Given many people still spend 4 - 10 hours a day in an email client it's not hard to believe they might pay 50 cents a day if it was a meaningfully better experience than a free app.

Isn't Sparrow primarily a GMail client? I mean, that's pretty much all I use it for (iCloud email pales in comparison, and I haven't run my own IMAP servers for years).

It does GMail really really well and GMail users tend to be a bit more affluent or clueful - better customers.

I paid for my desktop email client (The Bat) upgrade just couple of weeks ago.

The Bat!'s still around, since 1998? That is awesome.

I don't think RITLabs took any VC money... hmmm ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com