One of the most important startup lessons to learn, in perpetuity, is not to underestimate email.

I learned this the hard way when I was running a startup 15 years ago (we used sign in with Twitter and didn't required people give us their email address) and it's still true today.

Email is almost universal, mostly free from gatekeepers and is an incredibly effective way to keep your product relevant in a way that doesn't depend on your users remembering to visit your site or open your app.

There are people out there who don't use email, but they tend to not be people who spend serious money on the kind of products most startups are building.

Agree that interfaces are moving in this direction. But humans and agents will always need a way to send/receive messages and notification asynchronously. Email is the most universal channel and we think it is here to stay.

I would actually go as far as potentially considering email a distributed protocol for live-chat considering how quickly they are delivered [1]. I'm aware that is not how many people use them, but I believe that is more related to the interface and not the underlying technology. Somebody could probably built a live-chat messenger that looks like Teams or iMessage while actually just being an email client. Edit: This already exists [2].

[1] https://groups.io/email-provider-status [2] https://www.spikenow.com/features/conversational-email/

Great question - we get this input a lot. It really depends, while I'm a big believer of voice and API-driven design in the future, I think email's role remains but looks different. It's a sticky, universal protocol that serves as a great system of audit and record. Also think an agent is only as good as its context - an inbox serves almost as a personal gateway to the internet and early customer's use cases show different applications from agent-human connection to identity verification and authentication.

What a silly take. Email has been around for ages and it will continue to be around in perpetuity. It's still the medium of choice for certain types of interactions where a documented paper trail is important and you eg; need escalation, further review, etc. It's still also the choice for many companies and individuals.