Kippt (YC S12) Takes Its Enterprise Tool For Sharing Useful Content Out Of Beta
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Yes, they have that right. Email is definitely the competition, and I'm glad this team is upfront about it. Lots of group chat platforms brush this off.
> But these kinds of discussions are not best supported by long chains of e-mail.
Ah, you can't end on that TC! Why are these kinds of discussions not good on email? I've tried a bunch of group chat/discussion/collaboration platforms. I use them for a while, and they're fun and exciting during that honeymoon stage, but I always end up going back to email. It's dependable, robust and evergreen. And everyone has it. I don't know if it's ever not worked. Seriously.
I want to believe that something is better than email, but I have yet to see it. I had HUGE hopes for Google Wave, which was supposed to kill email. Didn't work. Checking out Inc, and it feels a lot like Wave. I hope it doesn't suffer a similar fate.
What's the huge problem with email?
I think there is data out there that confirms email sharing outweighs sharing on FB + TWTTR + everything else online combined.
You can also get digest emails on new stuff/mentions. So it seems like you could interact entirely via email and then only go to the web if you want to search/see groups.
Header on their website: "Say no to email, build a better workplace"
When they say something like that and then build a service that is dependent on email (at least somewhat), and even go as far as allowing the service to be used in it's entirety via email, I have to wonder if they genuinely believe email is broken. If they really believed in the "say no to email" matra, they would have simply said no to email themselves.
Apologies for the bluntness. My skepticism stems from personal experiences working on a project that was designed to 'kill email' (rather, a subset of email, not group chat like this). The same thing happened: primary interaction mechanism with the platform was ... email. That project failed.
The addition of being able to "like" things your co-workers post, categorize topics into groups, and carry lengthy conversations right on the page, are features that have really sold us on the idea.
Before Inc we tried email groups (so messy), Google+ groups (again, messy, and not everyone wants to get on there for discussing/sharing interesting things), etc.
Kudos to Karri and the team on creating something that's beautiful and functions well.
You can always reach us by email if there is something you think should be fixed or working hello@sendtoinc.com (it comes to founders directly).
What makes these tools succeed at least for the short term, is they fuck with the organizational habits of people. Their landing pages are huge cues to get more organized, which people love. People love the idea of getting their shit together and becoming organized once and for all.
The challenge these apps are facing is creating a habit loop. You need a cue and a reward, but more specifically when replacing a habit (email) with something new, you need to replace either the cue or the reward. In between those you have your tool. Without this change people just go back to their old habits. In the case of Inc the reward is "thanks for sharing that link, you’re awesome!" and the cue is "I need to send this to my whole team". Currently everybody immediately reaches an internal mailing list or enters in a few autocompleted emails when they encounter this cue, the urge to share with team members.
Now what Kippt, their original product did, which was clever, was creating new cues. They heavily pushed their Chrome extensions which inserted "Kippt" buttons and links to loads of websites with potentially interesting links. There’s even one for all hacker news links. This created new cues for people to respond to.
For Inc to succeed it needs to cleverly introduce more cues because email works fine for this particulare habit loop and will be hard to replace.
You're right, that's why we still constantly working / talking with our customers/users, to find if things are working or not.
I think mobile app, better notifications, doing email and other integration, and improving the daily digest emails will help to create those habits.
We want people to use the app everyday at work, understand that people also need to work, give them enough cues, but not to bother them.
One thing that have noticed that even chats are pretty intensive, and some teams so it a lot, it also requires you to be present at the same time, to effectively join the discussion.
With Inc, discussions is more like in a forum or email, where people comment when they have time / something to say.
One of my biggest pet peeves is endless emails sent to everyone in the organization by someone who just wanted to share an article that he/she thought was interesting. Then someone replies all with a comment, another person replies all, and soon, my email client just kept on buzzing even if the topic doesn't concern or interest me.
And the most frustrating thing is there's no rule that I can create to filter out those kind of emails.
This is very, very useful. Kudos to the Kippt team.
> And the most frustrating thing is there's no rule that I can create to filter out those kind of emails.
FYI, Gmail lets you mute threads, which addresses this exact use case.
On the consumer side, I've since cancelled my subscription for two primary reasons: (1) it wasn't fast enough for my core use case (saving links and finding them later); and (2) none of the other features provided me with any value (indeed, they often distracted from the core case). There are simply other tools that do this better. The pivot to enterprise provides a much more unique value proposition.
Shameless self plug: The site is called http://preserve.io and if you're interested we'd love your feedback on our pre-beta which has now been actively used for over a year
Congrats gents on the latest developments!