So the story is I was going through my email and realized I had like 150 emails received, most of them were:
- Transactional emails, e.g. password resets, login alerts, GitHub
- Bank transaction emails
- Email from products I signed up for but clearly unchecked the "I want to receive product alerts or news alerts"
- Newsletter issues I subscribed to.
So going through all these emails was a hustle, and I like reading newsletters my favorites being Morning Brew and The Publish Press by Colin & Samir team. At that point I thought of the idea:
What if I could have an app that receives all of my newsletter issues, and I can easily access the app and just go through a week's issues. That would be a step closer to decluttering my inbox.
Are there potential customers for this app?
- This is not a new idea, a similar product called Mailbrew aggregates content from Twitter follows, RSS feed, & Email issues to generate a weekly or daily digest tailored to you. They are making money from such a feature, at the time of this writing Mailbrew is making close to $15,000 MRR.
- The other reason is well we are getting too many emails for sure, last year alone close to 320 billion emails were sent and received in 2021, according to Statista.
- Every single day there is a newsletter launching from celebrities like Dua Lipa to popular youtube channel TMG. The Substack reader can only do so much, and it's strictly Substack stuff, what about the Mailchimp issues or Buttondownmail issues.
Research
So after knowing the product could potentially get paying customers, I decided to research the core tech of it, and that was receiving emails.
For me to receive emails I needed 3 things:
- SMTP server: to receive the emails
- Domain name: to generate addresses to emails
- Storage: the emails need to be stored somewhere and a database isn't the best place for that.
More on this later in the Research part.
I am 80% done, was actually supposed to launch on 10th Feb 2022, but got some hurdles with the domain stuff and a lot of things from my personal life.