Am I the only one who would have liked a bit more detail behind the reason for Fluent shutting down after just six months?
I watched and waited with anticipation for the launch, and was excited when I got my invite and could start using the service.
It's a great product, with excellent UX and design, and while it still felt technically like a work in progress, I was ready to stick it out as a user and see where everything went.
Now, less than two months after getting my "golden ticket," it's all going away with a vague statement: "We feel that we couldn’t keep running the service as it is, and now’s the time to move on."
Was there not enough runway to survive beyond six months? Did something else happen that they don't feel like discussing? If you're going to make announcements like "The future of email, brought to you by ex-Google people," it seems like you should at least know that you've got the funding to keep the lights on for more than a couple months.
It might seem like I'm being harsh on Fluent, considering that I'm just a user who didn't pay anything and shouldn't have any expectations. I'm not thinking about this as a user, though. I'm thinking about this as a would-be startup entrepreneur. One of the biggest barriers to getting traction early on is convincing users that you're going to stick around, that they can invest their time getting used to your product, even trust their data with you. After all, you're just some startup, maybe they should wait a year and see if you're still there. Meanwhile, you're stuck in a Catch 22, because you need those early adopters in order to still be there in a year.
When a startup makes big claims, then closes their doors mere months later, it puts another brick in the wall that makes it harder for other startups to make the case that it's worth getting on board for early adopters.
I'm sad to see Fluent go. It was a good idea, and seemed to be well executed. I just wish they'd be a bit more transparent about what happened, and why they weren't able to see this coming.
> Email is quite clearly a thing that needs fixing
Honestly, I've never seen it that way. Email continues to work fine. It's platform independent and easy to use/setup. It's probably one of the best things on the internet ever.
Email is great. But long threads with various forwards and cc's become incredibly painful. Gmail have gone some way to fixing it, but Fluent.io looked like they were doing a great job (Judging by the demo videos)
Ever tried sending an attachment to someone over 4-5mb? One of the most broken aspects of email right there and something that won't be changing any time soon. Sure you can use a service like Mediafire or Rapidshare, but it's just another step that shouldn't exist in this day and age.
(I used to run my own cloud based e-mail aggregator www.inbox2.com)
The primary problem with these services is that they have to pull content and have to do it regularly. That means going and checking your inbox every 2-5 minutes to be able to provide a descent experience. Your ISP e-mail provider (or gmail etc) sit there and wait for e-mail to be sent to them making it less processing intensive (push based systems).
There are some techniques such as imap IDLE to make this a bit more efficient but 1. not every e-mail provider supports that and 2. for ex. with gmail idle caps at about 35K connections per box.
You could also have for ex. gmail forward all email to a custom address but average users generally found this very confusing and couldn't get this going.
We calculated that it cost us about 2 euros per month to support a free user providing a 'good' user experience. Good luck making that back as paid service is also not a (scalable) option; the general consensus being: "email is supposed to be free" or "I am already paying for my gmail!".
Its stuff like this that makes me very cynical about a big portion of the startup world. I admire companies that stick to their vision for the long haul and don't bow out because all of a sudden they don't have enough attention/passion/whatever. You'd think that if a party comes out stating huge ambitions and a big vision for fixing a problem, they'd have the determination to match the cause.
I share similar sentiments. Start-ups feel more fickle as of late... perhaps just chance with Sparrow's recent buy out, etc. Unless there's a real reason to keep going for the starters (monetary or personal drive/passion), then there's no fountain to stand on.
It's disappointing! I was really looking forward to trying this out... but I never made it past the waiting list.
@cynicalmood I'm curious whether you've run a startup? How long would you go without an income (if that's the "whatever" you're referring to) even if you believed in the vision?
Why are there so many of these sites? Is there a low barrier to entry or something? 90% seem to do similar things, so maybe someone should make one that allows people to write plugins for their platform and allow people to extend things that way?
Email itself is just a standard protocol; anyone can implement it. So, yes, there is a very low barrier to entry. Also, there are various problems around current email usage patterns that people want to solve: dealing with enormous inboxes, dealing with long conversation threads, managing contacts, integration with business workflows, etc.
I guess when you go saying things like "the future of email" unless you're Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft or Facebook that's all it's ever going to be: words. From the limited glimpse I got to see of the service it looked pretty promising and very visually pleasing, but sadly without the funding ideas like this just can't and won't work.
I would like to see someone else take this idea and run with it because I think it's definitely something that is bound to happen, someone at some stage will make email better. I think the owners should open source the code on Github, it would be a shame for such a service to fall by the wayside all because the funding wasn't there.
This request happens for every startup that closes. I don't think it's realistic most of the time, because projects like this are heavily tied to specific infrastructure and the optimum level of technical debt for a startup is much higher than the optimum level for an open source project whose survivorship depends on the community picking it up and taking it over (because it's unlikely the founders will spend much time working with it). Furthermore, the team would need to devote time to auditing the security aspects (e.g. looking for sensitive data that might have been in the code base, by accident at best, sheer ignorance at worst) before releasing it, which takes further time.
So I think it's more important to ask for user data to be handed over cleanly and securely, and for certain data to be made public if it's of general interest (though again, that requires diligent security auditing).
Anyway, it would be good to have some evidence that this common call for open source has actually paid off in the past. Closest I can think of is Firefox, but the circumstances were very unique - for one thing, it rose from the ashes of a project had at one point been wildly successful.
@dhanji - thanks for all your work on this - you've inspired us all.
This post read a little bit like "This is more expensive to run in time and money than we thought - so we're shelving it for now."
Can I ask - was this move triggered by
(a) Google buying Sparrow? (and thus shelving other email acquisition plans)
(b) Marissa Mayer moving to Yahoo (and killing a potential purchaser strategy)
(c) The release of outlook.com (creating a high speed competitor with lots of resources for distribution and support and marketing).
I've been very happily paying for a fastmail.fm business account for the last few years. A rock-solid system, and great at handling lots of addresses on multiple domains.
Haven't heard much about fluent until now. It does seem to be a problem worth solving and 70,000 signups, does imply that it is a validated problem. Still coming out of the startups world, it feels eerie that a startup would shutdown within 6 months. Is this one more of those many cases, where the cofounders developed a solution for a valid problem, however failed to figure out how to monetize it?
I feel that email needs fixing. I will explain my opinion by walking through my history with email, chronologically:
1994-1996 - used AOL. Proprietary format that can not be updated to anything modern.
1996-1998 - got a Geocities account. Geocities was later bought by Yahoo. Yahoo did a terrible job merging geocities usernames into the Yahoo username system, such that I was left with a strange, difficult to spell username, and the system sends email with one return email address when the message is original with me, but when I'm replying to an email sent by someone else, the return email address is different. Both email addresses go to my account, but my friends have often been confused about which my "real" email account is. And so have I. All the same, to this day, I still use this account in emergencies, when other email technologies have failed me. I hate, hate, hate the fact that so much of my "Sent" history is locked inside of this system.
1998 - an intense period of experimentation during which I tried 8 different email clients, many from very small 3rd parties, some of which only had a single developer, but some of which were famous among that crowd of tech elite who had been on the internet since the 1980s. All of these clients were later abandoned by their developers, or the company that owned the software went backrupt. There was one exception: Outlook Express.
1997-2000 - used Outlook Express. Downside was simply that it ran on Windows, and I was never happy being on Windows. Also, when I was ready to move to something else, I could not find any easy way to mass export my email, nor save it in some format other than eml.
2001-2007 the year before I had started renting my own server and keeping my email on my own server. In 2001 I switched to Linux as my main computer. After some experimentation, I settled down to using Thunderbird. My problem was that this client was incredibly buggy. At least on my Red Hat machine, and later on my Ubuntu machine, Thunderbird had many, many bugs and would often crash, causing me to lose a lot of work. Frustrated with Thunderbird, I would sometimes switch back to using my Geocities account, which I sort of hated, but which was more reliable.
2007-2009 - used Gmail, but hated having to rely on a 3rd party, and have also had privacy concerns with Google. Since 2000 I have preferred to rent my own server and keep my email on my own machine.
2010-2011 - used Pine. Also experimented with using Emacs as my main email client. I love Emacs, but decided I did not like it for email.
2011 - by 2010 I had sort of given up on Linux and switched to using a Mac as my main machine. Sometimes use the Mail.app for particular purposes, such as subscribing to various newsgroups. In general afraid of vendor lock-in and would prefer an open source solution. Mostly used Thunderbird. It is much less buggy than what I had to deal with years earlier on Linux. But still, it is somewhat buggy (sometimes search will stall, sometimes windows become non-responsive, and HTML quoting does not work well, which drives me crazy). It lacks some features that clients in the late 90s had, with the one big exception that it supports HTML email. However, I prefer to use plain text email, so that feature means nothing to me. When I try to use the HTML email, I run into numerous flaws that strike me as bugs: invisible barriers that will sometimes not allow the cursor to move up or down, when I'm using the arrow keys, or sections that won't allow themselves to be selected, or sections that can only be selected as a block. Drives me crazy.
It is 2012. I am unhappy with my email client. I would like something better, preferably open source.
It sounds to me like you're unhappy with Thunderbird, not email. You seem to refuse to use other email clients (Outlook, Gmail, Mail.app) for various reasons entirely unrelated to sending or receiving email.
[+] [-] jaysonelliot|13 years ago|reply
I watched and waited with anticipation for the launch, and was excited when I got my invite and could start using the service.
It's a great product, with excellent UX and design, and while it still felt technically like a work in progress, I was ready to stick it out as a user and see where everything went.
Now, less than two months after getting my "golden ticket," it's all going away with a vague statement: "We feel that we couldn’t keep running the service as it is, and now’s the time to move on."
Was there not enough runway to survive beyond six months? Did something else happen that they don't feel like discussing? If you're going to make announcements like "The future of email, brought to you by ex-Google people," it seems like you should at least know that you've got the funding to keep the lights on for more than a couple months.
It might seem like I'm being harsh on Fluent, considering that I'm just a user who didn't pay anything and shouldn't have any expectations. I'm not thinking about this as a user, though. I'm thinking about this as a would-be startup entrepreneur. One of the biggest barriers to getting traction early on is convincing users that you're going to stick around, that they can invest their time getting used to your product, even trust their data with you. After all, you're just some startup, maybe they should wait a year and see if you're still there. Meanwhile, you're stuck in a Catch 22, because you need those early adopters in order to still be there in a year.
When a startup makes big claims, then closes their doors mere months later, it puts another brick in the wall that makes it harder for other startups to make the case that it's worth getting on board for early adopters.
I'm sad to see Fluent go. It was a good idea, and seemed to be well executed. I just wish they'd be a bit more transparent about what happened, and why they weren't able to see this coming.
[+] [-] xqyz|13 years ago|reply
Honestly, I've never seen it that way. Email continues to work fine. It's platform independent and easy to use/setup. It's probably one of the best things on the internet ever.
[+] [-] andrewfelix|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalSea|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waseemsadiq|13 years ago|reply
The primary problem with these services is that they have to pull content and have to do it regularly. That means going and checking your inbox every 2-5 minutes to be able to provide a descent experience. Your ISP e-mail provider (or gmail etc) sit there and wait for e-mail to be sent to them making it less processing intensive (push based systems).
There are some techniques such as imap IDLE to make this a bit more efficient but 1. not every e-mail provider supports that and 2. for ex. with gmail idle caps at about 35K connections per box.
You could also have for ex. gmail forward all email to a custom address but average users generally found this very confusing and couldn't get this going.
We calculated that it cost us about 2 euros per month to support a free user providing a 'good' user experience. Good luck making that back as paid service is also not a (scalable) option; the general consensus being: "email is supposed to be free" or "I am already paying for my gmail!".
[+] [-] cynicalmood|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewjoh|13 years ago|reply
It's disappointing! I was really looking forward to trying this out... but I never made it past the waiting list.
[+] [-] nobrogrammer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boyter|13 years ago|reply
Why are there so many of these sites? Is there a low barrier to entry or something? 90% seem to do similar things, so maybe someone should make one that allows people to write plugins for their platform and allow people to extend things that way?
[+] [-] LiveTheDream|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalSea|13 years ago|reply
I would like to see someone else take this idea and run with it because I think it's definitely something that is bound to happen, someone at some stage will make email better. I think the owners should open source the code on Github, it would be a shame for such a service to fall by the wayside all because the funding wasn't there.
[+] [-] drivebyacct2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilsbunger|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmahemoff|13 years ago|reply
So I think it's more important to ask for user data to be handed over cleanly and securely, and for certain data to be made public if it's of general interest (though again, that requires diligent security auditing).
Anyway, it would be good to have some evidence that this common call for open source has actually paid off in the past. Closest I can think of is Firefox, but the circumstances were very unique - for one thing, it rose from the ashes of a project had at one point been wildly successful.
[+] [-] andrewfelix|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juliangamble|13 years ago|reply
This post read a little bit like "This is more expensive to run in time and money than we thought - so we're shelving it for now."
Can I ask - was this move triggered by (a) Google buying Sparrow? (and thus shelving other email acquisition plans) (b) Marissa Mayer moving to Yahoo (and killing a potential purchaser strategy) (c) The release of outlook.com (creating a high speed competitor with lots of resources for distribution and support and marketing).
[+] [-] ozataman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaequery|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bromley|13 years ago|reply
No affiliation, just a very happy customer.
[+] [-] boyter|13 years ago|reply
FYI I am not affiliated with them in any way. Just thought I would pipe up with a premium mail service I am aware of that's actually quite good.
[+] [-] imikay|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chmike|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kausikram|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ABS|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nc17|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] true_religion|13 years ago|reply
I did, and found it wasn't quite for me. The interface left too much detail out, and I preferred GMail + Rapportive to do my emails.
Was there a mobile app that was better? I only used the web app.
[+] [-] lkrubner|13 years ago|reply
1994-1996 - used AOL. Proprietary format that can not be updated to anything modern.
1996-1998 - got a Geocities account. Geocities was later bought by Yahoo. Yahoo did a terrible job merging geocities usernames into the Yahoo username system, such that I was left with a strange, difficult to spell username, and the system sends email with one return email address when the message is original with me, but when I'm replying to an email sent by someone else, the return email address is different. Both email addresses go to my account, but my friends have often been confused about which my "real" email account is. And so have I. All the same, to this day, I still use this account in emergencies, when other email technologies have failed me. I hate, hate, hate the fact that so much of my "Sent" history is locked inside of this system.
1998 - an intense period of experimentation during which I tried 8 different email clients, many from very small 3rd parties, some of which only had a single developer, but some of which were famous among that crowd of tech elite who had been on the internet since the 1980s. All of these clients were later abandoned by their developers, or the company that owned the software went backrupt. There was one exception: Outlook Express.
1997-2000 - used Outlook Express. Downside was simply that it ran on Windows, and I was never happy being on Windows. Also, when I was ready to move to something else, I could not find any easy way to mass export my email, nor save it in some format other than eml.
2001-2007 the year before I had started renting my own server and keeping my email on my own server. In 2001 I switched to Linux as my main computer. After some experimentation, I settled down to using Thunderbird. My problem was that this client was incredibly buggy. At least on my Red Hat machine, and later on my Ubuntu machine, Thunderbird had many, many bugs and would often crash, causing me to lose a lot of work. Frustrated with Thunderbird, I would sometimes switch back to using my Geocities account, which I sort of hated, but which was more reliable.
2007-2009 - used Gmail, but hated having to rely on a 3rd party, and have also had privacy concerns with Google. Since 2000 I have preferred to rent my own server and keep my email on my own machine.
2010-2011 - used Pine. Also experimented with using Emacs as my main email client. I love Emacs, but decided I did not like it for email.
2011 - by 2010 I had sort of given up on Linux and switched to using a Mac as my main machine. Sometimes use the Mail.app for particular purposes, such as subscribing to various newsgroups. In general afraid of vendor lock-in and would prefer an open source solution. Mostly used Thunderbird. It is much less buggy than what I had to deal with years earlier on Linux. But still, it is somewhat buggy (sometimes search will stall, sometimes windows become non-responsive, and HTML quoting does not work well, which drives me crazy). It lacks some features that clients in the late 90s had, with the one big exception that it supports HTML email. However, I prefer to use plain text email, so that feature means nothing to me. When I try to use the HTML email, I run into numerous flaws that strike me as bugs: invisible barriers that will sometimes not allow the cursor to move up or down, when I'm using the arrow keys, or sections that won't allow themselves to be selected, or sections that can only be selected as a block. Drives me crazy.
It is 2012. I am unhappy with my email client. I would like something better, preferably open source.
[+] [-] powera|13 years ago|reply