I used to offer free 4GB mailboxes for email over at Duzle.com including some basic features like anti-spam filters, big attachment sizes, and basic search facilities. It even had access for authenticated SMTP and IMAP, so users will be able to send/access their email using their own email client, rather than using the web frontend (Squirrelmail).
Sounds like a good deal, right ? I mean – you get 4GB, no ads, anti-spam filtering, search, web access, SMTP access, IMAP access (including SSL!).
Try to guess how many users I managed to bag in the first month ?
Just try it. Pick a number.
1000?
100?
10?
No – zero!
I’m not kidding – the site was live for a whole month and no one even bothered registering. One thing I have to admit at this point – I did not bother marketing/advertising it out, and that’s my fault. I was too occupied in way too may projects to focus on just a couple of high priority, large, workable ones (mentioned here as well).
However, there are other factors that lead to the zero subscriptions in the first month.
The Market
The e-mail provider market is saturated. I’m not kidding, there are the big guns – Yahoo, MSN, Google, etc. Then there are the smaller providers (they’re still relatively large) – Mail.com, GMX.de, etc.
Googling for “free email” gives out plenty of providers in one form or another. Some only offer 15MB on their free plan, others offer much more but with ads, etc.
How is David supposed to knock down Goliath in this market ? It is really tough. Hundreds (if not thousands) of competition with a plethora of different offerings.
The only way to break the market is to get the users in, and they have to come in by the millions, not meager thousands. However, that will require a good amount of capital expenditure in infrastructure, advertising, marketing and development – which I as a one man team just did not have.
The Differentiator
I had nothing on offer that made a difference from the competition. There are tons of free webmail clients out there, but they are all bog-standard clients, and do not offer anything special to users. I just wanted to offer e-mail, but there was nothing that I was offering that was different from the competition. Well, there were a couple of differentiators – I was giving out 4GB with no ads, a simple webmail client (back to basics) and spam filtering. But this is not good enough a differentiator.
Have a look at how Google, who were a late joiner in the e-mail provider market, took a chunk of market share – they had a very sleek web client that made the competition feel like the 1970s called in to ask for their webmail client back. Now that’s the level of a differentiator that’s needed – not minor ones, but disruptive ones.
Again, I did not have that.
The Users
Lets move on to how the two factors (market and differentiator) above affect the end user.
Users looking for free email have tons of choice, and one can argue, too much choice and that causes a ton of confusion – which is not good for them. It is really time consuming to look at all the minor differentiators between the various providers.
So, how do new users ultimately pick providers ? Actually, they tend to just look at large differentiators and recommendations from their friends/colleagues. If you think about it, this is a closer pattern to the social networking market rather than an internet service market.
What about current users who are already have emails at GMail and MSN ? How do I convert them to my service ? I needed a BIG differentiator, and I don’t mean something like “4GB, no-ads, spam filtering“, but more along the lines of – “This email service will give you a new meaning to email and how it interacts with you from a day-to-day basis“.
Moreover, it’s an outright pain to switch email providers. You need to tell your family, friends, colleagues, update your letterheads, business cards, etc. What about your business contacts ? What about all those 100s of websites and social networking sites that you’ve registered with your old email address ?
There’s a huge cost associated with moving email providers. What I needed to offer had to give users a much higher return than these costs put together.
In the end
There are other factors that I have not listed here that resulted in no one signing up, but I think these were the major ones.
That does not mean that I won’t be coming back – I do have some thoughts on how to re-enter the market, and I am in the middle of putting down some of these thoughts to discuss with a few people. I think the new idea is a paradigm shift on how we look at email, and its role in our everyday life. Rather than thinking it as yet another communication channel, it will look at it as an integral part of everyday life, and making it less “sucky” to use (in so many words) and interact with. It does venture into other communication channels and integrates those as well.
So, I’m out of the e-mail business for now, but (hopefully) will be back in the near future.
(hint – there’s a small project in here to create a review website for email providers – one that’s focused on free email providers, does not suck, leverages other reviews on the net, and allow users to rate + review as well. Anyone who wants to pick this up, please do! If you need some help/feedback/opinions, please do get in touch and I’ll be more than happy to provide my 2 cents.)
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