How Shortwave taught me to stop stressing about my inbox and learn to love email
Let’s face it. Nobody wakes up and says, “I can’t wait to dive into my inbox this morning.”
Email is the ugly step-sibling of enterprise apps. So much has changed in how we communicate — iMessage, Zoom, Slack — yet email is still a tedious but necessary way to manage modern communications for every business professional.
But here’s the thing. I actually do wake up eager to dive into my inbox. It’s because I’ve been using Shortwave, a brand new email experience that combines the best of Gmail and Slack in one innovative, easy-to-use platform.
And now, everyone can try Shortwave — After more than two years of development, it’s now available to the public!
At Lightspeed, we’ve been big believers in Shortwave’s mission from the beginning, when we partnered with the team during their Series A raise. We are excited about this launch so the world can finally see what we find to be a true game changer.
The joy of email
Shortwave is not a new email service; it re-invents your existing email experience. The Shortwave client layers on top of Gmail, so you don’t have to give up your old email address. It combines the real-time interaction of Slack with the asynchronous nature of email, and also includes support for social features like emoji reactions, and my personal favorite — typing indicators that make rapid back and forth an integral part of email.
Shortwave has changed how I view email. Going through the inbox is no longer a chore. It feels easier, more joyous, and more systematic. Shortwave automatically groups messages by type, making them easier to process. I can pin urgent messages to the top of my inbox, re-order threads to my liking, and take action on a group of related emails with a single click or swipe. The rest, I snooze to process later.
As a user, I could sing Shortwave’s praises all day. As an investor, it’s pretty clear why his is a massive opportunity:
- Email is overdue for disruption. It’s a massive time sink that consumes more than a full day every week for most people. If you got a chance to get back 20 percent or more of that time, wouldn’t you take it?
- The total addressable market is massive. Email is the original internet app — with billions of users worldwide. Gmail alone has over 1.5B active users. Capturing even a small portion of this market creates not just an amazing business, but one that has tremendous impact as we become more productive over email.
- The team and technology are amazing. Andrew Lee cofounded Firebase, an app development platform he sold to Google that now powers billions of apps. His cofounders Jacob Wenger and Jonny Dimond were key early Firebase employees, along with Ali Berlin Johnson and others on the Shortwave founding team. They have deep expertise in large scale cloud data systems, real-time sync, usability, security, and privacy — because they’ve done it before.
Stay tuned…
Fixing what’s wrong with Gmail is a good start, but Shortwave has more ambitious plans. It has the potential to change enterprise communications forever. I invite you to check it out and see if you agree. And do check out their careers page as well — the team is scaling up rapidly!
Congratulations Andrew, Jacob, Jonny and the rest of the team at Shortwave for hitting this amazing milestone!
