Talanoa

I build Talanoa, a desktop email client that sorts your inbox by the people you talk to instead of by arrival time, and keeps everything on your machine.

Since I started, there have been exactly two features users pushed on — the recurring, comes-back-every-week kind of pushing.

I never would have guessed which ones.

Dark mode.

And… custom keyboard shortcuts. 😅

Dark mode shipped a while ago. Custom shortcuts shipped this week. So, fine. You win. I gave in to the pressure. 🤣

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Here's what I think is going on, and it took me too long to see it.

The things I talk about — people-first inbox, local storage, email turned into tasks — are the reasons someone downloads the app. That's the pitch, and the pitch works.

But once someone decides to actually live in the thing eight hours a day, they stop evaluating the pitch. They start noticing every small thing their old client did that mine didn't. A screen that isn't white at 11pm. The keys their fingers already know.

Nobody switches email clients because of a keybinding settings screen. But people go back to the old one because a key did the wrong thing three times in one morning. The pitch gets them in; the papercuts decide whether they stay. I don't have the data to prove that yet — it's a hunch from reading a lot of emails.

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The honest part: shortcuts were not the weekend job I assumed.

Rebinding one key is easy. What isn't: two-key sequences (G then H), alternatives so people can keep the old keys and new ones, telling you which action you're about to overwrite instead of silently stealing it, and bindings that still match when the keyboard layout changes.

And some keys stay locked on purpose. Escape still closes dialogs, Enter still confirms, and any shortcut that can fire while you're typing needs a modifier so it doesn't swallow the letter you meant to write. Total freedom would have been faster to build and worse to use.

Same release also has Outlook Calendar and a full French translation. Both were real work. Neither one generated the steady stream of "when?" emails that a settings screen for keybindings did.

Changelog, if you're curious: https://talanoa.email/changelog/0.11.2

So — what's the feature your users pushed you into that you'd never have put on the roadmap yourself?

Some users told me:

“It is the future of email.”

Others told me:

“I bought lifetime and stopped using it.”

Both are equally valuable.

Full recap of my week!
https://medium.com/@bettercalljohn/the-truth-hurts-s02e03-48c2c8fb8190?postPublishedType=initial

New build in public update is live 👋

This week:
→ Tried LinkedIn & Reddit ads (complete flop 😅)
→ Finally started growing on X
→ Realized I wasn’t truly talking to my users
→ Learned more from 10 days of calls with paying users than from months of building

Big takeaway:
Your paying users are pure gold. Talk to them constantly.

Full recap:
https://medium.com/@bettercalljohn/speak-to-your-customers-s02e02-20ed08f89920

I just shared a new update on Talanoa after 3 months of building.

No YC.

A lot of shipping.

A new calendar feature that started as "I don't really get why people want this" and ended as "ok, I can't go back now."

A new website, built 100% with Claude, but not in one magical prompt.

The real trick was to stop asking AI to build the whole thing at once.

I built it like I would in Figma:

hero first, then before/after, then each section one by one.

The more context the AI had, the better it got.

That’s probably the biggest lesson from the last few months.

AI is not a replacement for taste.

But it is a crazy accelerator when you already know what you want.

Full story here:
https://medium.com/@bettercalljohn/still-building-in-public-s02e01-504b9a832ef5

We just added calendar booking directly inside compose.

That means you can now write an email and, without leaving your draft:

• insert your booking link

• or pick free time slots from your calendar

• share only the times you want

• let the recipient choose what works

• automatically create the event once booked

This is exactly the kind of feature I want Talanoa to be known for.
Not "more email features."
Not "more productivity hacks."

Just smoother flows that remove friction from everyday communication.

Scheduling a meeting usually turns into:
open your calendar, check availability, copy a link, go back to your email, send options, follow up, repeat.

Now it just happens inside the draft.

Offer a time.
Send.
Get booked.

That’s it.

It may sound like a small release, but to me it feels like a big step toward the product vision:

making email feel less heavy, less fragmented, and much more natural to use.

Talanoa is still early, but every release like this makes it feel more real.

I finally wrote a new build-in-public update after two months of silence.

A lot changed during that time: meeting people who love the vision, getting unexpected visibility, rewriting the product story from scratch, applying to YC, and dealing with a flood of user feedback.

And the craziest part?
Talanoa went from 270 → 690+ users in just a month.

If you’re curious about the whole journey, I wrote everything here:
https://medium.com/@bettercalljohn/i-applied-to-yc-rebuilt-my-product-story-and-watched-growth-take-off-december-update-414af9082c5c

It’s been a productive month for Talanoa. Here’s what I shipped:

🔁 Email forwarding
✍️ Signature management
⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts
🎨 UI cleanup across the board
🔎 Better search engine
🔄 IMAP/SMTP sync performance improvements
🧱 Windows app stability is way better now

One big realization: as more users joined, small UX frustrations became easier to spot and fixing them made a huge difference in retention.

Also, I’m using Loops.so for my onboarding flow and it’s been a game-changer for staying in touch with new users.

Still building solo, still learning.

Next up: on-device AI, better notifications, and alias management.

Would love feedback if you try it → https://talanoa.email

Let’s build.

It finally happened. After 5 months of shipping, tweaking, onboarding early users manually, and questioning everything… someone bought Talanoa. No discount, no nudge — just belief in the product. And wow, it feels amazing.

But I want to say this clearly:
- It didn’t happen on launch day.
- It didn’t happen the first week.
- It took months.

We often see launch = $$$ in this space. But sometimes… launch = silence. And that’s okay. Some projects need time to breathe, grow, iterate, and earn trust.

💡 If you’re not seeing sales yet — keep going. Keep showing up. Keep improving.

That first sale might be waiting just one more week away.

Talanoa is now helping people organize their inboxes by person, not threads. It’s cross-platform, supports Gmail & Outlook, and I’m just getting started.

Thanks for being such a supportive, inspiring community. You all helped make this happen 🙏

Here’s what happened this week building Talanoa (my privacy-first email client built 100% local):

• 🎯 I tested a promoted post on X: $8 for 8,300 impressions, 111 clicks, but 90%+ were on mobile… where my app isn’t available 🤦 Lesson: don’t promote desktop apps to mobile users.

• ✉️ Set up an onboarding email sequence with Loops.so. Such a powerful tool for indie SaaS workflows.

• 💬 Received tons of positive feedback this week and some great new feature ideas.

• 🧠 Learned about BIMI (a way to show your logo next to emails in Gmail & others)

• 📈 Audience still growing slowly on X & Medium

• 🧪 Started refactoring UI to make room for multi-account support — highly requested + I need it myself 😅

Full post (with screenshots, lessons, and more):
https://medium.com/@bettercalljohn/users-are-talking-i-finally-listened-and-it-changed-my-roadmap-week-20-d1f2f8d482c4

Hey Indie Hackers 👋

Here’s what I shipped this week as a solo dev working on Talanoa, a new kind of email client:

• Finally got my Windows build signed and trusted through Azure

  (no more "Windows protected your PC" nightmares 😅)

• Collaborated with a great copywriter on:

  • A reactivation campaign for my waitlist

  • A smooth onboarding email flow

  • A cold outreach sequence for CMOs

• Switched from Cloudflare to Simple Analytics

  and discovered a 34% download rate from desktop users

• Finalizing Flathub packaging for Linux, to support every OS with a clean install/update process

I wrote a full breakdown of the week and shared some numbers here:

👉 https://medium.com/@bettercalljohn/startup-life-one-small-fix-big-trust-downloads-bb6d159819bd

Would love to hear how you’re tackling onboarding, trust, or metrics tracking right now too!