An idea that took a decade to build

I've been trying to build Jelly for more than ten years.

The first time I wanted a shared inbox, I was organising a conference - the first Ruby Manor in London - with some friends. We relied heavily on email, for communicating with attendees and speakers, negotiating with venues, and so on, and it was obvious that it would be better if we could both see all our conversations, instead of them being locked in our individual inbox silos.

So I looked into what our options were, and even back then, everything was overcomplicated and expensive. The only real options were CRMs designed for companies exclusively doing product support; companies who can afford to pay $50 per person per month using the tool, because they know they'll get that investment back in sales/refunds avoided.

But that didn't fit for us. Not every interaction with someone is a "ticket". And could we handle being penalised with another per-seat charge if we brought another volunteer helper on board? Nope.

I took a few stabs at scratching this itch, like any motivated developer might, but it never really took off.

Since that experience, I've felt the same need multiple times, most recently working as part of Good Enough: a Serious Business making Fun Products for Real People. We don't have support agents or sales people; it's just us, talking to our users, and also talking to people in general that we'd like to meet or know. Y'know -- conversations.

For a while, we muddled along sharing a Fastmail account, doing the "mark-as-unread-so-other-people-will-see-it" dance with our emails. And again, I was reminded of the need I felt, for a simple, affordable way for group of folk to share an inbox.

So this time, we built it. Jelly - the best way for a team to share an email address.

We've been using it for almost a year, and we love it. There's no way we could go back. And we want to get it into the hands of every other team and group that's too small to matter to the behemoths in this space like ZenDesk, HelpScout and Intercom. Let them have the multi-million dollar company accounts, that's fine. We like building things for the little guys instead.