There were some fundamental errors in my approach to a recent idea I had for an email alias service (minmail). I've already shared my thoughts on this, but to recap, I should have:
This post isn't about the mistakes I made, but rather, what to do with what I learned.
Diving into a project with little validation is a habit formed from years of being more interested in creation than monetisation. This is okay when you're just interested in learning or building for yourself, but inhibiting if you're hoping to build a business of any sort. Though I stumbled somewhat with minmail, I did eventually take the above steps before I got in too deep.
My initial search (e.g. this one, among others) for existing email alias providers gave me the false impression that there weren't many offering the service I needed. I did, however, come across a useful article that introduced Firefox Relay: a Firefox add-on that allows you to generate aliases by clicking a button (that it inserts) next to an email field. I liked the idea but, for my needs, it had significant limitations:
Most of the other services I found were of the "temporary mailbox" variety. I gave up on searching and got to building. I know, I gave up too easily, but building is always way more fun and feels more productive than scouring the web. (O_o)
After hacking together a PoC, I reached out to you guys for feedback — it was incredibly helpful! As a result, I was made aware of a few related services:
I tried each one of them and compared what they were offering to what I was hoping to bring to the table. After evaluation, Burnermail and Simple Login were the only ones I considered real competition. And I took the fact that there is competition as a positive sign, because it indicates that there's some demand for such services. I also still felt there was room for minmail, as I was hoping to capture more mainstream — and less technical — users. My vision was for a feature-packed service that's incredibly easy to use, as well as low-maintenance.
Inspired by the results of reaching out to IH, I re-thought my approach to finding competitors. Rather than relying on generalist search engines (duckduckgo, google, etc.), I started searching specifically on sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt, Beta List and Alexa. It's far more time-consuming than a general search, but also more fruitful. It revealed even more services:
They vary from Chrome extension (c0x0) to fully-featured alias services. 33mail falls into the latter category and has been around for over a decade; it recently hit $8K MRR. AnonAddy appears to be only a couple of years old but has a solid ranking on alexa.com, and seems to be one of the most popular services in this space, based on the stats and forum discussions.
AnonAddy, 33mail and Simple Login all have strong, feature-rich offerings, competitive pricing, as well as a considerable headstart. Many of their features overlap with my own, but they also offer some things I can't/won't initially. In particular, AnonAddy and Simple Login both have the following going for them:
The potential advantages minmail might have are:
Based on the above, I think I've decided on the course of action to take, but I'm turning to the IH community again, because I'd love for you to offer your opinions. Would you bail out, or keep building?
I've invested relatively little so far, so don't feel like I would be losing if I dropped this idea. At the very least, it has been educational. On the other hand, it feels like there's potential and a whole segment of the market who aren't being reached.
What would you do? Please cast your vote and, even better, leave a comment!
As always, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading!
There's probably no one who can make this decision for you:
However, I would try to approach it like this:
Additionally, I'd recommend reading this IH post: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-business-ideas-ab51c3d51c
Thanks Niklas, that's sound advice, and it's appreciated. I honestly wasn't looking for anyone to answer the question for me, it was more of a sanity check.
That IH post is excellent, one I will re-read, I'm sure.
Good luck, man! I'll follow your progress.
Yes, it really is. There's a reason why it's the most upvoted post on IH. I've re-read it like 10 times already.