MailWatcher

The Inspiration

Last year in January, I left my job with a goal: Code every day while I'm unemployed. I didn't know what to code, but I had to find something to work on. One of my early ideas was building an on-call app for salespeople. I called it MailYo, with the tagline, "Yo! You got mail."

My brainstorming process was to look at tools that engineers had that other people could benefit from. One that stood out was PagerDuty. PagerDuty is an app that calls your phone when an app has a critical error in production and needs your immediate action. I wondered, what if a salesperson reaches out to a CEO of a big client? An event like this shouldn't be mixed with other emails and should trigger some urgency. If the salesperson or customer support person responds in the moment, they could catch that CEO while they're at their desk, providing an extraordinary level of service.

I spent a weekend coding this browser extension and got it to work for my email address. Later that week, I demoed my app to some friends over dinner. That's when everything changed.

The Pivot

Like any hacker, I decided to do a live demo with my friends instead of a pitch deck. I wasn't looking for advice and wasn't trying to sell them anything. I just wanted to show them how I was spending my unemployment days.

For the demo, I added one of my friends to my on-call list and asked them to email me. When my phone started ringing, everybody said "wow", and then they started telling me about all the other things that they would use this for.

"Can I use this to notify me when a flight's price goes down?"
"Can your app call me when a limited edition item drops?"
"Can I get a call when my Amazon package arrives?"

That's when it hit me. All these questions can be answered from the data buried in emails, but none of the email apps were designed for our current use of email. Nowadays, most people don't communicate using emails (except professionally), so I decided to build an email client that optimizes the reading / exploring experience.

And that's how my on-call app turned into an email client.

We are currently in the soft launch period. We're offering a 2 week free trial (no credit card required) and 40% off an annual subscription. Check it out at https://www.mailwatcher.io/