Memo
Reclaim focus
Memo is a smart email workspace that helps you to action, structure and organise your communication.
Made it to Product Hunt with Memo. Super excited about launching now Memo has users and works well.
Launch day always feels like a massive milestone because of all the prep one does to get ready and we are grateful to all of Memo's loyal and supportive users who have stuck with us through thick and thin.
Check out the launch over on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/memo-6
Thanks, Peter and Richard
We want to make Memo the only place you need to go to have productive discussions. Instead of forgetting if you left a comment on Trello, Google Docs, Github or anywhere else, why not have a single Memo thread and reference all those services.
Today we added support for embedding Google Docs into Memo, including Slides, Sheets and Forms.
Additionally we implemented the oembed protocol, that allows you to embed Tweets and Reddit comments into Memos.
Beta testing Google Docs integration
The Google docs integration is still in beta, if you would like to try it out send us a memo.
Future integrations
Being able to refer to these services directly from a Memo thread has reduced the amount of context switching we have to do and the amount of distractions we face. We want to keep adding integrations, so services would you like to be able to refer to from memo threads?
Peter & Richard
Two weeks ago we invited you to start using Memo. Many of you did and your feedback has been fantastic. You've told us about the things you love. And, more importantly, you've told us about the things you don't love, which we can start improving.
You can still try Memo. Start a message with us at sendmemo.app/team. Say hi, send us a message or you can start a conversation with anyone using their email address
Having real feedback is invaluable. The result is a step change in how quickly we can build the right features. When building in isolation it's really easy to focus on exciting blockbuster features. Perhaps focusing on these exciting features is the right thing to do early in the process. But after a point you need to build the table stakes features, make it work well across different devices and a host of other important features.
With that in mind, here are the things we've improved using your feedback:
Fixed an issue with collapsed message summaries going off the side of the screen on mobile devices.
Notification emails are now styled, they also include the first paragraph of the message you sent. Both of these changes make it much more pleasant to step from your emails into Memo.
When writing a message, quotes and paragraphs can be dragged around, this allows you to answer questions in any order you want. We have changed drag and drop so it only works by clicking the six-dot icon rather than the whole paragraph block. This has made it easier to select text when composing your reply.
Unanswered questions and empty paragraphs are automatically cleaned out when you send a message. We also prevent users from accidentally sending empty messages.
Finally, when quoting part of a message that was given as an answer only the thing you want to quote is highlighted, removing the problem of long threads resulting in confusing deeply nested quotes.
Peter & Richard
Focus is a valuable thing. We lost it in 2019 thanks to Slack. Slack ate its way into our ability to get deep work done at our company.
This post tells that story and what happened when we stopped using Slack.
That moment was really the genesis for Memo. Our mission comes from a moment of genuine pain. So much so, we pivoted our business completely to work on better quality communication.
Here's a video I recorded today which shows some of our features through the lens of Memo's mission. It explains not how they work but why they work as they do to serve the mission.
https://vimeo.com/510305201/b64cbccf56
We launched beta testing last week and the response has been fantastic. Thanks for some great conversations with you all in Memo, your bug reports and your positive feedback.
Memo is available today
Memo is open for business. Sign in and start conversations. Memo is free for the time being while we continue to validate so go ahead, get stuck in.
You can talk to Peter and I and you can reach out to anyone that has an email address.
In Memo you can write to anyone!
Today, you can try Memo by visiting sendmemo.app/team and sending us a message.
We are excited to share this with you, the very first to use Memo and to share in the mission.
Head to sendmemo.app/team, sign in with your email address (magic link) and send us a message. You'll see some highlighted questions that you can reply to and why not try quoting something in reply too. You can also start new conversations with your contacts.
If you come across bugs, please let us know. We are able to log some errors but oftentimes bugs might be more of a usability issue that doesn't get logged so we would really appreciate hearing about those.
Feel free to share web-links, your favourite YouTube video or XKCD. Memo will embed this content into your message right before your eyes.
Really looking forward to receiving a message from you. See you on the inside!
Peter & Richard
Thank you for all the excellent feedback to our new name Memo and the message composer video we shared last week.
Next up, the plan. Let's start by zooming out briefly:
The Mission
Memo believes in higher quality, more productive communication that is kinder to your mental well-being.
For the mission to succeed, we needed to invest time building a custom message composer. This is the technical milestone we reached last week.
The composer enables us to build so much value into the body of the message. From embedded videos to deep linking, this truly is a significant step up for the humble email.
Memo's 'Aha' moment comes when highlighting questions. I wrote an email to a supplier asking five questions hidden among a pretty long email.
In my experience, you're lucky if you get one question answered but because the questions were automatically highlighed to the recipient, I got five clear answers in return. Awesome.
This experience was more productive, definitely higher quality and reduced my anxiety levels too - it was a stressful legal conversation!
Fortunately, the composer and highlighted questions are the bedrock of every other conversation-improving feature we are building.
The Plan
The basic plan is to merge the original feature set with the new message composer in this order:
- Group conversations
- Assigning highlighted questions (action first inbox)
- New attachments view
- Thread conclusions (with optional voting)
- Outstanding messages with mark as done
- Inbox delay / scheduled delivery
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- More to spec
Here's a quick video update of Memo today:
https://vimeo.com/502537335/d79f76c093
The Future
Next week we will invite all of you to try Memo. We have a goal to start 1000+ new conversations and we will need your help.
New year, new name. Introducing Memo.
We've discovered the name Plum Mail is quite divisive but we wanted to concentrate on features so we parked the problem.
Now gearing up for onboarding and launch it is time to revisit the name.
What do you think of these options for a domain?
- mellomo.com
- mémo.com
- sendmemo.app
We are inspired by the concept of memos. Memos suggest more long form and thoughtful messages. Our features encourage sending fewer but higher quality messages.
Memo needs to be suitable in both personal and professional contexts. The name Plum Mail doesn't quite convey the professionalism we would want for sending messages at work.
Memo's New Composer
To deliver genuine innovation in the body of the email Memo needed a unique message composer. After a busy few weeks we are now super excited to share with you our progress in this short video demo:
Happy New Year to you, We would like to leave you with some words from one of our early beta testers:
"This is going to be an awesome year, full of experimentation, growth; and of course higher quality, more productive communication that is kinder to the mental health of all involved."
Couldn't have said it better ourselves.
New year, new name. Introducing Memo.
We've discovered the name Plum Mail is quite divisive but we wanted to concentrate on features so we parked the problem.
Now gearing up for onboarding and launch it is time to revisit the name.
What do you think of these options for a domain?
- mellomo.com
- mémo.com
- sendmemo.app
We are inspired by the concept of memos. Memos suggest more long form and thoughtful messages. Our features encourage sending fewer but higher quality messages.
Memo needs to be suitable in both personal and professional contexts. The name Plum Mail doesn't quite convey the professionalism we would want for sending messages at work.
Memo's New Composer
To deliver genuine innovation in the body of the email Memo needed a unique message composer. After a busy few weeks we are now super excited to share with you our progress in this short video demo:
Happy New Year to you, We would like to leave you with some words from one of our early beta testers:
"This is going to be an awesome year, full of experimentation, growth; and of course higher quality, more productive communication that is kinder to the mental health of all involved."
Couldn't have said it better ourselves.
This week we shipped Plum Mail's new rich message composer.
It's a unique piece of development work that forms the bedrock of all Plum Mail's interactive and collaborative features coming in the next steps.
Embedded within it is rich interactivity that you will discover as you type. For example, highlighted questions are automatically formatted when you type a question mark.
When you quote in reply from a previous message Plum Mail creates a link to the original paragraph, even if it's in a different conversation thread.
If you paste in a URL, Plum Mail automatically generates a link-preview. If you add an image URL, Plum Mail embeds the image into the body of the message.
These features, and more, are designed to be discovered. We want Plum Mail to be intuitive to use and require no learning curve.
We hope discovering these features will happen naturally so the change in behaviour is subtle.
Last time we wrote about changing user behaviours and our blog series on the subject. Here is the second half of that blog series which gives you a greater insight into how Plum Mail encourages new communication behaviours for structured conversations and conversation conclusions:
3. Structured Conversations
4. Conversation Conclusions
Thanks for your support this year. Peter and I look forward to connecting with you again in 2021 and would like to wish you a happy new year.
The more you talk to users, the more you realise the big problems in async communication today are human, not technical.
This presents an interesting challenge as we develop Plum Mail. Our solutions are naturally technical but we need to think carefully about how users are encouraged to use features in an optimal way so the benefits of improved communication are actually felt.
We have given a lot of thought to this and are working to blend the worlds of user experience design and hard feature development together.
Trying something new
We want Plum Mail to be easy and familiar to use but at the same time, brilliantly disruptive. You need to disrupt in order to provide a benefit that previously didn't exist.
However, being too opinionated on 'how communication should be done' doesn't wash well. Plum Mail is, therefore, adopting a policy of nudging and encouraging users to try out a new communication behaviour rather than 'enforcing' it.
There are four new communication behaviours that Plum Mail encourages but does not (and cannot) 'enforce':
We have published two (out of four) blog posts so far on communication behaviour which introduce the problem, how the feature solution works, how we are making the new behaviour attractive and how we are making the new behaviour persist.
Ensuring the user has autonomy
This matters because when you become a Plum Mail customer, you will want to experience the benefits we offer.
These will only be attainable if you and others use Plum Mail in the spirit in which it has been created.
We considered making you sit through a lengthy onboarding call but that doesn't work for the casual Plum Mail user replying to a message and frankly I'm sure you have better things to be doing with your day.
Instead, we are planning on delighting you through feature discovery and guiding users with subtle prompts, highly relevant to the action you are taking in Plum Mail at that moment.
Critically, we want you to decide what behaviours you adopt and to do so because they provide real value to you, not because we decree from on high that you're getting it all wrong and we know exactly what you should want.
I am optimistic about users adopting new ways of thinking about communicating and excited that Plum Mail's features are there to assist with that.
It will be super interesting to see what unexpected changes in communication behaviour emerge in the coming months as users engage with our new features.
Please do check out my blogs on Changing Communication Behaviours. I would enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Embedding Video
You can now embed YouTube and Loom videos in Plum Mail messages, simply by pasting in the link.
