An email inbox is a hellish place. My work inbox has 1,295 unread messages in it right now. My personal inbox has nearly three times that number. I receive hundreds of emails each day. Many of them I don't want to read. Most of them I don't open at all.
But among them are a handful that come every day at about the same time, that I am hungry for, in the same way you check your mailbox for a magazine you really like. The email inbox is the native habitat of a creature that's been the darling of media industry pundits for the past two years, roughly since Google killed Google Reader. It's called the email newsletter.
The email newsletter is a limited format. Its limits are what make it beloved. It's a curated escape from the madding crowd; a bit of portion control on the endless social media buffet; a lifeline out of a bottomless clickhole.
That's not new: A 2014 Quartz study found email is a primary news source for executives; a 2015 study by the American Press Institute found 20-somethings also read news on email. A small portion are even willing to pay for it. Publishers like The New York Times and Politico have invested in the medium; upstarts like The Skimm and NextDraft are the Drudge Report of the 21st century--minimalist, thorough and astonishingly successful.
Some new companies are starting up on the thesis that these great products shouldn't be in your email. Cannonball Corp. is one: Founder Raffaele Colella is braving the death of the App Store middle class with a Flipboard for newsletters called My Blend. It pulls your favorite subscriptions out of the inbox into a slick app.
I tried My Blend and for the handful of newsletters I like to sit back and read, it was great. Nobody wants to lean back into the couch and open their inbox, and I'm no exception. I guess the App Store crew in Cupertino feels the same way.
A second newsletter-tech startup, also based in Boston, can bypass the email inbox and the App Store, altogether. Founded by an IT veteran, nwsltr.me scrapes email newsletters and delivers them via Slack. Founder Robert Buckley says he is targeting an invite-only launch by end of April.
Buckley, whose career goes back to Kodak in the 1980s, started nwsltr out of frustration with the limitations of email, which can't handle video or audio.
"You can't get a rich experience," Buckley told me. "(Email) is not conducive. It's not a habit-forming thing." That's why so many newsletters carry deadweight of subscribers who haven't opened an email in months, he said.
Nwsltr aims to solve that by verging on copyright infringement, copying a newsletter's content into web pages like this one that can be redistributed via other media. (Buckley doesn't like to say "copy," preferring "render.") Most publishers don't complain, he said: The nwsltr service is bringing them new readers and delivering analytics.
Colella, meanwhile, started his company with a product called Cannonball, a general-use email client designed to make it easier to manage the inbox. They found people using it mostly for heavy-duty subscription management. "A lot of people were using the app just to do that," he said. "So, we thought, this is a thing."
Cannonball Co. closed a $400,000 investment in February for the My Blend product, bringing its total raised to $1.7 million. Investors include MIT's Ed Roberts, Raj Aggarwal of Localytics and Mike Dornbrook (ex-Harmonix).
Aggarwal told me he, too, got the product intuitively. "I remember the first day I told my wife, hey download this app and she said, hey, this is fucking awesome," he said. Add that to the engineers and product people Colella has gathered to his team, and the PR he's generated for the product: "Without having the time to do the due diligence of a professional investor, this was an easy one to say yeah, I'm in."
Email may be limited and frustrating, but it's also the place you can reach more people than any other medium. Some 2.59 billion had email accounts in 2015, according to industry tracker Radicati, receiving an average of about 79 emails per day.
My Blend's business, Colella said, is advertising-based. Publishers, from news organizations to retail brands, put their email sign-up invitations in front of readers who are likely to be interested in what they're offering.
"You cannot really buy good email signups," Colella said. "That is what we are doing."
