I banned email at my startup

I banned email at my startup(medium.com)

19 points by thomasknoll 11 years ago | 16 comments

comptly 11 years ago |

Disclaimer: I work for @thomasknoll.

This was a huge plus when I decided to join the company. I've never been more productive and less distracted. I get to focus on work, instead of a daily deluge of emails some of which inevitably get lost.

Another benefit of moving this all to Slack, for me, is that the team communicates way more transparently than I've seen at any other company. We're plugged into what is going on (if we want to be), and the politics of "who is on what email thread" essentially evaporates. I use private messages on slack sometimes for super-sensitive stuff, but that's only happened a few times since I came on board.

Biggest downside? It's gonna suck if I ever have to take a job at a company with entrenched email culture :-(.

jacquesm 11 years ago |

Interesting approach. How would you propose to interface with the rest of the world where not having email is about as strange as not having a fax was a decade ago?

  - customers
 
  - prospects

  - end users

  - recruiting

  - registrars

  - suppliers

That's a genuine question, I'd love to get off the email treadmill completely and just getting rid of the corporate component would be great.

I see that you're still doing 'email for external communications' but that's where the pain point lies for me, internal is manageable.

thomasknoll 11 years ago | |

I answered something similar generally below to exelius. But, to answer a few of your specific examples:

- 90% of customer conversations occur via Intercom.io our hello@primellop address and all reply-to’s point there. And, generally the other 10% that come directly to me where it makes sense to have the rest of the team available to help, get cc’d into hello@ in my response.

- currently all our recruiting is inbound (mostly through angel.co) and I follow up with people there to schedule a call. Certainly some amount of external email around that.

- on the sales front we are definitely using email. Happy to play in their world and make it easy for them. But, again, most next actions and internal collaboration/communication moves to trello/hackpad/relateIQ

- all the services we use obviously send a bunch of email, that we sometimes need to respond to. But all of that is in a group email that most of us can dig through if we need to.

And, FWIW, I’ve had the opposite experience with email. I can handle the external communication OK… it’s the mess of internal email that has caused the most headaches.

byoung2 11 years ago |

The pain points you list about email are the same ones we're addressing with our startup MorphMail. Because email cant do everything we want it to, we end up using several tools. MorphMail is an attempt to make a tool that handles multiple use cases elegantly. Check it out at https://www.morphmail.com and get on the list to join our beta!

thomasknoll 11 years ago | |

Thank you! Checking it out now.

nanoscopic 11 years ago |

How do you keep track of performance metrics for tasks? I used trello at a previous job, and had issues when there are many tasks, ensuring that tasks are actually getting done in reasonable amounts of time.

I personally liked having lots of checkbox subtasks on trello tasks to show continuing progress, but no one else at the company used that feature.

thomasknoll 11 years ago | |

For each area of the business we have two boards: planning and current. The planning board gets pretty messy, and is the place where we capture all the ideas that come to mind, comments and input are added to help prioritize those ideas as a must-get-to-next-week, or someday-this-would-be-nice. And the current board is the chunk of cards we are committing to getting done this week "no matter what". So, the current board stays pretty clean, and people work real hard to get everything cleared out of there each week, because then we can go to the planning board and grab some of the other high-priority things and check them off.

It isn't perfect, but it does keep us making forward progress. And sometimes those things that just don't ever make it to the current board are things that don't really need to get done.

nanoscopic 11 years ago | | |

Where I was at we had a planning board and that was fine for incoming work. Tasks that could be done within a couple of days were fine as well; we did have a sort of 'current' board. The difficulty was only really for long running tasks that took more than a week.

From the way you are describing it typically the current board was emptied each week? New tasks were only brought in at the beginning of the week?

Did you break down larger tasks into chunks that could be handled within one week? If so, how did you track progress within multi-month projects if they were broken down into small pieces?

exelius 11 years ago |

How do you manage communication with people outside your company? Many of us are in roles that require us to communicate with people both internal and external to our organizations. Many of the external people I deal with would not be willing to use an additional tool just to communicate.

thomasknoll 11 years ago | |

Good point. And we do still use email for external communication. But, even on those messages that then require internal communication and decision making or any next-actions, we shift the communication over to slack/trello/hackpad to get the work done and then reply back externally.

nebyoolae 11 years ago |

The title is somewhat misleading (it's catchy, though), but I agree with your points and think that while email is still a great catch-all communication tool, there are better ones when you're actually trying to work in a team on many projects.

thomasknoll 11 years ago | |

I was trying to decide whether to add, "and you won't believe what happens next!!?!" to the end. But, I decided to keep it simple.

I certainly don't mean to be misleading. But, it definitely feels as extreme as completely banning email. At least for our team, all our past experience with hating email at a company was tied to internal email culture and the inability to actually do work.

alexisnorman 11 years ago |

Though we haven't banned email at the startup I work for, we have a very similar communication process (Slack, Trello and Pivotal Tracker). Makes things feel a lot more productive and personable with one another.

porterhaney 11 years ago |

How do you manage official communications internally? Announcements, HR, etc?

thomasknoll 11 years ago | |

Slack is the main “channel” for all of that type of information. And/but, I would say, 80% of the time, it is a link to a longer post in hackpad with more details, and a request for comment.

thomasknoll 11 years ago |

aaand we’ve never been happier. =)