Shortwhale

It feels awesome to be on Product Hunt, thanks! :) @rrhoover: We don’t do auto-replies; the idea is really to change behavior right at the time people compose the email. If someone writes directly, that’s ok. But what we’ve found (@danariely has tested it for a few months now) is that people really use the form (he links to it from his website http://danariely.com/about-dan/) and follow the requests.

My opinion: You aren't ever going to get people to leave regular email to send email from somewhere else. I think Dan might be a bad test case because he's sought after. People are willing to jump through hoops to email him. So this might be a great tool for sought after people. But day-to-day for normal people I can't ever see something like this working.

I really like the multiple choice functionality. This would be great for designers and asking quick questions that need a simple response. Is there a way to use Shortwhale on outbound email to someone who doesn't use it yet?

In theory I like this but reality is people will directly email you and I feel like it's kind of jerky to auto-respond to people that email you with a link to re-submit their email somewhere else. If anyone has ideas or solutions to managing email, please share. Related: to check your emails stats (how many you've sent, received, response rates, etc.), check out The Inbox Checkup.

Here are some more thoughts on this: The idea is super simple and although technically trivial, it works extremely well for Dan (@danariely). We have ideas on how to expand this but first we'd like to know if someone else might find this useful too. We know that this is only a solution for people who get tons of (unsolicited) email – but if we were Gmail, we'd know what to do that would help everyone ;-) Underlying to all of this is the idea to put more demands on the sender (there are things to pick from a drop-down and people can create multiple-choice emails, which allows the receiver to answer with one click). However, what we found is that it can also make it easier for people to write because it actually removes some demands from them: they know that the recipient doesn't expect any formalities and the structure helps them too. And, above all, senders are more likely to get a response (and quicker). We'd really love to hear what you think. Please comment :)