Brief

Stop yourself from sending wordy, rambling emails

8 followers

Stop yourself from sending wordy, rambling emails

8 followers

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Long emails are no fun to read or write. Brief is a Chrome extension that adds a word counter to the compose and reply views in Gmail and disables sending if an email is longer than 125 words. Need to send something longer than 125 words? Just triple-click the send button!

Launch tags:Chrome Extensions•Email•Productivity

Launch Team

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SlidesUp API

The simple changing of the send button is quite powerful! Would love if it could highlight sentences that are the main culprits of wordiness. I currently use a combination of Hemingway and Boomerang to evaluate my writing. Bringing everything under one roof would be awesome.

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9yr ago

Warp

Maker

@kunalslab I haven't heard of Hemingway before but I've thought of including some of the features it has in future versions of Brief (specifically, the grade level indicator). I'll have to see which features are easier to integrate without crowding up the experience of Brief.

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9yr ago

SlidesUp API

@captainsafia it is a delicate balance. Good luck! Happy to provide feedback when you come up with something new.

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9yr ago

@captainsafia Hemingway is a mighty fine thing, I use it all the time when writing copy or important emails. Will check out Brief as well!

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9yr ago

Product Hunt

Succinct, clear writing is underrated. Ironically, a book called Brief was posted on Product Hunt a year ago to also help people write more succinctly. 😊

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9yr ago

@rrhoover yes

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9yr ago

VIPKID

@rrhoover It would be ironic if the book was super long, otherwise it's my understanding it would just be a coincidence

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9yr ago

@rrhoover Especially in academia. I have spent almost an hour writing a specific and short thesis and my lecturer was like: "Not enough words..." O.o

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9yr ago

great idea, though how did you choose 125 words? i've read blurbs stating that 175 words is solid for business emails, and to never exceed 200 - have yet to see any definitive study

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9yr ago

Warp

Maker

@passingnotes I read a few blog posts that cited research by Boomerang which determined emails between 50 and 125 words have the highest response rate.

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9yr ago

@captainsafia interesting A maybe it depends on the use case (like type of lead, quality of lead etc) - or do you think for all emails?

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9yr ago

Ramp

Hunter

I'm a notoriously wordy writer - saw this a few days ago on Safia's twitter and had to share it with the rest of PH! I'm a big fan of Polymail, so I'm not sure how I'll integrate this into my day-to-day life, but it's a great tool nonetheless. Thanks Safia! 📬 💌 📮

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9yr ago

Warp

Maker

@nickabouzeid Thanks for sharing this, Nick! Yeah, I'm not sure that Polymail has an extensions API for this to be added. I used Nylas and that has extensions so that might be where I take this next.

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9yr ago

Ramp

Hunter

@captainsafia Excited to try out Nylas if you can get it working! 😊

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9yr ago

125 words? I highly doubt my longest email is more than 20 words. But I know some people who could use this.

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9yr ago

Warp

Maker

Hey everyone! I just published brief to the Chrome webstore and added the ability to force send an email via triple click. If you've already installed it from the .crx, remove that and install the web store version instead! https://chrome.google.com/websto...

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9yr ago