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.
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.
@dominikg I misinterpreted the landing page WRT auto-replies when I was scanning the page. My bad!
Other than Dan, can you share other examples of people or types of consumers that are using this? I'm curious if there are less obvious use cases emerging.
@rrhoover It's too early to say, we've just announced it. We know that in its current incarnation, the value is somehow limited to people who get many unsolicited emails – journalists, authors, VCs, etc. or in general people of public interest. However, to a large part, the idea is really to remind people to treat email carefully. Not all email needs to be sent, and much of it could be shortened :) We're very much inspired by things like http://emailcharter.org/ and http://five.sentenc.es/.
@dominikg Kevin might dig this (no pun intended). :)
I have a simple contact form on my blog (ryanhoover.me) but few people tend to use it and instead email me directly (ryan[at]ryanhoover.me). I prefer to be open with my email but I also can't respond to all of it and many emails go unread entirely, often because people write cold essays.
@rrhoover To your last point re: cold essays: This is one part where Shortwhale might help. If you tell people how you prefer email, and what topics you're interested in, you might get less of those – at least that's the experience for @danariely. Btw, you could also link to /email, which says you're open to email, but still shows your preference. See for example Toni Schneider's (Automattic) page: http://www.shortwhale.com/tonido...
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.
@mulligan Fully agree. In its current version, this is for sought-after people. If only we were Gmail or Apple Mail or Outlook... we have an idea on how to help everyone ;-) (Hint: It doesn't work (practically) as a Gmail Gadget as the sender would need it too.)
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 :)
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?
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