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Ask HN: Where did i screwup?

5 points by backmail ↗ HN
All,

I rcenty launched my side project https://backmail.io . I really thought my side project solved a painpoint in lot of people's live. There is no easy way to get a backup of your gmail content. Gmail takeout is very slow, and you cant have a regular backups using that. This tool also works for the Gsuite users, so when you have a componay provided email account in google cloud, you can easily take a backup when you leave the company without any hassle. Since there are very few users for this service, i had decided to shut down the service.

However i would like to know what i did wrong? Should i have done some market research before implementing this? There was some serious discussions in the HN about easier way to move away from gmail, or take a regular backups of the gmail, which i thought was an validation to the idea. Should i have done something more? If so, any pointers / advice would be very helpful? Should i have put more effort marketing??

Any advice would be really grateful!!

Thanks, P

13 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 34.7 ms ] thread
YCode
I can only speak for myself, but I'd never heard of this product until now.

Even if I had, I've never had a reason to move my email off Gmail.

Anything important enough to need a backup of I just manually save to my cloud drive that's synced to my local computer.

backmail
Thanks for the feedback. I had posted ShowHN couple of times, but it never came up in the front few pages! Do you have any suggestions, how i could have marketed it better, so you might have known it ?
gtirloni
1) I alrady have a hard time trusting Google/Microsoft/etc with my email let alone another third party.

2) For local backups, IMAP/POP works relatively well already.

I don't see how this would work as a standalone product. Maybe if it was a feature in something like Fastmail or a full-fledged office suite, it would be more appealing.

backmail
Thanks a ton for your feedback. I understand that IMAP works fine for local backups. But doesnt that add another task to save the local email backup safely somewhere ? Would you have used this service, if i was providing an option to save it directly to dropbox ?

Also would you like a desktop app (windows/mac app) , which automatically saves the backup to your dropbox safely. That way your emails never get stored in any thirdpay servers, but only your local and the drobox!

Thanks once again for the service.

gtirloni
I like the idea of a desktop app. Or even a self-hosted server-side app.

I wish you all the best in this endeavor and thanks for sharing.

josho
Have you ever heard the phrase vitamin vs painkiller? Do a quick google.

> solved a painpoint in lot of people's live

Your product is a vitamin, it's a nice thing to have, not a need to have. Personal email backup is not a pain point—It's a nice to have and it's much harder to sell vitamins than it is to sell painkillers.

backmail
Thnaks for your feedback. Thinking about it, you were spot on. I wasnt sure it was a vitamin or a painkiller, hence i assumed it might be a painkiller for lot of people, where i was completely wrong. Thanks once again for your feedback.
josho
You've likely learned a lot about gmail/imap/mail in general, see if you can leverage that instead of walking away completely. Do some brainstorming on how you can turn this into something that is closer to a painkiller, or has some kind of virality to get less expensive growth.
billconan
I only heard about this today. But I would not be a customer probably.

I think gmail is stable enough, I never thought of losing emails.

I have used gmail for a long time, it really documents my life. one day, if I lose my gmail account, I will feel sad. but those emails are less than 0.01 percent of all the emails in the account. it isn't worth signing up a service for that 0.01 percent I guess.

Overall, regarding the idea, I feel that it is like selling an insurance for a very specific rare disease.

backmail
Thanks for your feedbac. Do you think you might have used this service, if it was providing email backup to other email service like fastmail, migadu etc ?
tmaly
Same as others, I have only heard about this today.

Did it work with Yahoo email? I have had my yahoo email far longer, and I would really like to migrate the data.

How long did you have the service up? I do not think you should quit now, just work on telling a better story. Things take far longer to bite than we imagine

backmail
Unfortunately, this only works with Gmail. I will try to see if i can get it working for yahoo mail. Thanks for the constructive encouragement. I launched it around 60 days ago, but no pageviews after the first 3 weeks.
tmaly
have you tried any content marketing?