CredoSeal2

Things should suck less

Here at Mail Pilot HQ (a spare bedroom in Alex’s college apartment), we couldn’t be more excited to be writing our own story. We have a lot of ideas and a lot of beliefs in how innovative startups should work. We wanted to somehow put these concepts into writing. In today’s world, all companies are obligated to have a mission statement. Unfortunately, it seems like every corporate PR department shares a single template titled “Generic Mission Statement”. Mission statements have become diluted and redundant.

Thankfully, there is a growing trend among some of the best companies in the world, those who are truly in touch with their core way of life, to have a company credo. A credo is far beyond a mission statement. It becomes a true statement of belief and identity. Those within the company know it, and embrace it. Those outside of the company realize it, customers appreciate it, and fans love it. We believe that a company’s credo should be an intrinsic part of everything that company does.

From our minds, to the white board, to code, and every step in-between, we’ve grown to recognize the essence of what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. We’ve developed a personality, a methodology, an intuitive sense to how we get things done at Mail Pilot. We believe individuals should adhere strictly to their values and beliefs, and that in adhering to our values and beliefs, we grow as individuals and as a company. We believe that sharing our credo with the world will change us from a company that is faceless to one that is understood, connected with, enjoyed, and respected.

Here’s our company credo:

I. More Mission
-We believe that mission statements should mean more.
-We believe in fancy words, but we believe that our mission statement should be more mission and less statement.

II. Pushing Forward
-We believe that outdated and poorly thought-out solutions should be turned on their heads.
-We believe that over-engineered solutions are all too common and that piling more and more complicated features on top of broken systems is simply lazy.
-We believe in professionalism in the software industry and that forcing an over-relaxed work environment is a counterproductive juxtaposition.
-We believe in challenging this current state of affairs with more natural and intuitive solutions that are designed intentionally to accomplish well-established goals.
-We believe that software should push people forward rather than hold them back.

III. Work Smarter
-We believe in creating our own dream jobs and in playing to our strengths.
-We believe in collaborating and balancing our strengths to form a productive, aware team.
-We believe in working on solutions to our own problems, interests, and passions.
-We believe in our ideas and in standing behind our products for the long-haul and we believe all startups should be fueled by this same passion and not dollar signs.
-We believe that innovation and ideation should start from the ground up, ignoring all preconceived notions and solutions.
-We believe in responding to competition through innovation and not through legal exploitation.
-We believe in our supporters and our fans—without them believing in us, we wouldn’t be here.
-We believe that working smarter does not mean working more.

IV. Organized Chaos
-We believe that email should not consume our lives.
-We believe that email is not going away and that ignorance is not bliss.
-We believe email applications should focus on getting things done and become a productivity tool that fits naturally with current workflows.
-We believe there can be organization in the chaos.

V. Get on with your day
-We don’t just believe in these things, we act on them.
-With today’s software, users are often forced to do more work to get less done.
-At Mail Pilot, we do more work so you can get more done and get on with your day.

Gone are the days of two-liner mission statements that are meaningless. It takes many words to accurately depict our actions and the thought processes behind them. This credo is our playbook, and it addresses every aspect of everything we do at every stage of our business. It is designed to be fluid, yet consistent. We hope it provides insight into how and why we’re reimagining email to work better for you.

FundedBlog

Mail Pilot: FUNDED.

Congratulations! Together, we did it!

We could not be more thankful right now.

We are thankful for our 1,623 backers. 1,623 people voted to say, “Yes, email is broken. But this idea looks like a game changer, and this is a project that I want to be a part of in 2012.”

We are thankful for Kickstarter. Without this crowd-sourced funding platform, our success would not have been possible.

We are thankful for our friends and family who put up with all of our Facebook and Twitter updates, obsessive rambling about Mail Pilot, and crazy schedules these past 6 weeks. Through all this, they have cheered us on every step of the way, passing each milestone with us.

But in a particular way, we are thankful for the fact that enough backers pre-ordered Mail Pilot that we now get to work on this exciting project full-time.

Of course, we’ve already started, and we’re making significant progress. We’ve chosen the technologies we want to use for our first release of Mail Pilot. We’ve collectively spent dozens of hours learning some of these newer technologies. And we’ve begun to implement deployment-ready versions of the Mail Pilot apps for the backer-only beta due for release no later than June. It’s beginning to take shape, and we can’t wait to get what we’ve got in to your hands.

And don’t worry about that “June” date, you’ll have some surprises coming your way before then, and you’ll be a part of every step of this journey on the supporter page.

In the meantime, keep the questions, comments, and feedback coming to our new Google Moderator page!

FundedBlog2

Mail Pilot: FUNDED.

Congratulations, and thank you. We cannot wait to enter the next chapter of our project, and now with 1,600 of our newest friends. We’ve got some exciting announcements to make about Mail Pilot, so stay tuned this week.

We will also be posting a bigger funded update to the Kickstarter and to this blog in just a few.

8DaysLeftBlog

New Kickbacks

This has been another big week for Mail Pilot.  With your support, we’ve passed our funding goal, and now have over 1,100 backers.  Surrounding your feedback and suggestions, we’ve created some exciting new Kickback Tiers, and we want you to be the first to know.

  • $35 and up: Iconic Backer: You’ll get a vote to help us choose the Mail Pilot icon. Share your vision for Mail Pilot’s first impression.
  • $150 and up: Personal Chat: We want to thank you more personally. We’ll video chat with you to personally share our gratitude, talk about the Mail Pilot project, answer your questions, and hear your valuable feedback (or talk about whatever else interests you).
  • $5,000 and up: Charter your own flight: We’ll work with you to design a custom theme for Mail Pilot for yourself or your company that will bring your own branding or personality (logo and colors) into Mail Pilot. Share it with your employees and your friends. (Includes 25 2-year subscriptions to Mail Pilot).

You can upgrade your pledge by selecting “Manage Your Pledge” on the Mail Pilot project page.

As always, each tier includes all the kickbacks from the previous tiers. You’re automatically eligible for these new kickbacks if you’ve already selected a higher level.

Development is well under way, and we get more excited everyday that you’re allowing us make Mail Pilot a reality.

Thanks again for your support! Help us make the most of our last 8 days by continuing to share Mail Pilot with your friends.

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A day worth remembering

Our 1000th backer. Our 35,000th dollar pledged.

In 27 days, over 1,000 people said, “Wow – I’d pay for that!” To many, yesterday may have been like any other Sunday. For us, and for many of our backers, we will remember February 12 as the day we passed our funding goal. And with 15 days left in our campaign, we can’t wait to see how much further we can go.

We owe all this success to our backers. To the 1,046 people who have already agreed to help us bring more intuitive software to the world, we can’t thank you enough. We’re delighted to have 100% funding – and counting – to make Mail Pilot a reality. We simply cannot wait to get what we’ve been working on in to your hands. And now, we can afford to fund it as a startup, and work full time on making it reality.

We hope you continue to share Mail Pilot with your friends and networks! The more we raise, the more we get to innovate and push the envelope.

Here’s to the last two weeks of our campaign, and to the backer-only beta officially hitting your inboxes soon.

Thank you.

- Josh & Alex

Project Update: 3 Weeks In, 2 Weeks To Go

This has been an explosive week!

On Tuesday, we celebrated reaching the halfway mark in the campaign. With a slew of updates on our blog, we also launched a newly refreshed project video on our Kickstarter page.

The Daily Dot, the internet’s regional news source, covered us! “Virginia Tech students turn to Kickstarter to help change the face of email”

BANGSTYLE is featuring an interview with us to help promote our campaign!

Last Saturday, we had a blog post on our biggest surprises during our first few weeks rank as high as 8 on Hacker News. We were glad to watch the discussion, and to be able to give our own experiences to the public in the hopes that they would help somebody, somewhere.

We finished out the week at 91%. 91%! Thank you for the journey so far, let’s keep it going. As I post this, we only have 8%, less than $3k, to hit the goal.

Our Second Half is About to Begin

Today, Tuesday, February 7, we’re halfway. We can’t believe it’s already here, but it is. And thanks to you, we’re already at 75% funding. Here’s what’s happened in the last 18.5 days:

Click to see full graphic

With this halfway point, we’ve taken the opportunity to update our project video. Before the campaign, we spent a lot of time on the video, but we weren’t totally pleased with how it turned out. Check out our project page now to see our refreshed video. We’re much more pleased with it.

Biggest Kickstarter Surprises v.2

This post is part of our online series Crowdfunding Journal which chronicles our open crowdfunding campaign.

As of week 2, and 60% of our funding goal, here are our biggest surprises. Thinking about starting your own campaign, or just a little curious? Read on.

There are no trends; there are only random fluctuations

One thing we thought we’d see is a set of trends and patterns in pledges and other stats. Major publication coverage? We’d expect a spike, and a gradual decline.

Not only are these spikes random half of the time, but there is seemingly no reason why the second to last day shown in the image to the left was our biggest yet since the first two days. Worse, there is seemingly no reason why the following day was our worst funding day, by a wide margin, on a day when we saw more coverage than the day prior. We looked for any pattern: day of the week, holidays, etc., and found none.

Some days we raise hundreds before noon, then mum. Other days, we see nothing until the afternoon, but then it starts pouring in. Some days we see calm yet consistent pledges all day long. Some days we get tons of backers at a very low average pledge, some days we get just a few backers at a very high average pledge.

The lesson here may be to simply not obsess over the stats, the calculations, the trends, and the numbers. There are no trends, we’ve found no patterns – our time is much better spend chatting with our backers, and working on Mail Pilot.

A bug in Amazon’s payment service makes it difficult for some backers outside of the U.S. to pledge

So it turns out there’s a little bug that will lead some backers from outside of the U.S. to believe they are unable to support your campaign. Usually, this is untrue; they can in fact pledge, and there is a workaround for the issue.

We started receiving reports that some of our international fans were not allowed to support us on Kickstarter. After looking in to it, we found out that there is simply a bug and a workaround. More on that here. And, according to Kickstarter’s FAQ, “Anyone, anywhere (with a major credit card) can pledge to Kickstarter projects.”

A New York Times mention didn’t directly result in a ton of backers. A high ranking on Hacker News did.

We were ranked as high as number 3 on Hacker News in our first week, and on that day we saw over $3k in pledges flood in (our biggest day). That same week we were mentioned in David Pogue’s article on Kickstarter in the New York Times, with a link in the online version and a screenshot in the print edition, and saw just over $1k come in (one of our smallest days). That said, we are still simply honored that David Pogue checked out our project and liked it enough to include it in his article, calling Mail Pilot “Ingenious.” Needless to say, we now have quite a few copies of that day’s paper.

People can cancel or reduce their pledges

This freaked us out when we first saw it, because we had definitely did not know about this going into the campaign. Likewise, however, people can increase their pledges. In all, we’ve probably had 10 or so of our first 300 backers adjust their pledge.

You can change and add tiers during the campaign

There’s a limit to the madness, though – if a tier has been selected by at least one backer, all you can do is add a limit to it. That’s pretty big, though, especially if you need to get creative mid-campaign. You can also add tiers, which is something we’re looking at doing to try to entice some of our $5 backers. Finally, you can change everything about a tier that hasn’t been selected. We have one of these: the $5,555 tier. If we come up with a better Kickback, we could actually change this tier, and see if we can entice bigger backers.

Kickstarter’s campaign resources are very useful

Kickstarter provides project creators with plenty to do on the back end of their project. Your project dashboard has all kinds of basic statistic visualizations (we also supplement those with our own, which we will post about soon). If you’re debating which crowd-sourced funding platform to use, we give Kickstarter a huge plus for this.

We’ve gotten 41% funding from Kickstarter referrals

Click to see all columns

Despite what we’ve read, we have gotten a quarter of our funding from Kickstarter referrals (as opposed to external). Initially, it was close to 5%. As our project gained more momentum, it began to show up on the technology page, and even the discover page from time to time. It gets a huge amount of traction from these pages. For both dollars pledged and number of pledges, the technology page and popular page rank number 2 and 3, respectively.

We debated platforms

$35,000 is a lot of money

Going in to this campaign, we knew asking for $35k would be asking for a lot. It’s the smallest amount of money that could sustain our project, our development, and our team of two for half a year, so we knew we had to do it (to not shortchange our product).

We understood that we would basically need to “go viral” to be successful. Well, one week in, we we placed #3 on Hacker News, we had some of the “big dogs” on Twitter sharing our project with their 10, 20, 60 thousand followers, we’ve made an appearance in the New York Times in David Pogue’s article on Kickstarter, and now we’re starting to see blogs spread our screenshots and our message to their readership. I’d like to say we’ve “gone viral.” However, as I write this, we only have one third of our funding. This is huge to us, something worth celebrating, and we appreciate every penny that our backers have pledged to us in support. This came from huge swings in momentum. But we still have $23k and change to go. $35k is a lot of money.

Twitter is huge

After spending a day on the front page of Hacker News, word of our project hit the twittershpere is a big, big way. Neither Josh nor I had been big Twitter users beforehand. We were simply amazed at the support to come out of Twitter, and at how seriously investors and bloggers take you being tweeted by one of the Twitter heavy-weights. This amazed us. At one point in time, Twitter was the biggest source of funds to our project. We’ve had a ton of great conversations with people on Twitter about Mail Pilot. We even had our first $1k backer come from Twitter (thanks again, you know who you are!).

If you’re starting a campaign, one of our top 3 pieces of advice: do not overlook Twitter. It could make or break your campaign.

International support is huge

We’ve been blogged about in French, Swedish, and Dutch. Thanks to Google Chrome and its auto-detection of different languages, we’ve been able to read the nice things these blogs have said about us! Or, at least, what Chrome is telling us they said. Either way, we’ve been simply flattered, and have seen a number of backers come from these blogs to help support our campaign. We’ve also had a few feature requests for different localizations, which we’re bumping up in our roadmap after seeing the outpouring of support for this request.

Feature requests, comments, and messages, oh my!

It could be someone’s full-time job receiving and responding to all of the comments, feature requests, messages, tweets, and emails that we get. We wish we could respond to each and every person that reaches out to us, but we just haven’t been able to keep up. This was a big surprise – people care far more than whether or not they like your project and want to back you, they want to be a part of the process, they want to be up to speed. This is very cool, and we’ve really enjoyed the ride with our initial backers so far.

 

Thanks for reading, and we hope this has been helpful! If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to The Crowdfunding Journal, where we publish even more stats, experiments, and research, and be sure to check out our project page on Kickstarter!

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Project Update: Two weeks down!

  • We’re currently past 60% of our goal!
  • This week we past a major milestone: In less than 30% of our campaign time, we surpassed 50% of our funding goal.
  • We ran out of our $40 early-backer special. If you missed out, don’t worry! The $50 option is filled with some great stuff, and will get us to our goal faster.
  • The Collegiate Times, a student-run newspaper here at Virginia Tech, covered us.
  • Kickstarter picked us as a Staff Pick.

We’re having a blast getting your comments, messages, tweets, and emails. Keep them coming!

We’ve enjoyed chatting with our backers and hearing about all the excitement they have for our project, as well as hearing the things that they would like to see in Mail Pilot some day.

This week, we’ve got some blog coverage coming up, we’re updating our Kickstarter video, and hopefully we’ll be even closer to our goal. Thanks for spreading the word, and if you haven’t yet, help make Mail Pilot a reality by sharing with your friends: