Hi Charles! reBoxed was actually more of an experiment in how quickly I could build something - I just had the idea for it last Friday. It's not going to be reMail's main product. :-)
Especially since it is not true: I'm a very fast coder too and some product I sold or that is working well today started like one/two days of hacking where an alpha was already working.
The point is that this is just the start. Even if you don't add new features after the first two days you need weeks or months more to make this product rock solid, with a good UI, seriously scalable, documented, easy to use for the newcomer, and so on.
To get started fast is an invaluable thing, it helps building a lot of things in your life so you simply trow away what appears useless, not working as expected and so on. But to do great things a lot of work is needed anyway.
I like the idea of this product. Don't like the social aspect. I think that there are a lot of product that are waiting to be discovered and implemented by new startups that just involve yourself and the computer. Email is one of this things where to filter spam the social bit can be interesting, but probably the sorting of the email is just local to you and nobody else.
If I rate emails form Tommy are very important, and Tommy thinks email from Bob are very important, I still don't care to receive email from Bob as important emails and so on. The only useful bit of information that can be extracted from this stuff is that if I really didn't scored Foobar then the importance assigned to Foobar by my friend can be better to start without a clue at all, but anyway in the long run I've to compare Foobar with few of other guys for the system to really know if I care or not about it.
Btw it is a good start. If gmail were a pay-for product I bet that the email system of today would be much, much better. Instead a key component is uninteresting to startups since there are huge companies like Google pushing products that are good enough for most people, for free, and this in some way blocks evolution. It's better to pay 50$/year for a great email system than 0$ for a good one.
im not sure id use this but email is something that hasn't been innovated on in a WHILE. im glad someone is doing something about it. great job, keep working on it.
It's about making a point in efficiency and releasing, not launching, right. To get a useable prototype up to a level of completion where you can start to get user feedback doesn't take months, or even weeks if you're focused enough. The 77 hours works for the product, as my expectation aren't set as high compared to if he said "...in 3 months". It didn't take a lot of time or money, and he now has user feedback to shape the next iteration, or even decide the project isn't worth pursuing further.
dimitry - thanks for your feedback! I didn't mean the 77 hours as "look at how much of a rockstar I am", but "keep your expecations low": reBoxed doesn't have a fancy website, a product video, etc., simply because I didn't have enough time for those things.
While I can totally see you biometrically logging in with your fingerprint or something, I'm having a hard time imagining how I'm going to send an email to that.
