Orchestra’s new iPhone app takes on
Apple’s iOS Mail.
Orchestra CEO Gentry Underwood is a busy
man these days; his company recently launched a new iPhone email app called
Mailbox, and customer response has been high. But Underwood took time out to
speak with Macworld about the app, its rollout, and the company’s plan
for profitability.
Mailbox aims to be a true replacement for
Apple’s built-in iOS Mail app. Using it, you can swipe on messages in your
inbox to archive them, delete them, or “snooze” them – this last feature
temporarily hides a message from your inbox but returns it to the forefront
after an interval of time you specify. This makes it easier for you to get to
Inbox Zero (meaning an inbox that’s free of new, unread messages), while also
ensuring that the messages you’ve hidden will pop up later, when you feel that
you’re ready to act on them.
Mailbox
aims to be a true replacement for Apple’s built-in iOS Mail app
Orchestra has prepared for an onslaught of
users looking for a better way to manage their email. Underwood says that more
than 250,000 users have already signed up for Mailbox access through its
reservation program (which started on the Web but is now available from within
the free app); he warns, however, that access rollout will start slowly. Though
you can install the app right away, at first you’ll see only your current
position in the reservation queue. “We’ll monitor the early load, and we expect
that we’ll be able to increase the number of users exponentially over time,” he
says. But the primary goal is keeping the system online for early adopters.
Underwood says that the company isn’t too
worried about Mailbox buckling under the load as customers start using the app.
“The fear of the system falling over has been mitigated by [our] having spent a
bit of extra time setting up the reservation system,” he explains. This system
presents you with a code to unlock the app, once your spot in the customer
queue is reached.
Offline access
Underwood says that even if Mailbox’s
servers get overloaded, the developers have built in numerous fail-safe
mechanisms. “We built a very intelligent offline queue, so if you’re on an
airplane, or in large portions of San Francisco or New York City where cell
service is abysmal, we won’t let that degrade your experience. So you can do
everything you [can] imagine with your already downloaded email” even when your
phone is offline. “As soon as you get access to the server again,” Underwood
says, “all those changes propagate.”
That means you can mark messages as
archived or deleted, compose new messages and replies, and snooze selected
messages, even if the app is, for whatever reason, unable to connect to the
Internet. Underwood explains that this offline architecture works for Airplane
mode, and also if the company has trouble with its system and has to take its
servers offline temporarily.
The business of ‘free’
Mailbox’s
main limitation at launch is that it’s restricted to Gmail accounts
I’ve been using Mailbox for about a month,
and I’m a big fan. But should customers be worried about the long-term
viability of the app, given that it’s free? Underwood says no.
“We’re really following in the footsteps of
companies like Dropbox and Evernote, who have demonstrated their ability to
make a good business out of a ‘freemium’ model: You give people a version of
the experience for free, and have a series of premium features that more
hard-core users can step up and pay for if they’re interested.”
Though he wouldn’t talk about upcoming
premium features, Underwood does offer a peek at where Mailbox is headed. “A
native iPad experience is coming,” he says. In fact, “our goal is to get this
app onto every device that people use email on, which means the desktop and
Android, and maybe other mobile devices as well.”
Mailbox’s main limitation at launch is that
it’s restricted to Gmail accounts. But that limitation won’t last forever,
Underwood said. “We architected the system so that we can add other email
providers as we grow, relatively pain-free”.
The acquisition question
The last company to try to reinvent mobile
email was Sparrow, which Google ended up buying.
Buyouts are “always a risk, to be honest”,
he says. He points to situations that he thinks motivate acquisitions: “A
product isn’t [growing] at a consistent scale, or isn’t likely to grow into a
big business.” While he acknowledges that Mailbox could face such issues, he
says that the company’s hope is to build a big and real business out of the
product.
One
of the big opportunities here is that pretty much everybody uses email, pretty
much everybody who uses email on their phone kind of hats it right now
And Underwood likes his chances. “One of
the big opportunities here is that pretty much everybody uses email, pretty
much everybody who uses email on their phone kind of hats it right now. And if
we can address that problem at scale, we can build a real business.”
Mailbox’s goal, Underwood says, is to take
the pain out of the user’s day-to-day experience of managing email, especially
when they’re using it as a to-do list. If Mailbox can ‘take a little bit of
friction out of email-based collaboration, you’re greasing the skids for a lot
of people.”
Alluding to a famous Steve Jobs quote,
Underwood says that the appeal of building the Mailbox app was its potential
for making a dent in the universe. “I think we have a shot.”
