Yesterday, Lettini took a chance and posted about Jelly on Hacker News, a discussion site notorious for it's mercurial population of tech-maybe-too-saavy experts. Jelly is a tough sell for some of them, those with the technical skill to pipe email at a low level through custom-built filters running on their own cloud servers.
I'm not going to lie to you. I was pretty nervous.
And yet...
We got a really lovely response! It was also a great opportunity for us to practice talking about Jelly, about why we built it, what it stands for, and why people should consider it over other tools or workflows.
It gave us an opportunity to talk about our philosophy on pricing:
For us, affordability is part of the product itself.
We’re specifically building this not to hoover up every dollar on the table, but to serve smaller groups that have been left out in the cold by "bigger" tools, and who get screwed by per-seat pricing. We believe there are enough teams who fit this profile to be profitable.
There’s a difference between making profit and maximizing profit. the capitalists will call us crazy, but we're not here to maximize profit.
This really resonated:
I love this. Seriously.
This is such a refreshing perspective! I've always wondered if there's room for craftsmen to build quality products for smaller groups. Your focus on simple, well-designed software really resonates with me. Thanks for showing us a viable path.
A lot of people really got the product and the design choices we've been making:
I'm really liking the UX there! In sports-speak there's the "Whose got the ball" method to identify who is managing a topic...and the way this is executed - from what i saw in the video - seems really straight-forward to help answer that.
I really like the way this landing page is designed. And I think it really highlights one of the sales points, which is that you are decent and reasonable. Good stuff. I'm going to send this around to some people.
Of course, there were plenty of people offering their home-brewed alternatives that cover some of what Jelly does, setting up filters and forwarding and even using labels to "claim" messages.
It's fascinating to see how other people have approached this, and the existence of so many different "solutions" demonstrates, to me, that this is a problem that really exists in the world, and that really needs a Good Enough solution that works for people whether they are tech-saavy or not.
Anyway. Go try Jelly. It's approved by the smart folks at Hacker News. What are you waiting for?