November 2011
3 posts
2 tags
My Thanksgiving day wish
It being the day before Thanksgiving here in the US, I thought it appropriate to be a little thankful.
I have a lot to be thankful for: wonderful wife, http://danielacorte.com, two wonderful kids. And we are all warm, dry, well fed, employed, and happy. That in itself isn’t too shabby these days.
But this Thanksgiving, I’d like to sing the praises of my mother-in-law, Linda
My wife...
Zawinski's Law
You know it’s been a tough day when one of your engineers quotes Zawinski’s law of software development:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
And yes I did point out that we (http://sanebox.com) **are** the in the email business, but in the end he was correct to Zawinski me and that is why I LOVE...
ronarad asked: Hi Stuart, I am too a big believer in data visualization. I found your insight very useful one hand and very discouraging on the other. I tried to find your platform on GitHub and couldn't. Can you help? Thank you, Ron
October 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Lyme
I have a friend who has lost the ability to raise his arms through the ravaging effects of Lyme disease. He has been actively treating it for last year and after 6 months he started getting better. But the progress is slow, painful, soul-crushing.
That would be awful enough, but he had medical insurance and sought medical advice and was told for years previous to his effective diagnosis and...
September 2011
1 post
Goodbye to Verifiable. I mean it this time.
Some of you may remember my previous business, Verifiable.com, which was a cloud service that enabled users to upload data and turn it into pictures.
Verifiable.com has been running in read-only mode since I pivoted the business in February of 2010 to start SaneBox. My theory was that so long as the data on Verifable was useful and didn’t require support staff, I would leave it. And...
August 2011
1 post
Some thoughts on firing employees
I just sat in on the firing of my fashion designer wife Daniela Corte’s latest sales/assistant this morning. Yes, it was an awful experience.
I’ve worked at companies where no one ever got fired. That was pretty awful too. Everyone knew who the bad people were and tried to avoid having them on their projects. Sometimes you got stuck and you made the best of it. But it always felt...
June 2011
2 posts
Have you ever experienced a hate crime?
In my experience, we are all different enough that someone out there hates us for that difference. My wife is latino. I’m a jew. Our best friends are gay. You get the idea.
But, for me, I have never personally had anyone shout at me or physically attack me for being jewish. I know it happens. I have read about it. But, it is always somewhere else to someone else.
Today, one of my...
1 tag
My kids say the craziest things
background: in this story my wife is putting my 5yo daughter to sleep. My daughter shares a room with my 3yo son. They have a bunk bed.
Daughter: Mommy you should stay and sleep with me
Son (from lower bunk): She can’t. She has to sleep with daddy because they are married. You sleep with me because we are married.
Daughter: Brothers and sisters can’t get married
Son: Why? Will...
May 2011
1 post
1 tag
An homage to my guys
My company Sanebox is a tiny operation. There are four full time employees. Three of the Four work from home in states that are far away: JD/Michigan, Kris/Colorado, Peter/North Carolina. I work in the world wide headquarters in Boston, MA.
Each of the guys has small children and lots of important personal distractions. And this week Peter and Kris are moving. On the stress-o-meter, moving is...
April 2011
6 posts
Security and Privacy at SaneBox
Everyone’s email is a mess. Your INBOX contains multi-million dollar deal memos and bulk email from retailers you visited years ago all sorted chronologically. So an offer for Viagra may come ahead of a job offer.
SaneBox solves this problem. It automagically decides what emails “can wait” and moves those to a separate SaneLater folder. You are left with a clean, priority INBOX....
3 tags
Some parenting hints for a friend with a new baby...
A friend just had a baby daughter. Instead of doing my usual and sending a one shot email, I thought I would create a post in case these hints can help someone else.
All my best to all the parents out there. It is so easy to forget how scary the crying was at first and how little they are when they first come out. Seeing a picture of the new baby brought it all back.
1. This DVD is brilliant....
Best tax day for rich since '30s →
youmeandmyapi:
17%
That was the effective tax rate paid by the 400 Americans with the highest adjusted gross income in 2007, the most recent year with IRS data available. The figure is down from almost 30 percent in 2005. All in all, this April 15 could be the best tax day for the wealthy since the early 1930s - with top rates on ordinary income, capital gains, dividends, estates and gifts at...
5 tags
Can you spell scope creep
One of my SaneBox engineers (no names to protect the guilty) just sent me this quote:
Every Program attempts to expand until it can read mail.
Those programs that cannot so expand are replaced by ones that can.
— Third Law of Software Envelopment
Hmmm… I’m thinking this is a little push back on the latest round of production tickets.
Maybe it’s time to do some...
4 tags
5 tags
Why some people need an email intervention
I have an old friend who has always had trouble keeping up with his email. Let’s call him FooBar. FooBar get’s a **lot** of email. And it was his email woes, in addition to that of other friends, that caused me to create http://sanebox.com.
No I’m not going to mention FooBar by name. He is a good guy with this one little foible: he thinks every single email might be crucial...
March 2011
3 posts
SaneBox - Better Priority Inbox for Everyone
For those that have been living under a rock…
SaneBox and Priority Inbox distinguish between important email and email that can wait.
First, make no mistake, SaneBox is better than Priority Inbox.
Because SaneBox…
Automatically files the unimportant stuff out of your INBOX so it doesn’t constantly distract you.
Requires no training to be effective.
Is more accurate
...
Google's Smart Labels versus SaneBox
Hmmm… Does Google’s new, free, bundled Smart Labels product seem to mimic functionality from my product SaneBox? Yes.
Am I going to wander into traffic because Google seems to be slow-copying my product? Absolutely not.
SaneBox is still easier to use, more accurate, and more fully featured than PI and Smart Labels. And SaneBox will be better yet 4-6 months in the future when...
3 tags
toddlers and stomach aches
This will only be interesting to people with toddlers or that know other people with toddlers. Sorry to everyone else. But I wish I had known all this 1 year ago.
My 5yo daughter has had a stomach ache of varying intensities for a year now. We have been to the doctors, to the emergency room twice. They have taken x-rays and probed her and investigated. They invariably described her...
February 2011
3 posts
SaneArchive
Today we fielded a new optional folder called SaneArchive. This option keeps the total count of Sane folder emails to a maximum of 5000. The 5001st oldest email will automatically be filed into the SaneArchive folder.
We’ve discovered that as we get better and better at separating the unimportant email into SaneLater, our users spend less and less time processing (filing,deleting) those...
Fame, Fortune, Success and happiness
As many of you know, my wife, The Fashion Designer, has been getting a lot of press lately for all sorts of things. But mostly, to celebrate the fact that people like her designs. The most recent big moment was that her swim wear was in the bathing suit issue of Sport’s Illustrator.
Why am I mentioning this?
It’s to make the point that everyone is grasping for fame and fortune and...
How to capture childhood moments
When my kids where born, being a true geek, I rushed out and registered their domains, their twitter handles, and their gmail accounts.
I recently read a blog about someone who did the same thing and sends an occasional email to their child’s email address as a way of capturing important moments in their childhood. And I guess, a way of giving them insight as an adult into what their early...
January 2011
3 posts
Status of SaneBox
In my on-going attempt to live my startup life out loud, here is the status of SaneBox.com
SaneBox was started on 2/20/2010.
It automatically files unimportant emails into a @SaneLater folder so your Inbox is free of distractions.
It does this with global rules and a statistical analysis of your email history and your relationships with other social networks. Training is as easy as moving...
surviving professional day
Two snow days last week, MLK day yesterday, and now my kid’s school has declared that today is a professional day. Four extra days off from school. And each of these “days off” are a wild dance with childcare and keeping your businesses running. This is a quick note on how to survive it.
First, let’s all agree that starting a business is like rolling a huge rock up a hill....
3 tags
The USPTO customer service is fabulous
I’ve heard so much whining and moaning in public about how the government payroll is bloated and overpaid and doesn’t work and how we should outsource the whole thing to private industry or India or both.
I can’t take it any more. I just got off the phone with the USPTO. Yes the United States Patent and Trademark Office. I hit “0” and got a knowledgable, pleasant...
November 2010
2 posts
Leading means planning instead of reacting
Quick backstory…
@danielacorte, my lovely wife, and world’s greatest fashion designer, also owns a small business: Daniela Corte in Boston. She designs and produces a women’s clothing line.
About two months ago, her stitcher’s dad got sick and last week he died. Over the months there was lots of lost time and two last minute trips to South America. This is a dramatic...
How to think about your email statistics
SaneBox, my latest venture, shipped activity reports this week. These reports have a chart showing your email traffic and your email processing for the week.
Here is my activity chart for the week of 11/8/2010 and some thoughts about how to interpret the data:
I received 607 emails and ONLY 508 were important. SaneBox estimated that I saved 49 minutes because I didn’t have to search past...
October 2010
1 post
growing up
Wednesday October 27, 2010 marked SaneBox’s first step into Adulthood. We opened the site up to all gmail users and started taking paid subscriptions.
It felt like a big step so I thought I would commemorate it with a trip down memory lane:
The original idea. 2/20/2010
The first real outside user. 3/31/2010
The first middle of the night page. 4/2/2010
The launch of alpha product...
September 2010
2 posts
Dreading Web2.0 Expo
Wish me luck. I am doing the equivalent of speed dating at web2.0 expo at The Sheraton in NYC this evening. The format is to give a 5 minute demo over and over for 2 hours to various strangers. This may define what I have avoided for my whole professional career. But, I decided when I closed Verifiable (my last startup) and started SaneBox (my new startup) that I was going to do everything...
can a little company compete these days?
I was reading nick bilton’s post about Google’s Priority Inbox. God, I love how he “humanizes” otherwise very geeky things: “There were times that I felt like I was training my inbox, as if I was trying to teach a puppy to sit still for a few minutes.”
Here’s my take on this: the purpose of SaneBox (my company) is prioritization but without all the...
August 2010
3 posts
Trying to please the world?
As many of you know, I have a new business called SaneBox. In my continuing effort to live out loud, here is my current data and thinking about why some people leave SaneBox while most others stay and love it.
For those who don’t know, SaneBox enables users to focus on important emails. SaneBox either has the unimportant stuff skip your gmail Inbox or we put labels on the envelopes so...
Are you a business manager or an entrepreneur?
Didn’t you always wonder. Is there some magic test. Maybe a slip of paper that turns a particular color when a true entrepreneur is near :-)
This week I discovered the answer.
It came about because my wife @danielacorte, the fashion designer extraordinair had a staffing change within her clothing design firm. One of her key employees resigned suddenly. Who knows why. That part really...
3 tags
How to avoid email overload
As some of you know, my professional life has become all about email. This means that I often get asked what I believe are the best practices for avoiding email overload.
Here are some general rules that I use. (If you have good ones that I don’t have listed here, please comment and I will update this entry):
touch each email only once. reply/file or read/file or forward/file. If you...
July 2010
6 posts
1 tag
HD Over-The-Air TV
Yes. Cable and Satellite TV has been dead to me for about 6 weeks.
I thought I could simply use iTunes and a mac mini but I’ve been defeated by ABC and the soccer world cup which was unavailable via a decent internet feed for love of god or money.
Ahhh… but adversity is the mother of invention. Here is the solution.
Go here:
Antenna Web
type in your zipcode and it will tell you...
Pricing
In my ever increasing desire for transparency and living out loud here is my current thinking on pricing in my new business SaneBox.
First, this is a thought experiment, I’m not going to start charging tomorrow. The website needs way more documentation and our invitation and email communications need to be significantly slicked up.
But, that stuff is pretty close. So it is time to think...
Living in a non June Cleever world
I’m writing this while on vacation in Province Town with my extended family including my two kids (5 and 2.9), some friends, and a dog named Ringo. Wednesday was my daughter Natasha’s 5th birthday. A real milestone for everyone. My daughter felt about as old as she is ever going to. And my wife and I have started to feel as if these moments are passing us by like sights out the...
A new feature - is it the right one?
We are days away from fielding the ability to turn your google Inbox into a SaneBox.
Back Story: This post is about SaneBox a fairly new product which (with 2 clicks) “labels” the envelopes in your google Inbox so that you immediately know what is important and what isn’t. It’s also about how to decide what your small development team will work on. And finally about how...
dherman asked: Stuart, I'm a big fan. I followed Bijan's original post and now, @msg (Michael Galpert) sent me an invite. This is a tool that I need to make my life much easier! Now, hopefully this pays out with the ability to spend a lot more time with my son!
Darren
Darren
ericarnohiller asked: Stuart,
Hi, I am a fellow entrepreneur who happens to be working on the website product called www.endaround.org that deals with some of the same topics as Verifiable. I noticed that you guys were setting the doors and found your posts about what happened very interesting. Although our focus at EA is slightly different than Verifiable, I think the subjects that the two products...
Hi, I am a fellow entrepreneur who happens to be working on the website product called www.endaround.org that deals with some of the same topics as Verifiable. I noticed that you guys were setting the doors and found your posts about what happened very interesting. Although our focus at EA is slightly different than Verifiable, I think the subjects that the two products...
June 2010
5 posts
What do users want?
Here is the million dollar question (or with inflation the billion dollar question).
As you know, I spent almost 3 years creating Verifiable.com, a data visualization tool. For 3 years, we failed to effectively engage the users and ended up guessing what they needed or wanted. Sometimes by watching what they did or had trouble doing and sometimes by seeing what they didn’t do. It was very...
follow-up to life without cable or satellite TV
I realized my previous post wasn’t sufficiently detailed - here are a bunch of the details…
Here is a list of the equipment that I used in my system
Panasonic PTAX100U projector (several years old but still loving it even though the highest resolution is 720p) If you buy one of these remember that in September they always rev it so you can buy last years model for way way less. Also...
Trust
I think that my new business SaneBox will have a real challenge surrounding the issue of trust.
SaneBox automatically labels envelopes that are in your google Inbox:
top - must be looked at right away
sane - should be looked at in a timely manner
later - things you can put off for a convenient moment
This requires our servers to analyze your email history and queue and contacts.
It is this...
Scaling and Testing and Prudence
My business SaneBox which helps people navigate the copious traffic in their Inbox is in testing mode. I have some great people that have offered to help test. Some of them I have been able to accomodate and some I am hoping to let into the test soon.
Our business is email filtering which is not a simple or trivial effort. We are very very careful to make sure that the filtering is simple,...
1 tag
How I learned to love buying ONLY the media I...
Satellite and cable TV is dead to me.
Yes for the first time in my life I have no set top box in my daily life and it is a fantastic feeling.
I bought 2 new mac minis and attached them with mini-DVI to DVI to DVI to HDMI cable to my PANASONIC PT-AX100 projectors. They are attached to my home network thru their WIFI 802.11N interface. I was a little worried about the bandwidth but it works...
May 2010
1 post
Out with the Old business in with the New
We will be making http://Verifiable.com into a read-only service on Aug 1st 2010. And sometime thereafter, I will turn it off.
We have moved on to a new project: http://SaneBox.com. With 2 clicks we will separate your email into 2 folders: email you have to look at right now and email that can wait. It is what we have all been waiting for all these years of struggling through over loaded...