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 emails.  So the number in that folder simply grows and grows.

We have always labeled the most recent 5000 emails.  So when we see the 5001st email, we will unlabel the oldest one, put it back into the INBOX, to bring the total under our quota.

SaneArchive, when active, will act as a repository for these oldest emails.  So, instead of putting the old ones back in the INBOX, we will put them in SaneArchive.

We could simply “archive” them in gmail, but then we would not be able to reverse the process if you should decide you hate the folder or our service. If you turn SaneArchive  “off”, we  simply return it’s emails to your INBOX.  If you “cancel” the SaneBox service, we simply return all Sane folder emails, including the SaneArchive folder emails, back to your INBOX.  In either case, your INBOX looks just like it did before you clicked.

If you want to force an old email to stay in your INBOX: simply “flag” or “star” it. 

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 success. We all work really hard.  Struggle.  Battle. Go into your office everyday to push the business forward one more inch.  Sometimes it feels like it is working.  Other times, you feel that you are running full tilt into a solid, immovable wall.  But either way, you come in each day to do it again.  Your employees require it.  Your customers require it. Frankly, you can’t live without it.

But, this kind of life only works if you have balance. There must  be time for friends and family and lovers.  And again, this balance is required to be a better employer, vendor, and human.

First some homage to The Morning Breakfast Date.  A tradition I highly recommend to all of you.  Breakfast is a great meal. And seeing your significant other when they are fresh and at the peak of their game is a treat.  Don’t begrudge getting into the office one day a little late!

This morning was a little different.  The emails, the texts, the phone calls, were all coming in fast and furiously because of the Sport’s Illustrator coverage. So, our coveted 30 minutes together was starting to slip away.  Given the intensity of my business and hers this is always a risk.  But this morning, our date was starting to feel a little like the taking of Omaha Beach.

I mentioned this to my lovely, successful, intense wife and she gave me that smile and immediately turned her iphone off and actually put it away in her bag.  She put away fame, fortune, and success, so we could have our 30 minutes of happiness. If you ever hear me complain about anything, anything at all, remind me of this moment and I will stop.  I promise.

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 lives were like.

My wife and I thought that was a great idea, but it’s like blogging. A great idea but hard to keep up with when daily life is constantly intruding.

I have always scanned their report cards and especially cool artwork and school work. It lowers the mind numbing amount of paper we have floating around. And, in the past, I’ve always emailed some of this stuff to their grandparents.

The 2+2 moment came yesterday when I realized I should be CC’ing the kid’s email addresses when I email out the scans.  Very satisfying.  And I can’t wait until they are old enough to check their email accounts.

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 an email from the wrong folder to the correct one. It has an @SaneBlackHole folder for training emails to trash and folders for deferring emails. It can also discern up to 5 levels of importance and file accordingly. It can report every week on how you are doing with your email.

Milestones:

1 month to first private beta user.

6 months to first direct free bundled competition: Google Priority Inbox

8 months to public release on gmail and google apps.

Now: (11 Months later)

Since going public (users having to pay after the initial 30 day trial) we are converting at 11.33%.  So we get 11 paying customers for every 100 trails.  People tell me that this is good, but I still reach out to the other 89 users every time to see how we failed them. I will blog about why people quit SaneBox separately.

We have been adding features and improving accuracy and scaling and now have a working beta to provide SaneBox for ALL IMAP servers: yahoo.com, me.com, exchange, dovecot, you name it.  This involves taking user passwords so we have upped the overall security of everything including encrypting those passwords and all authorization credentials with a key that has to be typed in by hand.  If someone were to steal the code AND the database, they still would not have access to those passwords.  If you want in on the beta, email me: roseman dash beta at sanebox dot com.

The website was running a bounce rate of 62% so I hired Performable to put together some new landing pages and they are in the midst of A/B testing to bring those numbers under control.  I’ll blog about this effort separately.  What do you think of the website?  My team hates the font.

I am installing 2 new blades with 24 cores and 128GB of RAM each which will 5x our current capacity.

So far our traffic has been generated 100% virally. It’s time to start paying for key words.

That’s it for now.  I’m off with my wife for a kidless, not-on-call, 4 nights and 5 days, beach vacation tomorrow. It’s supposed to start snowing again here in Boston at 9AM. Our plane takes off at 8:45AM.  Wish us luck.

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. Gravity is constantly trying to roll it back.  If you stop pushing for even a moment, whatever progress you made could be lost.  So, there is no such thing as a TGIF or a professional day. Every single day you get up and start pushing again (hoping gravity was asleep last night too. sometimes it wasn’t).

The worst is being on baby-patrol when you have critical business to deal with at the same time.  Often, because the kids are the constant, I deal with the business stuff and let the kids destroy the house.

This morning, on this lovely snowy professional day, I decided to ignore the flare ups for my allotted 4 hours of baby patrol and simply play with the kids. We played kid-boggle, daddy chase them, kids chase daddy, daddy mountain, and assorted other distinctly non-business games.  It was actually sort of relaxing.  My kids are very cute when they want to be :-)

So it’s 11AM and the rock may have rolled back a little, but I think it was worth it.

And, remember that I have lot’s of backup child care and my wife, http://danielacorte.com, who even during Providence Fashion Week is still pulling 90% of the child care heavy lifting. So, I’d like to end this by paying homage to all the single mother’s and single dad’s and other single primary care givers, without redundant childcare, struck down by a school professional day. Please employers of the universe cut them a break. It is a tough road to travel alone.  Allow your employees to realize that their kids are cute when they want to be!

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 person on the phone within 4 rings that answered all my questions.  Try calling Verizon and having that happen.

I filed my SaneBox trademark on June 23, 2010, sure I would have liked it to have gotten assigned to an attorney sooner.  But, I can only imagine how many of these applications they get every day.

The USPTO has a system that enables actual humans (not lawyers) to fill out these applications online. I’ve done it with lawyers and without.  In the end, I’ve found it is easier to do it without.  The lawyers ask exactly the same questions the website does but at $400 an hour.

Quick hints for filling out the form:

1. Search for marks from companies that are really well funded that do something similar to your product.  Especially marks for competitive companies.
2. File with their wording (adapted for your use) and for the classes they chose. My personal favorite is Google.  They have great lawyers and have trademarks for just about everything

You fill out the paperwork, pay, and wait. They assign a lawyer who looks into the mark and either pushes back or publishes it for opposition.  And when they push back (they didn’t in this case), the lawyer tells you exactly what they found wrong and even suggests wording that would fix it.  Seriously.

30 days later, if there is no opposition (there wasn’t for SaneBox). Your mark proceeds to publication.  My current publication date is 2/1/2011.

Can you imagine what this process would have been like or how much it would cost if this were run by Haliburton?  Enough whining. Sure some stuff about government is broken but that is true of any large organization. Let’s get off the back of the people that get the work done. In my experience, they are doing an awesome job.

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 personal tragedy for the stitcher and her family.  It also became a production nightmare for my wife. For years, we have discussed bench strength in her business and how insecure it is to rely on any one person.  But, with daily crisis and production schedules to meet, it is hard to worry about theoretical stuff especially when solving the problem costs both money and time.

Well since last week, I have seen a small cast of stitchers of various skills auditioning to play understudy in my wife’s business.  And all because of the sudden absence of a key employee.  She is not replacing the key employee simply providing for some long needed bench strength. And in the sudden crisis she has found resources that she didn’t know she had.

At around the same time, I had lunch with an old friend who was bemoaning the failure of one of his companies to hire sufficiently for it’s demand.  They had raised plenty of money but were still operating in tiny, everyone is a hero, startup mode.  I was struck by the common cord between the two stories.

We hear horror stories of companies raising millions and hiring so many people that no one is quite sure what any one else does.

This blog post is a cautionary tale to not err on the other side.  Make sure you have built the team that will succeed. People get sick. They take vacations. Their parents die. A work place should be a nurturing, safe space where it is okay to have these things happen.  This means that your company needs to plan instead of react. We are all sometimes guilty of running ultra-lean in order to chase profits.  But this tendency to under-hire has a real and personal impact on your employees and more often than not make your businesses less effective.

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 the unimportant stuff.

My account is set up so that my unimportant emails are automatically filed into my @SaneLater folder.  So my SaneBox and my Inbox are the same.

The light grey shape in the background is the size of my Inbox.  The purple dotted line is the number of Inbox emails I process at any odd time (file,archive,delete). The yellow line is the number of Inbox emails I receive. So you should see the grey shape retreat when my purple dotted line increases faster than my yellow line.

The red line is the number of very important emails (@SaneTop) I receive.  @SaneTop is a subset of @SaneBox. The black dotted line is the number of @SaneTop emails I process at any odd time (file,archive,delete).  I should be processing these emails faster than any others.  You can see that I’m not.  Which is something I should work on.  I’m obviously letting very important emails sit while I process other less important stuff.  If you are guilty of the same thing, you might want to “show” @SaneTop on your settings page.

If I am using SaneBox properly, then my brown line, the number of unimportant emails I process, should look like a clearly defined step function.  Email is shiny.  But, I have more important things to do all day long than process unimportant mail.  So you should see me process that queue once a day and then leave it alone. 

The time I free up by not paying attention to unimportant email all the time should be shown in my ability to keep my Inbox small which is indicated by the stars.  We give out a star any time an Inbox gets below 50 (1 page) in a particular day.

We indicate at what point each day I am most concentrated on email.  You can see that mine is never the same each day - which hopefully means that I am being opportunistic.  The other possibility is that each day is pretty full with lots of surprises so I make room for email when I can. On the weekends, you see my activity is pretty early in the morning which gives you a sense of when my 5yo and 3yo get up.

Is my processing of 607 emails in a week impressive.  Actually no.  It is a little above average for SaneBox users. The trick is to do it while getting everything else done too.

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 4/22/2010

First major competition launches - Google Priority Inbox - 8/31/2010

The end of the alpha test 10/27/2010

What was accomplished in that 8 months? Small passonate user base, scalable stable product, key features, documentation. Hopefully, we have distinguished ourselves from Priority Inbox. Do I have regrets? I think we should have gotten here 2 months ago but even now, I don’t know where we would have cut back. 

So, you ask, how does it feel to be a 2 day old adult?

Everything is the same and yet completely different.  And all because people have started to pay for the service.  And, in that single difference, I feel enormous change. Each payment feels great - like a personal acknowledgment of the product’s value and the hard work that went into it. About 3 years ago, I started paying for services that I liked on the web and started expecting customer service. I like living in that world and don’t want to ever go back.  Gauging from the number of year and lifetime subscriptions we’ve sold, SaneBox users agree. And, we won’t let them down!

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 differently and this is part of it.

My career has mostly been defined by “making stuff work”.  I founded my first company, Gamesville.com, with @stevenkane.  It was just the two of us for quite a while and to avoid killing each other we had a firm allocation of responsibility: I made it work and Steve did everything else.  It was the same way with our second company, GameLogic.  In both cases, I always felt that “making it work” was the harder job - it was 24 hours a day - it always felt like I was rolling a really heavy rock up a steep hill but never quite getting to the top. How hard could that other stuff be?

Well, now that I am doing “everything else” - including this expo, I am painfully aware that I was wrong.  Making stuff work is hard.  I still do that too.  But in a different more binary way than this other stuff.

I absolutely dread this event.

The fashion designer, @danielacorte, the best-wife-in-the-world, in the middle of Boston Fashion Week, 2 days before her big fashion show, is coming for moral support - I’m guessing most of these guys haven’t seen anything like her except on TV so I’m hoping that she will distract them.

So, with the clock ticking down to this event., I would like to thank @stevenkane for every public event, advertiser meeting, interface design review that I didn’t have to attend.  Ahhh… those were the days.