Mastering Your Inbox with Mohit Mamoria

Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:00:00]   Hey there and welcome to episode 14 of We Can Do This. And on today's episode, we're talking about email. If you're like me you may spend an embarrassingly long amount of time checking your inbox. I know for me, personally, email is one of those things that makes me feel productive, but in reality, I'm actually not getting any work done by checking my email. And although it's important that I keep up on some of the things that are happening in my inbox, I tend to almost treat it like social media. Like I go through Instagram or Twitter and scroll to see what else is happening. I do the same thing with my inbox and I end up spending way too much time there and convinced myself to them getting work done while I'm actually just checking off some imaginary thing on my to do list. Right? So on today's episode, we're talking with Mohit Memoria. 

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[00:00:58]Now there's a couple of things that I think are going to be really interesting in this episode. One is the story about how Mailman got started now Mohit actually built a solution for himself to buy himself time back so he could actually get work done. And as a developer, it was a simple script that he wrote for himself and he actually used for a year or so before, even considering starting a company. And I actually discovered this whole story about Mohit starting this company on Twitter from Andrew Wilkinson.

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[00:01:29]If you're familiar with Andrew Wilkinson, who is the founder of Tiny Capital, who they own some really amazing companies, such as MetaLab Dribble 8020. And they connected on Twitter because Andrew was actually looking for a solution to this email problem that we're talking about.

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[00:01:47] He wanted to receive emails in specific chunks during the day, and turns out Mohit actually already built something did this for himself and they thought everyone really needs this. Let's turn it into a company. So the story of how this company got built is really, really interesting and a little unique.

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[00:02:06]And then also in this episode, we talk about email and how to develop a healthy relationship with our inbox so that we can, you know, respond to important emails, make sure we're aware of things that we need to be aware of, but also set up these boundaries. So that does not consume our lives and that we actually get work done.

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[00:02:28]And honestly, I began using Mailman this app that Mohit and Andrew built. And it's really changed everything for me when it comes to how I'm approaching my inbox. 

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[00:02:39] So let's jump into this episode with Mohit Memoria.

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[00:02:56]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:02:56] All right. Hey there. Welcome to the podcast. Today, I'm here with Mohit Memoria. Mohit is a serial maker. He started coding when he was 11 years old and built his first company when he was 18 and still in college. Now he is building and growing Mailman which you can find at mailmanhq.com. So Mohit, welcome to the podcast.

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[00:03:17]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:03:17] Hey, Sean, thank you so much for inviting me super happy to be here.

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[00:03:20] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:03:20] Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you today. As I mentioned to you, I'm familiar with Mailman primarily through Twitter, I'm super active on Twitter and I follow Andrew Wilkinson I'm really, you know active in like kind of the maker community and no-code community on Twitter. And I remember discovering the story behind your company, and I'm really intrigued about what you're doing, how it was built and I think there's a lot of value that you can add and in sharing about it. So tell us a little bit about yourself, maybe what you were doing kind of prior to founding Mailman and how did that get started?

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[00:03:58]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:03:58] Well, it's it's so good to know that you heard about Mailman. So let me tell you the story about how Mailman started and it's a little quirky story. I exited my previous venture in 2019. My previous venture was a fund where I was investing in some startups very, very early stage. It was phenomenal. I exited that fund. We deployed and we successfully gave money to our LPs, but I realized I was not a money manager. I was more of a maker, so I wanted to get back again to making stuff. And, but before we had a super successful fund, we were getting emails. I was getting dozens of emails every single day. So I had to look for a new idea and to look for that new area and I needed to get some focus time. So I wrote this very small script in, in Google apps that that would just collect all the incoming emails and deliver to them in batches every four hours so that I could get that slot for us just to do my focus research and reading. This was, this is what I was using for one and a half years.

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[00:04:54] I was using this script in the background, just so that I can find the next thing that I want to build. Fast forward to February of 2020 a friend of mine forwarded me a tweet by Andrew Wilkinson. And Andrew had said something like this say I want to achieve something like this in Gmail.

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[00:05:08] Anybody has any idea how to do it? I write him an email. I sent him the script, a Loom video, how to use it. And after a couple of days I get back an email saying, do you think this can be a business as well? Actually really took a pause there. I was like, maybe. And then after awhile we finally came to a good enough plan to start building something and that's how Mailman was born.

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[00:05:30]Andrew is my partner, phenomenal person to work with. And yeah, so that, that's the founding story of Mailman before Mailman. I had been just building too many stuff failed too many times succeeded a couple of times and now it's done for Mailman.

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[00:05:44]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:05:44] So for those of us who aren't familiar with Andrew Wilkinson that probably some of our listeners are familiar with Tiny and some of the companies that are underneath the Tiny umbrella. Right. But for those of us who aren't familiar with him, you want to share about that relationship and why maybe that was a viable person to talk to when discussing this idea.

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[00:06:01]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:06:01] Absolutely. So I've been following Andrew Wilkinson, MetaLab, Basecamp people for many, many years. 

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[00:06:07]Andrew Wilkinson started his journey. From this agency called MetaLab. MetaLab has designed UI interfaces for Slack Google, Uber, and bunch of other big, big companies.

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[00:06:20] Now while he was doing agency very similar model as the Basecamp, he started building products as well with the same team and after many, many years. He also started buying the existing companies instead of building something from scratch. He started buying and that's the form of Tiny as of today. 

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[00:06:36] So he calls them wonderful businesses, a good businesses run by lean team and profitable business is what are wonderful businesses. And they are happy to buy those wonderful businesses and keep running them forever. 

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[00:06:48] They run with the existing team with the existing founder, if they wish to stay forever. That's that's the model. So this, this particular thing just had a huge respect in my eyes. And when somebody sent that to tweet. Didn't even take 10 minutes to read the email. I wrote that email

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[00:07:03] after, after one and a half day, two days, I get the response back and that to and fro it was like really talking to your heroes because somebody you look up to for many years who is building wonderful businesses. With lean team, who believes that just growing the headcount of the company does not really mean growth. So these are the few things that I really admire about him and other people in the space and to work with them as partners. It's just phenomenal. 

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[00:07:27]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:07:27] Cool. Thank you so much for yeah sharing about that dynamic and how that happened. So do you want to share with us a little bit, like what, in this past a year since launching what have you learned? 

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[00:07:37]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:07:37] Oh, so many things. First of all having a partner like Andrew is great because he has a huge Twitter following 160-170k people. So whenever he's building something or whenever he's a part of something he tweets out in a very distinct thread with a story. So that gets us initial exposure.

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[00:07:53]We got that. We got about a couple of things. People on our wait list. And then from there, people actually started using mailman. They started paying for it, upgrading their accounts. So the journey last year was fantastic until November, December. It was fantastic. When we were just onboarding our waitlist customers, we, people are upgrading, everything was going great.

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[00:08:10]Then comes January, 2021. And this is when that initial spike starts to wear off. And then you have to put in more work in product and marketing, and then you have to figure out more processes that, that are scalable. I mean, you cannot always ask somebody to just tweet about, and again, get one more spike and then repeat it.

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[00:08:28] So we did keep we, we did keep getting some, some of these tweets threads newsletter mentions YouTube video mentions occasionally, which kept bringing in new users, but the. Our first struggle was to find a really crisp positioning for Mailman. I mean, if you tell somebody, Hey, Mailman allows you to manage your inbox, it doesn't create any picture in front of your eyes.

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[00:08:51] It doesn't bring any emotion out of you. So we had to spend many, many weeks just to nail that positioning down right now. If anybody's interested, the positioning is that Mailman is like shield for inbox. Think of your inbox as a palace. The king or queen, if there's no guard at the door of the palace, anybody can come in and take a bit of attention throughout the day throughout the night.

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[00:09:12] And you will be a very capable person, a king or a queen, but you will be very miserable because you don't have time to do the biggest stuff for the kingdom. You're always just struggling. You're, you're just reacting to what, what others are doing and add to that. Just imagine enemy kingdom, sending some spammy people to just pick up your energy.

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[00:09:32] So already you cannot focus on your kingdom. So this is what happens with our inboxes. Our inboxes are like open palaces. You are always reacting to stuff coming in. And that also makes it addictive. And this addiction is worse than social media addiction because this addiction feels like work.

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[00:09:46] When you hit inbox zero in a day, it feels like you are, you have been productive. Well, not really. I mean, in a sense, yes, but not really. There, there could be other creative things that you could be doing. So Mailman is like a shield, a guard that sits at the door of your palace.

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[00:10:00] So that your palace is not just a palace, but it's the sanctum where you can stay peaceful stains and zenmode, and focus on growing the kingdom and not just reacting to small, small stuff that keeps them coming in.

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[00:10:10] So mailman allows you to control what kind of emails come in at what hours and all of that stuff. So this is. The position that we had spent weeks to figure out. And what really helped was just talking to our early first 750-800 customers. So I spoke to all of those people one-on-one to really understand why did they sign up with Melvin and how they would describe mailman?

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[00:10:34] And that's how we, so this has been my biggest learning when your initial launch from product and from Twitter and everything, and that we are so. The first thing I would do next time would be to focus all of my attention. Not on product, not on roadmap, not on feature set, but on getting the positioning down.

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[00:10:51]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:10:51] Yeah. that's, that's really interesting. I mean, I remember when I first heard about Mailman and the concept, I think I often will like relisten to the four-hour workweek with Timothy Ferriss. And in that book, he talks a bit about, you know, batching, somebody. Kind of tasks. I think he specifically addresses as email, but like you look around there, no email tool or software makes it easy to do that.

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[00:11:17]And it's probably contrary to the, the email platforms interests. They, they want you to stay in your inbox and we don't want to live in our inbox. So there's almost like this butting heads between our own personal interests and like Gmail's interest. Right. 

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[00:11:33]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:11:33] At Epps. Absolutely. Do you remember that product called inbox by Gmail? 

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[00:11:37] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:11:37] Yeah, 

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[00:11:38]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:11:38] So that product actually had a feature called bundles and that would put all of those incoming emails in separate bundles. And then you can set a delivery schedule for those bundles, but that product is no more there. 

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[00:11:49]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:11:49] for clear reasons. 

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[00:11:50]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:11:50] Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know I'm speculating, but maybe that somehow caused the numbers of like activity in the inbox. Those numbers very critical to the business to go down, maybe.

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[00:12:00] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:12:00] Yeah. Yeah. That's so interesting that I like the, the analogy you used, the analogy that comes to mind for me is like, I go grocery shopping once a week. And that's because I have a list that accumulates, and then I go out and  batch my grocery shopping. Right. But we don't think of it this way, but the way that we treat our inboxes is if.

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[00:12:19]You know, every time I run out of something in my fridge, I'm going to go drive three or four miles to the grocery store and do that every moment something runs out and find myself at the grocery store, like 25 times in a given week. But no, that's just absurd, but that's exactly how we treat our inbox.

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[00:12:35] And I think the mailman seems to be like the solution that we were all waiting for. 

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[00:12:40]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:12:40] Sean, how you described Mailman is fantastic. And I want to take your permission. Can 

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[00:12:45] we use this idea in some of our marketing materials? 

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[00:12:48] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:12:48] Yes, absolutely take it. 

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[00:12:49]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:12:49] Fantastic. Thank you so much.

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[00:12:51]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:12:51] But so talk to us a bit about I mean, just a reference, a previous episode we had, if you're familiar with Arvid Kahl he mentioned in his podcast episode. Mental health. And specifically he was talking about like customer support messages and like running a startup and responding to, the ding, you know, anytime something happens and some of the internal, I'm sure you can relate the internal trauma that that might create.

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[00:13:15]And I think with email, and I think there's a parallel too, is that there is a not only a product. Perspective of this, but also just like a mental health perspective and just like keeping your mind clear, healthy, and focusing on your work And not necessarily the begging plea of every client, every person doing outreach.

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[00:13:35] So talk to us a little bit about, you know, say I've been buried in my inbox. I start using your product and I stick to this, probably I imagine you're the fall is probably like twice a day morning after late, late afternoon, checking your email. And I started doing this What are some of the, benefits, you know, after let's say I use this for six months, what kind of benefits can you imagine that would reap inside your own personal life and your business? 

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[00:14:03]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:14:03] Oh, fantastic question. Okay. So I could tell right from the day when I started using Mailman in the form of that script, which would, which had absolutely zero configuration. It would just keep delivering my emails every four hours. So throughout the day, my day was split between like four hour slots. And between these four slots, I would take like 30, 40 minutes to just do my email and respond to emails or just to archive them. 

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[00:14:25] The biggest change that I felt was that I was just able to do more creative work.

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[00:14:31] And I'm not saying that I was not creative before I was still creative then, but when you have almost four hours of zero interruptions, so those four hours I was so peaceful. So creative. I just cannot explain it in words. I got so much of work done and when Mailman came to the picture, I actually, so just in April I actually finished.

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[00:14:54]Oh, it was my first anniversary of using Mailman so like any other nerd, I ran some analytics on my inbox usage before Mailman and after Mailman, I wrote a tiny script and ran this analytics. I brought out a graph and I can send the graph to you if you have some show notes so that you can show it to your listeners.

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[00:15:15] So in that graph, I saw that before. My inbox was active like throughout the day, even if it didn't didn't feel like, because when I'm working, I'm having lunch, it didn't feel like, but throughout the year my inbox was whole red. So if I plotted my 24 hour day, it was red, red, red, red, red, with some spaces of like a known red parts with Mailman.

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[00:15:34] There were three big red zones, like in the morning after my lunch. And before I wrapped up my day, in between everything. It was just known red part. This was the time when I was free. So the area, the red area shrunk, and also the red area was concentrated on only in the two, three chunks. I, it was an aha moment for me when I saw that it visually, because once you feel something, it's something, but when you can represent something visually and you can show it to somebody, it's something else, I'll send you that on graph. And then I just spent, I just do data, very rudimentary math. Hey, I spent this, much time on good emails which are non spammy non in notifications. I spent 20 seconds,

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[00:16:11] 30 seconds. I multiplied all of that time with the pain and I just took a difference between March, 2019, versus my emailing them to 2020.

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[00:16:20] I saved over 200 hours, 200 hours to me means more than $4,000 a year. So that's $4,000 worth of time saved. And that, that time to last was spent building mailman, which is much more, much more valuable than anything else. So yes, saving time like this really adds up and has a huge impact on your life.

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[00:16:44] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:16:44] Oh yeah. That's, that's incredible. I mean, imagine what you can do with 200 extra hours or 4,000 extra dollars, right. I imagine one of the, the other thing that kind of rings in my mind is I, there was a phrase, actually, a girl that works with me.

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[00:16:55] I'm her name is Linzee as a assistant and she made this comment to me about communicating with clients. You could read this as customers, right? Is we implicitly like teach them the rules of communicating with us. Right. So if I respond to someone at 7:00 AM, after dinner, like we're communicating and training them that it's okay to communicate with me at that time too, and expect a response.

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[00:17:23]And you can see that, how that would decrease productivity, create some maybe frustration. But I imagine also responding in these chunks of time and like checking in these terms to them. Of retrain your customers, people that are communicating, jumping in your inbox, that this is when I respond and over time, they're going to expect, oh, Sean responds to me in the morning and at the end of the day, and if I want to reach him, I can expect a response at those times. 

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[00:17:50]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:17:50] Yep. Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. I'll give you an example, Andrew. He uses Mailman and his delivery slots are just once in a day. So no matter when you send him an email, he will get a response, a response in his early morning, rest of the way. And the response to your response will happen only in next.

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[00:18:06]So now when I talked to hunter, for example, this is just an example. I know because I'll get in response only after 24 hours, I need to put in as much information I can in this informant, in this email. So that the decision happens only with one email communication, which I absolutely loved what Linzee said that once now I'm trained how I should be really emailing Andrew to get the best out of him office time. 

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[00:18:30]It w it is amendment for both because now the entire process is done over just one email communication. What otherwise could have been on 3, 4, 5 emails. 

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[00:18:39]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:18:39] Yeah. That's, it's so true. And man, I I'm thinking of all these other benefits to it. So getting out of your inbox, I mean, it's funny cause this isn't like a secret, you could probably read any book and it's going to say, don't spend all day on emails. I'm doing. 

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[00:18:54] Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:18:54] Yup. 

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[00:18:54]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:18:54] But I think it's just a it's A common trap.

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[00:18:56] We're all, we all fall into the trap of other people's expectations and other people reaching out. So I think this sounds like this is an opportunity to kind of take things into our own hands and take control of our, our inbox so this is, very, very, very helpful. I, mean, before we wrap up, like any other thoughts related to building the company or any other thoughts related to creating a more healthy relationship with your email is going to be beneficial to You long term.

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[00:19:23]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:19:23] I would say one thing, I've realized that if I have to build another company from start, I will not start building product first. I'll start building a community. And I really do not want to say that community has to be thousands of people, even if community is like just 50 people  who are passionate about, the problem is a fantastic start versus building a problem then convincing random people that this is the problem that they have.

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[00:19:47] When we talk about inboxes sucking time out of our days, we understand this, but 90% of the world except inbox as it is, because that is the only state of inbox that they have seen. They have not seen a calm inbox. And at one point in time, they just give up on their inbox. They'll have thousands of hundred emails they they'll just leave it. One thing I failed at building Mailman was a community in the beginning. There's still time, of course. But I don't think I have enough bandwidth to do that now, but if we had a healthy community, these kinds of collaborations, like how, how somebody thinks about this problem, these kinds of conversations really help to shape up the company and the product.

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[00:20:22]So this is one thing that I would do, especially in this day and age where everything is digital, everything is based on internet. I would start building a small community first and I'll just give him maybe one inbox tip.

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[00:20:33]If somebody, if somebody cannot afford Mailman or cannot write their own scripts maybe you can just create one filter and this filter is such a passive inbox hack that if you just do it once and then just leave it. So create a filter, which says any email that contains the word unsubscribe or opt out, skip the inbox and file it another different label.

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[00:20:54]So what this helps us to do is it just removes all the notifications, promotion spam away from inbox and all the only emails that you get are from real human beings. And then once a day or twice a day, you can just go into that label or that ad folder and look, and just, just take a look at all of those.

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[00:21:09] And the good thing is whenever I suppose, in the future, decide to clean out your inbox. You have to free up free up some storage. You can just delete all the emails in it, in that folder.

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[00:21:17]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:21:17] I love that. I love that hack. It's just. It's a clever hack. I mean, my, my wife, my mom, my friends have never sent me an email with a word unsubscribe in it. 

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[00:21:28] Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:21:28] Yes. 

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[00:21:29] Absolutely. 

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[00:21:29]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:21:29] And then on the topic of community, I mean, I'm a new Mailman user myself, and I'm curious about the other way that your customers are using Mailman.

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[00:21:38]What times of day do they recommend and what kind of filters that they set and things like that. I can definitely imagine community. 

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[00:21:44]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:21:44] Yes, absolutely. What we have realized is right after you wake up, like you wake up, you get freshened up and everything right after your lunch.

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[00:21:53] So whenever you're not feeling productive, you just had food. And right before you wrap up your day, these three slots during the weekdays. Keeps a very peaceful mind and do not have any email coming in on your weekends. So you can configure that in Mailman that on weekends, nothing comes in.

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[00:22:10] And yeah, so this is the most common schedule that our most active customers are using 

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[00:22:15] Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:22:15] I love it. Awesome. Well, thanks for being on the podcast today. I'm going to include everything that you mentioned in our show notes. So if anyone wants to take a look at Mailman I'm really interested in seeing that chart after a year of  yourself using the tool. But thanks again.

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[00:22:29] If anyone wants to learn a little bit more about you, Mailman, what are some things that they can do to find you?

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[00:22:37]Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:22:37] Absolutely. So I'm more active on Twitter well versus anywhere else. So I want to, with my first name, last name, @mohitmemoria. And if you want to try out mailman just go and sign up on mailmanhq.com and send me a Twitter DM. I'll send you some discount code. 

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[00:22:55]Sean Pritzkau: 

[00:22:55] Awesome. Cool. So special. So special treatment for listeners today. Definitely go in and check out Mailman but, Mohiti it was really great talking to you. I'm very excited to use Mailman. And I appreciate you being on the podcast.

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[00:23:11] Mohit Mamoria: 

[00:23:11] Hey, Sean. Absolutely love this conversation 

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[00:23:14] 

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[00:23:28]Sean: 

[00:23:28] Alright. That was a really interesting conversation with Mohit. And honestly, by the end of our conversation, I'm really convinced that email is sort of this thing that is really deceived us to thinking that it's an essential part of our day-to-day operations, that we have to be constantly checking email and when we think we're being efficient with our time or we're being responsible with our time. It's really could be the furthest thing from the case. Right. It's just like the analogy I used of  opening your fridge. Right. And finding that something needs to be done like an action item, right?

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[00:24:02] Like go grab the ketchup and thinking that, that thing. Is as important as all the other things. Right. So let's say discovering that the ice cream is out, that's probably not an urgent task. Right. But if we don't have anything for dinner tonight, then that would be a more important task. And email just tends to make us think that everything is important.

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[00:24:24] Right. And it isn't in fact, email isn't even that important. As long as we have good systems around these things to get them done. Now I think Mailman is a really good solution to this problem. And I've been able to use it for the last few weeks and found that it's really helpful. It's really customizable. And honestly, I love it. Going to check my inbox, knowing that nothing is going to come in and it's okay because at 4:30, it's all going to come in and I can, you can look at it then, for example. So, definitely check out Mailman.

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[00:24:57] If this is a problem that you're experiencing, right. That you're always living your inbox, then definitely try this out as a solution. If you're interested in more of what Mailman is doing or Mohit is doing, you can check the show notes with some links in there. You can follow Mohit on Twitter.

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[00:25:12]And he said, if you reach out, he's more than willing to generate some discount codes for our audience to use. So definitely check that out. But again, thanks so much for listening to the episode and I'll see you next week.

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