Subscribe
Sign in
Consider Groups — It's like Slack channels but for email.
Consider is email for startups: a new email client for you and your team, designed to enable focus and flow. With Consider Groups, search, link, browse, and respond to all public email. Minimize chat interruptions and get back to focusing on what matters.
43
Replies
Andrew Abogado
I'm a fan Consider fan. Love the minimal and simple design. Another behavior that I need to adapt for myself are groups. Congrats Ben and the team for this release and the funding.
Share
👏👏👏
Very excited about how Consider are thinking about work communication and collaboration.
Hey Product Hunt, 👋 I'm Ben, CEO at Consider.
Email's future is as an asynchronous, less immediate, more thoughtful counterweight to Slack. Asynchronous communication is fundamental to doing deep creative work: it doesn't interrupt you, it gives you space to think. However, there is work to close the gap between what we believe email can and should be, and what email is today. The first step in closing the gap is to examine all the ways email is used today and ask ourselves: how would we design this if starting over? Enter: Groups.
With Groups, we are bringing Slack channels to email. Three specific features I'd like to call out:
1. Within each Group you have a shared history of past conversations, regardless of when you joined a company or team.
2. You can easily browse and search all public email (anything sent to a Group) in your company, without leaving your email client.
3. Every public conversation in your company now has a shareable URL and you can join conversations that didn't originally include you. This unlocks workflows like Slacking someone an email and asking them to comment.
We really hope you like it. Let us know what you think.
Ben
@benmcredmond
Nice service!!!
But I have a few questions:
How and which service do you use to verify your business email data?
Would you like to test our service Proofy.io for this goal?
And, could you leave feedback about our startup below my comment?
Thanks
I love this! I remember reading about how Stripe sends most internal email communication to shared lists that everyone can view and respond to. This sounds like a great way to easily implement that process!
Looks useful! It's a kind of the problem for me to search, share with my team on inbox.
I love that Consider is rethinking communication. It's something we do every day but we don't really think about how we do it. So it's largely shaped by what tools are available. "Consider Groups" adds a needed layer to the conversation hierarchy which exists, but isn't support well by Slack:
Slack: Channel -> Message -> More messages in message thread
Consider: Group -> Conversation -> Emails
Message threads within Slack often get lost, and their sidebar UI forces users into using threads only for small discussions. Consider Groups solves this issue, and also gives you a better hierarchical overview of what's happening and what people are working on instead of the endless scrolling train of thought that is Slack.
I'm interested in hearing why Consider went with Groups instead of tags. Semantically, I can see "Groups" being easier to understand for people coming over from Slack channels, and it makes maintaining privacy settings easier. But tagging conversations would give you the classification component without strictly enforcing one category per conversation (there are a lot of times a conversation in Slack could go in a couple of different channels). It would also allow for easy break-offs into nested conversations, e.g. `engineering`, `engineering - ios development`.
@robmoore Thanks Rob!
Groups work just like regular email recipients, so you're by no means limited to one group per message. We think group is a more accurate description of the behavior - membership in the group means a mail is delivered to your inbox. So that's why we went with that over tag.
@benmcredmond makes sense. So what kinds of conversations at Consider do you opt to use groups for instead of slack channels? For the more heavily used channels, messages tend to be more real-time and seem too lightweight for Consider Groups (e.g. "did you deploy this?", "can you look at this support case?", "do you have 5 minutes to call?").
I could see this doing fitting well for infrequently used channels like an "Ideas" channel or "Competitors" channel, but this use case is also addressed by something like Notion, Trello, or Github projects, where a board layout is (arguably) favorable and each card is more of a single updatable source of truth rather than an ongoing conversation. (what I mean by single updatable source of truth is that it makes more sense to update an idea to "in progress" rather than write an email update, or to update a card to reflect that Competitor X does now offer Feature Y).
I'd be interested to hear about how you're using it at Consider and how early adopters have been leveraging groups.
@robmoore Our model is aligned priorities between participants => Slack, misaligned priorities => email.
For example, an emergency or a designer and an engineer working on a feature together => Slack.
On the other hand, things like "hey can you read this doc?" or "can everyone send feedback on this feature?" or "what if we changed feature x to work like y?" => email is better suited.
Right now too much of the latter category goes in Slack for all the reasons Slack is more modern than email. Groups is one step of many to bring more balance here.
This is super interesting! Love the idea of a newly onboarded teammate having full context of historical issues when necessary, and an awesome idea for getting a siloed Consider fan to expand the product into the rest of their team.
@aj_nihill Does the recipient of the message share the same immediate priorities as you? If yes => Slack, if no => Consider Group.
Things like emergencies or direct collaboration between individuals working on the same thing: Slack. For everything else, we prefer email because it doesn't interrupt you. It lets you continue focusing on whatever is most important to you.
So get things like the following into Consider: "hey can you read this doc?" or "what if we changed this feature to work like..." or "can everyone send me feedback on this design?"
@benmcredmond @pachun Under the hood it's just email, so you can add other people in your company to a group without requiring them to sign up for Consider.
They'll still be able to send and receive messages from Groups using whatever email client they prefer.
Let me know if you have any questions!
