21.co — Replace your public email with an inbox that pays you.

@nickabouzeid Yup! Right now we support Black Girls Code and Folding@Home, but we'll be adding more over time. If you have ideas on what we should add, we set up a quick form at nonprofits.21.co that you can fill out.

@balajis @nickabouzeid sidenote is there a db/api for pulling a list of vetted non-profits that users could select for donations. Is the list at something like Amazon Smile built in house?

@arlogilbert do you recall any of the others that have tried?

@arlogilbert @balajis any update on this?

@arlogilbert Any update on this @balajis?

@arlogilbert Just saw this. Great qs: > First.... Love the concept but getting a "reply" seems like a pretty tough thing to measure, how are you going to do that? For example Ben Horowitz is charging $100 for a reply. What exactly does it mean that he "replies"? Does it mean a 1 word answer or a 4 paragraph answer to a deep question about a subject he is an expert in? We're rolling out Uber-style bidirectional ratings soon. So a good reply will be a reply that is highly rated by the sender. That could be short or long. Similarly, you will be able to rate the messages coming in to you, just like Uber drivers can rate passengers. > Second... What the motivation is for the recipient? Aren't most recipients who are worth paying to have a conversation with likely already wealthy? Wealthy people generally value time more than money and would rather get no email, donate 10k to a charity, and just not be bothered. Is that a future feature? Very good question. A few points in response: First, the use cases we have in mind aren't casual conversations/QA but very focused business applications like fundraising, sales, and recruiting where you would pay a high price for a response. Some of these recipients are already wealthy, but certainly not all of them (eg engineers are not wealthy but get a lot of LinkedIn InMail messages from recruiters). The size of the LinkedIn InMail market indicates that this sector is not trivial. Second, this is net new money that you can earn in interstitial times while in the back of an Uber or on the way to the airport. Wealthy people would do it for the same reason they like getting faves for their tweets -- because it's convenient and fun, and they can support a good cause while doing it. It's not a job by any means, but a few famous folks on 21 have already raised fairly substantial sums for charity in their spare time. Third, you are absolutely right that wealthy people value their time. But right now they get tons of unsolicited email and the only way they can prioritize is by whitelists and introductions from friends. Many of them would like to branch out, and ranking inbound messages by price while donating to charity is a novel mechanism to do that. It's similar to Buffett's annual charity auction. > Third... Hasn't this been tried in quite a few different variations over the years? Why is this now a good idea? We think Bitcoin is one of the biggest differences. The presence of scaled social networks is another factor. And we have a few features coming out that we think represent a different take on the space. With that said, we'll see! > Virtual reality was an abject failure right up to the moment it wasn’t. In this way, it has followed the course charted by a few other breakout technologies. They don’t evolve in an iterative way, gradually gaining usefulness. Instead, they seem hardly to advance at all, moving forward in fits and starts, through shame spirals and bankruptcies and hype and defensive crouches — until one day, in a sudden about-face, they utterly, totally win.

@balajis @arlogilbert Implement a signature people can save as a Auto Respond on their inbox. A little banner that says Contact on 21lists and a button could go a long way for scale. that will be $1 plz n_n

@findabhilash The Android app is coming. You can use web and mobile web for now :) If you want to be notified when the Android app comes out, go to our homepage, click the Google Play button, and enter your email when the modal pops up.

@balajis Super! logged in via facebook, created username, verified email, had prompt to login again, did so, login window persists... am logged in and can click other tabs but that initial empty state is confusing IMHO. Looking forward to using this and adding other nonprofits 👏

Signed up. I'm curious to see how this plays out. Great idea @balajis!

Love the idea and it's huge potential, looking forward to seeing what other tasks are there besides surveys and outside network contacts.

@balajis This was one of the cleanest launches I've ever seen. Signed up on web, got the email verification notification on my phone, which linked to the ios app, everything worked seamlessly, and both products felt very mature. Logo and UX are very well done. I'm quite impressed!

@bntzio You do not need a Coinbase account to receive bitcoin through the 21 app, though we do offer a one-click Coinbase integration. To pay to send a message to someone else you can use either (a) a credit card or (b) the bitcoin you earned from answering other people's messages. We'll be adding support to use bitcoin from an external source as a form of payment soon.

@asatwork I found this very confusing as well, didn't link as a result. Needed way too many permissions that weren't explained.

@asatwork Hi Alexandre, great feedback and we're going to remove that permission. It is a historical holdover from the command line version of the API, which allowed you to buy bitcoin for use in applications.

@johnbrett_ @asatwork John, completely agreed. As noted in my comment above, we will remove those extraneous permissions; they are due to historical factors.

@antonio_bustamante Great feedback. See this comment here for more detail. The quick answer is that the primary task type you will get over the next few weeks is of the form: "answer this message from someone outside my network and earn $20". You can solicit those reply-to-earn tasks by posting on Twitter, like Ben Horowitz and Muneeb Ali did. But we also have support for surveys and several other kinds of tasks, a few of which you can see in the introductory tutorial. The relationship between "pay N strangers to complete a survey" and "pay one stranger to answer a message" is that you might want to run a survey first, and then send messages to a subset of people as determined by their answers to the survey. For example, send out a survey asking whether 1000 people you don't know are both (a) fintech angel investors and (b) interested in your company. For the 14 that reply yes, send individualized messages to them to follow up.

@jasonkristofor Absolutely, more charities coming! Please recommend ones you'd like to see using the form at nonprofits.21.co. If you know a senior person at the charity or nonprofit, that helps accelerate things.

@jonathanamendes Awesome! Glad you liked it. Sharing your profile to answer paid messages from people outside your network is the primary way to earn bitcoin right now, but we have more ways coming soon. See this comment for more color.

Another thing: You should set up tasks for people to use their vanity URLs on their social media then verify to award $.

@drew23 Both great ideas that we will incorporate! Relatedly, we are working on Slack-style magic links to make mobile signup even easier.

@chadwhitaker I don't have one either and can't figure out another way to be verified.

@nhuebecker It looks like we'll have to create a LinkedIn account 😣

@chadwhitaker I did but you need 50 connections in LinkedIn for it to work

@chadwhitaker AngelList support is coming!

@nhuebecker @chadwhitaker Right now, you can email verify@21.co and we'll take care of you. As context, we've had a crush of signups recently and are working hard on streamlining the process. Starting next week, verification will be integrated with signup on both web & mobile, and we will give you a timeline on how long verification will take (it should be quick once that's up and running).

@drwolanin We were under heavy load and just added capacity. Try again?