"Would I pay for this?" is a great question for founders to ask, because it combines two of the most powerful techniques for generating startup ideas: solving problems you yourself have, and using payment as a test of how much people want something. One of my techniques for helping founders to come up with ideas is to ask them what they need so much that they'd pay for it.

Look at a large enterprise org - you think that Lockheed with 150K employees would spend $50/yr/user on email?

Hell no. they dont spend 7.5MM per year on their email accounts for the employees.

Thats the problem with enterprise scaling vs cloud/startup scaling. They are inverse;

The enterprise wants the cost per unit to go down when scaling. The startup/cloud wants the profitability to increase at the same rate when scaling.

We all want great services, but NOBODY wants to pay for it.

I myself seek to offload cost at every opportunity; work pays for machine, phone, travel, software etc...

Same model.

Yeah - I'll seek to solve problems I have, but not based on how much I would pay - but how much I would like to offload that cost.

(Clearly there is a lot of grey here, and there are areas where this doesn't make sense -- and others where it does -- and these are not mutually exclusive. (i.e. in areas where I am both building for the consumer and the provider (healthcare))

Yes, I certainly do believe that any American corporation with 150K employees spends significantly more than $7.5mm/year on their messaging system.

These systems actually get _more_ expensive as they grow larger - Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity, Sarbanes Oxley, Customer Service, SLAs, Data Loss Protection, Intrusion Detection - All these email services that the small enterprise doesn't worry about (that much) - add up significantly in larger enterprises.

I think the Gartner figure was something on the order of $500-1000/yr per employee for messaging in large high tech businesses. A lot of that is IT staff, and all the other systems for security and compliance. Email is one of the big apps within enterprise.

Would your problems be solved by hiring a personal assistant (a real person)? Then the solution is AI and it's hard.

Or do you believe it's impossible for anyone but you to sort through your mail?

If that's the case, what we need is to make sorting email "fun" (more enjoyable than TV).

We may be looking for the Angry Birds of email.

"The web" includes a bunch of stingy twenty something's on the consumer Internet, but it also includes the producer Internet, and the producer Internet is one giant system for turning piles of money into bigger piles of money. Something which makes that happen is cheap at any price.

If the cost of a premium email/task-list system is less than the dollars saved in time, and less than an assistant, people will buy it. Aim for the higher-end market, solve their problems first on their dollar, and later expand downward to everyone else.

I think you misunderstand. The premium edition of email is much like the premium edition of anything else- it's the email you don't have to use, the plane you don't have to fly, the car you don't have to drive, the food you don't have to cook. So I don't know that personal assistants and secretaries are "filling a gap" in the stop-gap sense, but rather they are the solution.

If you want to capitalize on it, do like a chauffeur company would do, but with email.

Peter Drucker said: "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."

So an entrepreneur tackling this problem would already have at least one prospective customer, thus they'd immediately be in business. And who knows, maybe something "big" grows out of it (e.g. maybe you discover there's a big market for this in the enterprise space).

That's only $10/month/user for a family of five. Come up with reasonable limits to ensure enough revenue (eg. max 10 users per plan).

The idea that households would pay $50/month for email is a bit of a stretch given that the alternative is free email that works pretty damn well.

I am talking about this service that pg thinks needs to replace email. I do agree with him that people currently use email in a way it was not intended to (todo list, sending files, etc), and that surely there must be a better way of doing these tasks, that would be worth $50/month, while getting rid of the limitations of email such as attachment size limits.

In fact I know I am right, because the reason we, in 2012, still have no easy way to share large files between friends and family members, is precisely because the storage and bandwidth costs are higher than the cost of email.

How many services do you yourself pay for today on a monthly basis? I can count mine on one hand. To get $50 from me every month you better have a life-changing service.

For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well.

Perhaps email is perceived as a problem just because it gets tons of "face time" with us every day. I'd leave it alone and focus on one of the countless unsolved problems in the world.

It is, but only in terms of what we think of email in today's usage. I think the next step will be where you can make the messages dynamic which would basically allow you to receive/deliver an interface to an app. Of course with all that power comes the issue of how to control it, but that would be an interesting problem to solve. Imagine instead of getting a notification email for an update on a Basecamp todo list, you would see the actual todo list and could manage right from your inbox.

Emails can send HTML and JS, there's nothing innovative about it. You only need to convince developers to add JavaScript sandboxes to their email clients.

If you wouldn't pay for it, then why would you expect others to pay for it?

It really depends on the context. When thinking about something for the masses, you are one very particular data point. You want evidence that lots of people would pay for something.

If you are building something for people like you and:

- there are lots of people like you, and you can make it very cheap

or

- you ARE paying tons of money for it already, and it could be better and cheaper (e.g. travel)

then you may be on to something.