I thought about writing something to do this a few years ago. The issue which I ran into that always stopped me from doing it is that you need to integrate every medium a person uses for it to be really useful.
I also suspect that outside of business contacts I view lack of communication with someone as a signal that I'm not that interested in talking to them.
That's just an excuse to quit. So you start with email. Email is the baseline. The important thing is to have a clear vision and start building shit.
If it's really important to integrate other services, you can do that later. (I don't think it is, personally. At least not for the kind of people who would pay you money.)
At the time -- this was like 5-7 years ago -- I wasn't terribly interested in startups and doing school work or hanging out with my friends probably seemed like a better use of my time. I actually solved a lot of that problem on a later project where I needed to write parsers for the log formats of a bunch of IM/IRC clients, but now I really am not interested in getting reminders about who I haven't talked to.
What this sort of thing does really bring home for me is that in terms of trying to do a startup through y-combinator I should probably ignore whether I believe there is a market for something as long as I think some people would find it useful.
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I thought about writing something to do this a few years ago. The issue which I ran into that always stopped me from doing it is that you need to integrate every medium a person uses for it to be really useful.
I also suspect that outside of business contacts I view lack of communication with someone as a signal that I'm not that interested in talking to them.
That's just an excuse to quit. So you start with email. Email is the baseline. The important thing is to have a clear vision and start building shit.
If it's really important to integrate other services, you can do that later. (I don't think it is, personally. At least not for the kind of people who would pay you money.)
At the time -- this was like 5-7 years ago -- I wasn't terribly interested in startups and doing school work or hanging out with my friends probably seemed like a better use of my time. I actually solved a lot of that problem on a later project where I needed to write parsers for the log formats of a bunch of IM/IRC clients, but now I really am not interested in getting reminders about who I haven't talked to.
What this sort of thing does really bring home for me is that in terms of trying to do a startup through y-combinator I should probably ignore whether I believe there is a market for something as long as I think some people would find it useful.
Exactly, since email is not the only mode of online communication this isn't all encompassing.