Inspiration

My inbox is a mess. Both personal and work email accounts. Hundreds of unread messages sitting in either one. I like sorting my emails, but I hate the work that goes into it! Every new email is a distraction... In the end, email kills my productivity. I wanted a solution so I thought why not make the sender do the all the hard work for me? And I went with it :)

What it does

Mailfriendly is basically a tool that makes the sender sort out your inbox for you by forcing him/her to fill out extra info like a contact form. The client then uses this info to organize your email into folders so you can choose what emails to read and when based on filters such as priority, topic, project, sender etc.

How I built it

Well, being a non-technical guy I used my business savvy to put together a team. I found a partner (Kristof) to help me get the prototype built. I came up with a simple strategy for us to test our MVP and he threw up a simple test page.

Challenges I ran into

One challenge we had right off the bat was combining context.io api with Drupal. So Kristof and his team of developers actually developed a tool to do that as a project of theirs to promote Drupal. Another challenge was seemingly simpler but nonetheless troublesome: time. We were kind of pressed since we began working on this at a late stage in the competition. And then finding the time between our work and startup projects... But we made it!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that our team worked well together. Putting a team together is never easy and making it work well can be even harder. I'm proud to say we got along and we succeeded in our goal to build an MVP tool for Mailfriendly.

What I learned

Personally, I learned quite a bit about project management. Assigning tasks and deadlines (specially on such a tight schedule) took a bit of learning at the beginning but I got better towards the end.

What's next for MailFriendLy

We believe in testing concepts first so the first step for Mailfriendly is testing with a group of friends; then, with heavy email users. We'd like to make Mailfriendly a bigger email tool but it remains to see what it will look like in the future (email client? mobile? gmail plugin?). Well, there's a lot to do :)