sharedinbox.com – Day 1

We’re all really excited to be working on a new idea, sharedinbox.com.

We started developing the idea last week over a quick lunch.  We took along a couple of A4 pads and some sharpie markers and sketched up the concept of a far simpler online customer support app.

The result of our meeting was that we wanted a customer service app where:

• The customer interface is simply email
• Operators know how to use it without training
• Operators are encouraged to give the best customer experience possible

I sent these brief ideas to Jason from 37signals asking for a quick fire response. He responded to my email almost straight away with this one liner:

“You’re not crazy – there’s likely a very large market for something simple.”

This got us thinking – how can we strip this idea down even further in to something even simpler?  We were already thinking simple – but what was the essence of it? Answer: A shared inbox.

Work started this morning and in just one day we’ve already made a lot of progress.  Users can register, login and create mailboxes.  The inbox screens are designed – straight from paper to HTML. We’ve started this blog, set up twitter accounts, set in motion a marketing site, figured out the pricing model – and produced a short film.

By the end of the week we hope to have a working app where we can send and receive emails from a shared inbox.

On the technical side we’re going to start with Rails 3 beta 4 (with jquery) – and see how this goes.  So far today it’s been a smooth ride and no major hurdles. It’s all mostly familiar with just a few new syntaxes to get used to.

Here’s the film of us in the office today – it’s a bit crude but we’re building an app here too you know..!

Shared Inbox Day 1 from Pigment on Vimeo.