All,<p>I rcenty launched my side project https://backmail.io . I really thought my side project solved a painpoint in lot of people's live. There is no easy way to get a backup of your gmail content. Gmail takeout is very slow, and you cant have a regular backups using that. This tool also works for the Gsuite users, so when you have a componay provided email account in google cloud, you can easily take a backup when you leave the company without any hassle. Since there are very few users for this service, i had decided to shut down the service.<p>However i would like to know what i did wrong? Should i have done some market research before implementing this? There was some serious discussions in the HN about easier way to move away from gmail, or take a regular backups of the gmail, which i thought was an validation to the idea. Should i have done something more? If so, any pointers / advice would be very helpful? Should i have put more effort marketing??<p>Any advice would be really grateful!!<p>Thanks,
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1) I alrady have a hard time trusting Google/Microsoft/etc with my email let alone another third party.<p>2) For local backups, IMAP/POP works relatively well already.<p>I don't see how this would work as a standalone product. Maybe if it was a feature in something like Fastmail or a full-fledged office suite, it would be more appealing.
Have you ever heard the phrase vitamin vs painkiller? Do a quick google.<p>> solved a painpoint in lot of people's live<p>Your product is a vitamin, it's a nice thing to have, not a need to have. Personal email backup is not a pain point—It's a nice to have and it's much harder to sell vitamins than it is to sell painkillers.
Same as others, I have only heard about this today.<p>Did it work with Yahoo email? I have had my yahoo email far longer, and I would really like to migrate the data.<p>How long did you have the service up? I do not think you should quit now, just work on telling a better story. Things take far longer to bite than we imagine
I can only speak for myself, but I'd never heard of this product until now.<p>Even if I had, I've never had a reason to move my email off Gmail.<p>Anything important enough to need a backup of I just manually save to my cloud drive that's synced to my local computer.
I only heard about this today. But I would not be a customer probably.<p>I think gmail is stable enough, I never thought of losing emails.<p>I have used gmail for a long time, it really documents my life. one day, if I lose my gmail account, I will feel sad. but those emails are less than 0.01 percent of all the emails in the account. it isn't worth signing up a service for that 0.01 percent I guess.<p>Overall, regarding the idea, I feel that it is like selling an insurance for a very specific rare disease.