Email First strategy
Though I have explained previously why email is the most important “personal place” online, I realized that people take email for granted and don’t give it much attention. Maybe because it’s the first electronic mass communication medium. It’s somehow normal to be so common that is received less attention.
When I was trying to attract one of our very early investors I presented him the Proemtheus Project from A-Z, with emphasis on the email as the core. The base upon which to build other services.
He was very excited about the future plans especially the [online] identity, and told me this is what I should emphasize.
I realized then that email is so common that probably most of the people will think the same: why waste time to update email? It somehow works right now so let it be.
He understood, and become an early investor, after I gave him two examples on why email is important and the strategy should be Email First:
1. most people treasure their FB account, it’s their billboard, their presence in the online society. But if you don’t have an email in the first place you cannot sign up for a FB account. Sure right now you can use your mobile number instead, but I doubt many people are using that one.
2. for online banking, again you need an email to use it. Maybe not with every bank but most of them require an email at sign up.
Email is the center of our serious communication: bank, utility suppliers, other accounts etc. Ultimately and inevitably almost all communication goes thru there.
If someone breaks into your email account has a great chance to get access to the other relevant accounts. But this scenario works for centralized email, where if you succeed in penetrating the server you have access to the whole pot. There have been cases of compromised servers.
If the email is decentralized, well you need to break one account at the time. Simply it’s not worth the trouble.
Security can be better enforced in a decentralized system. Proemtheus is also developing a new security system that protects even from ransomware. You can read about that on our website https://proemthe.us in the GIFT section.
After security and control, it’s about features. It’s rather hard to introduce new features in a centralized medium because email service providers must consider that feature relevant: keep users on their platform and give them a chance to monetize that user.
In the decentralized system Proemtheus is building, users will have access to developers that will create and deploy features. It will be similar to a software marketplace.
Need a feature? Post your request, maybe others will join you and then developers will jump to provide the solution.
On this platform, even established software companies will consider the pay-per-use besides license and subscription.
These are just a few reasons why Proemtheus will work on an Email First strategy: update the email so you have the core of user communication independent, and then we can build new services.
As a final thought of this post I also told our early investor that even if we skip the update of email and go directly to building the [online] identity it will be useless for users. Why? Simply because today and on short term you have nowhere to use it.
Things need to be updated and constructed step by step.
And we believe email is the first step since everyone that activates online has an email account and it’s using it daily.
