Brandon Foo

A lot of the features are the features that they're looking for and they aren't getting from their normal Gmail setup.

So a lot of our users who try out Polymail end up loving the experience so much, realizing it's actually so much more productive and better for their workflow that they end up sticking with us.

So walk us through kind of a timeline.

What year did you found the business in?

Yeah, so my co-founders and I started Polymail in about fall of last year, actually about exactly one year ago.

2015, fall?

Fall 2015.

We launched sort of an early Mac prototype on Product Hunt in December of last year.

And that actually ended up becoming the number three most upvoted product of all time on Product Hunt in one Mac after the year.

So we started seeing really tremendous traction sort of from day one back in December.

So that was actually completely pre-YC.

What we did was, you know, when we first started building Polymail, we were in private alpha at the time and we started building kind of this little community of people who we'd invite to try out the app.

And we actually had this Slack team that we built and people would just add

them there and kind of communicate with them on a daily basis and really get a sense of, you know, what were they looking for out of, you know, an email solution and how can we solve that.

And over time, we kind of grew this community to several hundred people.

And we kind of developed actually a pretty close relationship with a lot of these early users.

So when we went on to Product Hunt and launched, we got a lot of sort of our early supporters from that alpha community.

To come onto Product Hunt and kind of, you know, leave comments and leave these reviews about how, you know, we were both really great to work with as a product team and really dedicated to solving the problems and actually building a solution that worked and was what they were looking for.

Yeah.

So we let them know, you know, a day in advance that, hey, we're launching on product time tomorrow.