ProductWala: Spark

Spark is my primary email client on iOS and Mac. Email is inherently hard, and I think that Spark solves a lot of the mindset and transactional issues with traditional email. Let’s see how they do that.

Primary Persona: Bulk-email Bill. Bill is a consulting associate and gets a ton of emails every day across his personal and official email IDs. Bill has multiple newsletters he has subscribed to, does most of his shopping online, and gets important work tasks through email. Bill biggest frustration is that to avoid false negatives, he spends a lot of time going through non-essential emails, thus increasing false positives.

Secondary Persona: Junk Jim. Jim gets tons of junk email, and doesn’t organize his emails in any particular way. This means that his email is a mess, and isn’t the most reliable way to be in touch with him. He also has emails that he sends out and then forgets to follow-up on. Email is just broken for Jim.

Spark Features:

• Spark’s vision is to reinvent email, calling itself ‘The Future of Email’. Let’s see how they do that:
• Smart Unified Inbox: Spark breaks up your emails into multiple buckets (personal, newsletter, pins, read). This instantly solves the issue of spam/newsletters etc getting mixed in with important personal emails.

• Snooze/Reminder to Follow-Up: Spark also allows easy swipe actions to snooze incoming emails to some other day or time, or also to set a reminder for outgoing emails that will remind the user if they don’t get a reply to the email by a certain day or time.
• Smart Search: Spark allows searching for emails natural language search such as “attachment from David”, “link from Sam sent yesterday”, or things even more complicated.
• Smart Notifications: THIS IS GOLDEN! Spark does the heavy lifting of figuring out which important emails to notify you about and which to just pass into your inbox without a notification. Don’t worry, you can switch this off if you want, but in my experience this works really well in identifying important emails.

• Teams: This is a new part of Spark that allows users to identify their teams. Team features include private comments, shared drafts, links to emails, etc. This greatly boosts the productivity within teams using Spark.
• Other: Spark ofcourse has a ton more features such as easy attachments, services integrations, personalization, send later, Apple Watch app, etc. Here, the underlying theme is that Spark is highly customizable to the user’s workflow rather than forcing the app’s philosophy on the user.

Business Model:

Spark offers its consumer apps for free, and only charges for its advanced Spark for Teams features. Thus, Spark is following a similar business model to Dropbox, Slack and other consumer-to-enterprise product types. By delivering exception value to consumers, Spark is getting these consumers to get Spark be adopted by their organization. From the website, it looks like Spark is targeting Startups, Sales teams, Executives, and Consulting firms.

Key Metrics:

• DAUs and MAUs
• User growth, retention, average daily usage
• Consumer vs. Team user split
• NPS/C-SAT

Improvements/Ideas:

1. Voice-app integrations. By integrating with Alexa, Siri and Google Home, Spark will be able to deliver important emails to consumers in an intuitive method, and also enable users to manage their email using their voice services.
2. Instant Unsubscribe: Allow users to easily and instantly unsubscribe from email newsletters that they are no longer interested in receiving.
3. Learning of behaviors: Since Spark prides itself on being the most personalized email client, such a ML of a user’s usage would help streamline their actions daily.
4. Summary notifications: To avoid missing any emails, Spark should send out a consolidated notification every evening of any emails that the user hasn’t checked through the day.
5. Integration with other communication platforms: This is the long-term strategy. On an infinite timescale, all the different forms of communication (email, texting, slack, social media etc.) will start to merge into a continuous spectrum.

Key Risks:

Since Spark is only making money from its Teams product, it must balance developing consumer features to attract top-of-the-funnel with developing Team features to improve revenues.

What's your email client of choice? Have you tried Spark? Let me know.