Paul Buchheit built Gmail's first prototype by reusing Google Groups code, then added an "Are you happy?" prompt to gather feedback. He converted users one-on-one until 100 people loved it, then expanded. His advice: startups should aim for deep appeal to a small group before broadening.
Chapters
The very first version of Gmail I wrote in a day and it wasn't very good. But I had previously been working on Google Groups, which was like a Usenet search at the time. Now it's something different. But I took the code that I'd been working on for that and then I just took all of my email and shoved it into that database, into that indexing engine. And then I kind of had an email search.
So your first thing was just an email you could search?
Yeah. And so then I emailed that out to the engine engineering team and like, hey, I built this email search. Let me know what you think. And then people reply like, yeah, it's okay, but it would be better with my email instead of yours. So I'm like, all right, I have a feature request. So version 0 only searched my email. And I figured, I mean, a lot of our email is in common, so it sort of works, right? We're on a lot of the same.
Mailing list or whatever everyone cc'd.
So yeah, so then version two is just like, it indexes other people's email. So I send that out and then people like, all right, this is cool. Now I want to be able to reply to one of the messages. All right, feature request. And so the whole thing was just iterating, just step by step trying to make something that would make people happy. And so we actually had as our kind of like launch gate, this idea that we needed to have 100 happy users inside of Google because we hadn't launched it to the world, obviously. And so I actually embedded in the interface, this thing would pop up and be like, are you happy? Yes or no? And it would get a list. Then I would look at of who said yes and who said no. And then I'd go to all the no's and be like, what's it going to take to make you a happy user? Right? And actually just get them one at a time. And some of the people, they're like, it basically has to be a clone of Outlook. I'm like, well, you're never going to be a happy user. But anyway, people, it would just be like a minor thing where like, I just need to add one feature or like fix a bug or something and then they'll be happy. And so we kind of slogged through like just one user at a time until we got to like 100 happy users. So one of the ideas is like, when you're starting out building something new, especially if you're kind of going into an established category like email, like, literally email was like 30 years old when we started on it, right? So there was a lot of history and a lot of opinions about how email should be. People would sometimes angrily tell me I'm, like, doing it wrong because we made the reply on top instead of the bottom, or weird stuff like that. And so there's all this history. So it's pretty much impossible to enter a space like that and make a thing that appeals to everyone. And if you try to do that, what you end up making is just like a mediocre product that nobody really loves. And so my philosophy and what we try to get all the startups to do is figure out a thing that will just have really deep appeal, even if it's to, like, a tiny fraction of people. If you can make that small fraction of people just, like, obsessively love what you're doing, it's easier to then grow that group, you know, because, like, there's always people at the margin where if I just make something slightly better, they're going to join into that group. So it's easier to start with that, like, that deep but narrow appeal and then broaden it over time than it is to start with just sort of like, broad meh, and then try to, like, convert people from meh to, like, loving your thing in mass.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that lately, just in terms of retention. Like, if you get 100 people who never leave, that's a great place to start. Then if you have thousands of people, all of whom churn eventually, yeah.
