Sorted
Wayne Silberman, a serial founder from South Africa, saw that many people treat their email inbox as a to-do list, even though email was never built for that job. As he put it, "so many people use their email inboxes as a to-do list. But as you know, it's not really designed for that." Sorted was built to close that gap by bringing task management directly into the tool people already use every day.
Sorted works inside Gmail. Users can drag and drop emails onto to-do lists, rename subjects, add reminders, and merge threads into groups. Wayne argues that adding a task from email to Trello means constant context switching, so the goal was to bring a Trello-style experience into the communication tool itself.
The technical challenge was performance. Running a full web application inside Gmail, which is already heavy, meant the team had to "jump through a lot of hoops to just get the performance right." The team has three full-time developers on the product. The company launched around 2014, though Wayne said it never had a formal launch date. An early Lifehacker story gave users a way to install it without an invite code, which pushed the team into customer support and growth mode before they felt ready.
Sorted has no paying customers yet. Its growth has been organic. Wayne said "all of our traffic has been organic and all of our acquisition has come from user referral," with some press exposure from Product Hunt and Lifehacker. By December 2016 the free user base was roughly 200,000. Sorted ranked as the number one Gmail app on Product Hunt with about 2,700 upvotes.
What worked was the product's strong fit for people with heavy task loads, along with organic referrals and a clear positioning against Chrome extensions that push tasks into other apps. What didn't work was monetization. Wayne said the company is "not quite in growth mode yet" and is still trying to crack the core need and make the product sticky. Habit change is also slow: email is a deeply established habit, and Gmail already handles most tasks for most users.
Sorted is free today. Wayne plans to monetize through industry-specific power packs, starting with areas such as recruiting for small businesses. The company is funded by a separate, profitable mobile content business that generates north of $1 million a year in revenue, and the team has put in about $500,000 to $600,000 so far. Wayne is looking to raise about $1 million to accelerate growth, and he is also building a Slack product.
- •Sorted targets a real behavior, using the inbox as a to-do list, which means users are adopting a workflow they already have rather than learning a new app.
- •Working inside Gmail removes context switching, which makes the product more useful than Chrome extensions that send tasks to other apps.
- •Organic referrals and press pickups produced 200,000 free users without paid acquisition, which suggests strong word-of-mouth among people with heavy task loads.
- •Funding from a separate profitable business let the team stay independent and focus on long-term habit change instead of short-term monetization.
- 1.Find a behavior users already perform in a tool they use daily, such as using email as a to-do list, and build the feature inside that tool instead of asking users to switch.
- 2.Prioritize performance inside the host platform, since slowing down a tool users rely on daily creates immediate churn.
- 3.Make the product easy to share and recommend so early users bring in new users through referrals.
- 4.Use an existing profitable business to fund development so you can keep the product free and grow until the monetization model is clear.
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