Newton lives on to supercharge your email

Like a phoenix, Newton rises again, and deservedly so. Newton’s community has always been passionate, continuing to support the apps and requesting to keep the service alive.There are not many products that garner this much love and adulation.

Hello World,

Maitrik and Justin here from the NEW CloudMagic/ Newton team. Like you, we LOVE Newton and are excited to take the best professional email client to the next level.

In fact, we love Newton so much that this was our reaction to the news that Newton was going to continue last year.

Here’s Justin reaching out to Newton when they first announced the closure–

And just after a couple of months, we hear this…

It was saved! Well, that didn’t last very long, did it? Like many of you, we were gutted to learn that Newton was shutting down, yet again. This time though, we had to do something. We scrambled to get in touch with Essential as fast as possible. After a rollercoaster of a bidding process, we were lucky enough to be chosen as the new owners of CloudMagic

This wasn’t easy for us. We aren’t a well funded VC backed company. Nor are we a big corporation looking to acquire assets we can use. We are just an indie app development agency that loves building products.

Both Justin and I have years of experience in designing and building beautiful software products for startups and companies. We understand the ins and outs of product design and development but M&A (mergers and acquisitions) was a new rodeo for us.

Lucky for us, the circumstances around the buyout and recent economic situation, accelerated the sale and let us take over ownership of what we think is one of the best apps developed.

We are sure you have many many questions about the future of Newton and what we plan to do with it. After all, Newton has left much to be desired as a business operation for far too long.

Our plan to make Newton successful —

1. A contingency plan to keep Newton going forever
2. Building a stable and steady independent business
3. Add “service” in the SaaS (software as a service) business
4. Add features that increase the lifetime value
5. Better security and privacy around your data
6. …one more thing….rewards and discounts for loyal customers

1. Contingency plan to keep Newton going

We don’t want users to go through what we have been through for the last couple of years. That is why we want to build a contingency plan right out of the gate.

This is the worst-case scenario. If all else fails and something happens to us or our business we’d still want Newton to live on and community to takeover.

We promise to open-source Newton and find a way for self-hosted servers to support the product indefinitely so that your contribution is not wasted.

2. Build a stable independent business

When you approach business through the lens of building a unicorn startup your focus and priorities are different.

We want to turn everything down a notch for Newton and focus on running a successful bootstrapped business that is profitable. Go back to the basics and focus on customers’ happiness.

To achieve all this, we need help and support from the Newton community and users. We know you love the product and have stuck with it for a long time. We just request you give us a chance and stick with us while we turn this ship around.

Newton’s current pricing will help us achieve our vision. Unlike others, we don’t see the need to raise prices. I remember when Newton first announced its pricing. Everyone was shocked that a professional email client would charge $50/year.

In retrospect, that pricing is phenomenal when you look at Superhuman ($360/year), Polymail ($120/year), MailSpring ($100/year), Spike ($70/ year), Spark ($70/Year), Boomerang ($60/Year), Airmail ($10/year).

3. A stronger community and bring services into the SaaS (Software as a service) business

For the past few years, Newton’s support has been terrible, that’s no exaggeration. From the lack of communication, barely any bug fixes, and a total lack of understanding of the needs of users, it hasn’t been a very great experience trying to support the app.

You’ll be able to reach out directly to us — Justin (Justin@newtonhq.com) and myself (Maitrikvk@newtonhq.com) — personally with any issues you find or features.

We will embed customer support right inside of the apps and build an open voting platform for feature requests.

We want to address these concerns head-on by introducing pro-grade customer support to Newton services. Customer support that our competitors charge for.

Newton community needs more engagement and love. To build a community-driven product, we want to be active listeners and understand your requests directly. We will introduce a community discussion forum to create a place for Newton users to discuss their ideas.

4. Future roadmap. Building on top of an already great product.

Both Justin and I have a background in designing products centered around what user needs. This experience is going to be fundamental in turning Newton into a productivity-focused email platform for professionals and teams. Before we go there though, we want to focus on cleaning house for the next 6 months or so.

First, we’re going to focus deep diving into the codebase in order to understand over a million lines of code. This way, we’ll iron out many bugs and crashes that have been bothering you for the longest time. And then…

Within three to six months, we plan to deliver new features most requested by the users. Namely — dark mode, fixing Superchargers, and more.

We will also start working on decreasing the gap our competitors have on us by Supercharging the email experience.

5. Privacy and security

As users of Newton ourselves, we want to ensure Newton has some of the best privacy standards. We want to make it one of the selling points for Newton.

We are changing privacy policies and moving towards GDPR compliance with immediate effect.

You can easily delete your account and take ownership of your data faster than before. We are also looking into integrating PGP based encryption, so stay tuned.

6. One more thing.. an offer for existing and past users.

To thank the Newton community for helping us decide better, we are introducing a special offer for the month of May–

1. If you are already subscribed to Newton app, we will add 3 more months of Newton subscription for free.
2. If you had canceled your subscription and want to come back, then we will give you a 20% discount. Just reach out to hello@newtonhq.com.
3. If you refer a friend and they subscribe to Newton they get 20% discount and you get 3 more months of Newton.

You can now subscribe to Newton from our home page or from here.

Looking forward to supercharging the email for busy professionals and teams.

Thank you.

Background on

Justin (Twitter)

Justin Mitchell is co-owner at Newton Mail and CEO of Yac.com. He also leads a product design agency at SoFriendly. He is a serial entrepreneur who loves helping other startups build user-focused products. He is working to change how people work remotely at the Yac, an asynchronous communication platform.

Maitrik (Twitter)

Maitrik Kataria is the CEO of Newton Mail and Partner at Simform. He is a product designer by trade and has over 8 years of experience in helping startups with the intersection of marketing, growth, and UX design.

Simform

Simform is a software development company with a mission to help successful companies extend their tech capacity. Since 2010, Our team of 300+ experts has helped businesses through our development services. Simform’s extended development team model helps with custom software development, QA and Testing, API design and integration, and product development services.

SoFriendly

SoFriendly creates engaging experiences designed to drive growth for the world’s leading brands. We’ve worked with clients including Georgia Pacific, Google, and Hilton. We also build and launch our own products as a team such as Yac, DraftXR, and Syrup.

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