The fool proof committee

Feb 23, 10am

I was on vacation, and someone was telling me about some Fools’ Day prank he had pulled off on someone. Every year, in the last week of March, we at Newton start discussing a stunt to perform on All Fools’ Day but nothing ever comes out of it. We either never end up with any good idea or we plan to do too many things and nothing happens.

I quickly created a Hangouts group called The fool proof committee with the youngest and brightest Newtonians and threw in some ideas to get the ball rolling.

1. Mac Inbox with 10 panes. AKA Paneful mode.
2. Apple delivery button. Apples instead of Read Receipts notifications.
3. Space edition?
4. Newton with Stories
5. Remove inbox — Make Newton more minimal. People want 3 pane Inbox. But we say No Inbox.

Abhishek Panda: haha. thats a good one

Deepak: Remove inbox, is good 😂

Utkarsh: +1 to Remove Inbox

Vinit: I like removing Inbox… It’ll be like a stripped-down version of Newton. We’ll call it Newton Lite. And obviously it’ll be free.

Me: Mmm No. It should be more expensive. Coz it makes you more productive and saves you from depression.

Karthik: What about 5 tier pricing?

Me: Good Idea. Should be something that can actually be done but we’ll never do.

Rohit Bhat: How about we tell Newton is free now!! Dark humour?

Vivek: No no that’ll create unnecessary confusion

Abhishek: Cool. So this will be only website or in the product too?

Me: No change in product. Just on website and Twitter. Or may be on blog. OK, Panda please take it up and come up with a plan. Should be simple and do-able. We should concentrate on doing something on just Medium and Twitter.

March 6, 4pm

Panda and I have a discussion on how to move forward. We decided to have a product announcement kind of blog post about a new version of Newton without Inbox, available as another payment tier. Panda suggested that we have some more funny features like ‘Schedule mail on a previous date’ etc. Even though I liked his thinking I didn't want to make the prank so obvious. Instead we thought of designing an email app without an inbox. Instead of funny features, that are obvious give-aways, I wanted the new product to have chutzpah. It should be like a real product with audacious features that can technically be done and explained with a very straight face. The reader should really believe it.

Me: As a user I would open Newton to see a blank screen with a ‘I’m feeling lucky’ kind of button to load random emails. Mmm maybe not random emails. What if Newton already knows which email I should read and in what order?

Panda: Machine learning?

Me: Yes. AI.

Panda: Nice. So then it opens the first mail and from there next and previous will load mails based on the queue. And maybe Newton can paraphrase long emails to show the gist so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time reading.

Me: Good idea. And when I reply it should suggest not just words and lines like Google Inbox, but maybe the entire email. Or even better it can reply on its own. Ultimately only bots should be emailing each other. (This is something I had joked about when a friend and I was chatting using just the suggested phrases in Google Allo)

Panda: We should have social proof — people like Elon Musk, Jony Ive, M. G. Siegler and Donald Trump praising it.

Me: Yes so that’s our product. You should start writing as if we are introducing the new product along with screenshots.

March 13, 4pm

Panda shares the first draft with the fool proof committee. A lot of suggestions start pouring in. The name Newton X was not received well. Someone even suggested we should not go in this direction and instead do Stories on Newton. I told Panda not to get distracted and also not to share the draft with anyone till we finish.

I really liked whatever Panda had come up with. We discussed how we can add more buzz words like autonomous email engine, algorithmic queueing, platform, make the world a better place, state-of-the-art, etc. We also decided to drop the 5 tier pricing and instead make it a whopping $99.99 per year for everyone, with a small discount for existing users. Panda went back to take another stab at it.

March 20, 4pm

Panda shares the latest version. Spot on. We decide to keep the name Newton X. Panda picks Elon Musk, James Cameron and Tony Stark for cheeky social proof tweets. Elon Musk saying ‘We have APIs for Tesla integration’ was actually based on the real tweets we get almost every day asking for app integrations and our reply saying “they don’t have APIs”.

March 27, 4pm

Panda starts working on the product mocks. Our resident mock email writer Vivek wrote some amazing stuff along with Panda to go on the mocks demonstrating paraphrasing and reply suggestions. The initial idea was to create animated GIFs to demo the features but some last minute snag made us keep the screens side-side. This made the screens smaller in size and the emails tougher to read on lower pixel density screens. Most probably everyone missed the email content, so here they are.

March 31, 4pm

Our backend engineering head Sabyasachi looks at the final draft just to see if everything is technically correct. He suggests some small changes and the post is ready to go live.

Karthik and Co. make the master plan for Saturday, April 1; when to go live, when to tweet, how to engage on social media and support. The whole thing was kept a secret from the rest of the Newton team. No-one including Rohit had a clue. So we decided to send an internal mail also introducing Newton X as this new thing developed by a secret ‘Moonshot’ team within Newton.

April 1, 7pm IST

Newton X goes live.

Newton on Twitter