A Conversation With Nicolas Toper of InboxBooster
You’re caught in a tug-of-war between AI and human knowledge. On one side, the colossal email inbox providers fighting to keep billions of inboxes at least partially free of spam, scams and junk. On the other side, every legit playing-by-the-rules brand using the last un-gated digital channel to talk with their customers and prospects, enlisting the help of human and AI experts to get their messages in front of customers.
The tug-of-war is called ‘deliverability’, and this in-depth conversation with expert Nicolas Toper gives a glimpse of the mess on that digital battlefield. “…our job is to basically understand what this AI is doing. So human people can do something about it.”, Nicolas said.
It’s not as simple as AI-vs-human, of course. There are bad actors, good actors. Information that the latter can use to stay good can be used for bad, and vice versa. Email is a self-policing industry — there’s no United Nations Office of SPAM enforcement. So companies like InboxBooster have a vital — if daunting — role to play in helping companies navigate the battlefield.
Wondering how to keep getting your messages through? Check out this conversation, and check out InboxBooster.com.
TRANSCRIPT
A Conversation With Nicolas Toper of InboxBooster
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[00:00:00]
Matthew Dunn: Good morning, this is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of The Future of Email. My guest today, Nicolas Topper of Inbox Booster, and we just had five minutes to chat before this, so this is partially get acquainted and partially learn about your company. Nicolas, welcome. Thank you. Tell everybody about inbox Booster first, and then I'll ask you a bunch of questions, on completely other topics,
So, inbox Booster
Nicolas Toper: is a tool to tell you why and why you're in spam and what you need to do to get out the spam box. So we're going to we're going to do test test placements. So inbox placements, we're gonna tell them, Hey, this is your spa. And then we're going to tell you why. So we're going to analyze your email.
I'm going to tell you, you have a reputation problem. Your DNS is misconfigured or some part of your content has the, which are those parts are triggering spam filters. This is also [00:01:00] a free on like most of those tools is free. We paid, we have a pay as you want model. And for people who are customers who needs a little bit more hands on approach, then we charge.
That's basically our model. We can get it you can test it for free. And when usually it's for, for, I'd say 80% of the users, it's enough. Wow. Wow.
Matthew Dunn: Interesting place to jump in. Email email marketers and, and email inbox providers and the people at the end of that pipe who are looking at their inbox.
It's a funny global balancing act, isn't it? Yes it is.
Nicolas Toper: And and that's and that's actually interesting and that's why we wanted to, I wanted to work on that business is people cannot have the marketers and email and ESPs like Gmail, they cannot tug of war on trying to, to try to outdo one to one, one another to figure out how we can cannot bypass this temperature or what, how they can prevent it.
But the thing [00:02:00] is unless the thing is there, it doesn't have to be like that. You can just do what they want. And actually you'll be in inbox and you will have a not a lot of problems and you'll enjoy the good deliverability, but you need to understand what they want. And that's kind of the thing.
And what they want, there are a couple of different requirements. And there are very they're not very obscure, but they're very they're, it could be counterintuitive. Let me put it like that. And that's what we're explaining. We're telling you, Hey, you have you have a problem. Here is why he'll go back to that all the time, because you really have three different types of deliverability problems.
The first one is it hasn't, it's a DNS problem or misconfiguration. The second one is it has nothing to do with you. But it's because somebody else did something wrong, and that's why. So for instance, we had a customer, they were in promotion on Gmail, and that's because they had re imported a part of the template from the basic template of MailChimp, and that part was really flagged as a promotion by Gmail.
So [00:03:00] it has nothing to do with them. And the third case, it has anything to do, everything to do with them. And that is kind of the important case. Those cases are handled automatically by Inbox Booster. And the second case is the last case, where it has to do with you, is you need to change your ML practice in a good way or in a better way.
And you need to kind of find a balance where you can still... Get your, get your business goals while you can get to the business goal of the spam filter because the spam filter business goal is really to maximize the page view. So they're trying to remove, their goal is to remove unwanted email unwanted email into results, security problems, which I'm not talking about, like phishing email and spam, and email that you as a person don't want to receive.
So if you're, but the thing is, if you don't want to receive an email there's no way you're going to buy it. To buy from it, you're going to click on it. Yeah. So you shouldn't
Matthew Dunn: send it. Yeah. Yeah. The conundrum, right? I didn't know you exist. I [00:04:00] can't buy from you. If you tell me you exist and I want to buy from you, great.
If you tell me you exist and I don't, I don't care or I didn't want to hear that you exist. Bad, drag you to spam and, and the whole cycle starts over again. So it, it, it, it seems like know thyself, know they market is somewhere near the top of the list of, of things to do well. Yes.
Nicolas Toper: It depends. It depends when you're a startup.
Yes, but at the same time, knowing that you, for instance we're working with some startups, what, and they don't know who they're selling to. Like this is really so what I tell them all the time is send to 10 people or 10 to 50 people. You see if you, if your email is in spam yeah, and you've sent it through inbox booster to check that everything is fine, this really means they don't like it.
So if they don't like it, you're never going to start to that.
Matthew Dunn: Okay. So using, so in that, in that scenario, you're. You're helping them really [00:05:00] follow solid testing practices, solid, you know, experimentation, if you
Nicolas Toper: will. Yes. And that's, that's kind of the idea where spam filters or this can, there is there, I mean, spam filters and marketers are not at odds with each other because if email is in inbox, it means people will buy from it, from you, or they'll be interested.
So if you're able to identify that precisely. Yeah, then you're good because then you know, it doesn't cost you anything to send to people who are not interested. That's why it's such a spam filter to kind of add checks and balances. But that's but one, but it's actually in your interest. It's, I mean, it's not such a big problem because you, if you know that a specific segment is not interested.
Just don't email them. But then you need to have a very need to be careful to what you're sending. You need to have your segment. You need to do a little bit of statistics on top of that, but it's totally possible. And the first step is to know why you're in spam, which is what we're telling you. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. In a lot of cases, it has nothing to do with [00:06:00] you. So the problem is the ecosystem is a little bit blocked because you cannot have this feedback loop. ISP telling you, Hey, you're in spam because your email is wrong because they're not going to give you enough granularity, which is what
Matthew Dunn: we're providing you.
Okay. Okay. Gotcha. So you're helping to remove some of that awful black box sensation about deliverability issues. Like, Ooh, wait a minute. We're not, no one's seeing this. Why? Well, good luck. Good luck finding that out. Yeah. That's a complicated problem. Next. Yeah,
Nicolas Toper: that's exactly, that's exactly what we're doing.
And because, and then you'll, and you'll know what to work on and where it comes from and that will tell you how to fix
Matthew Dunn: it. Wow. So I have a background question that occurred to me as I was reading your LinkedIn profile and some of the interesting things you've done. You, you just spent some time in Y Combinator, correct?
A few years ago. Good, good experience. Yeah. It
Nicolas Toper: was very interesting for me because I come from a totally different background. Like when I created my [00:07:00] first startup, it was literally to pay my rent because so I'm coming from France and in France when you don't have like a good degree and you're not very known and all that, it's hard to find a job because kind of permanent employment.
So. At my time, people were creating companies because they couldn't get the job, not because they could get the job and they wanted to get rich. So my first start with email was really because I needed to pay my rent. And and so it's a good one. So it's, it's, it's, it's the best one. , . I had actually no, no money.
And we built and yes, I built an E S P, which was kind of the new, now it's very common, but at that time it's an relay, like some good analyst people. And because we were first of the market, able to grow pretty big without a, without capital at all. 'cause we, wow.
Matthew Dunn: Wow. Yeah. Good for you. In the, in at least partially France.
France being a central market for you, right? No access
Nicolas Toper: was the US was the biggest market. Market was the us. Interesting. Yes, the biggest market was the us. And but because so we were just a pretty good, [00:08:00] but we, but I literally had to borrow to someone that $1,000 to register the company because I really had no money.
So it was really bad. Bad. Yeah. Yeah.
And, and then the business were really fast. And we had to stop accepting users for two years. 'cause we had to rebuild the. Because in France, it was very hard to raise funding. All right. No, I suppose it's possible to raise funding. It's very hard to raise funding at good terms.
So so we're making like I don't know, like 10 or 15K per month. And we had someone offering me 50K for 15% of the company. I don't think so. And he was like, yeah. And that was the, basically I could find that was, it actually made sense. So at that time it was like, like, oh, okay, I'll just stay small and that's it.
Right. So we grew to to over a million dollars of revenue. And then I sold the, and then I sold the business after for a couple of years. Nice.
Matthew Dunn: Finished. Congrats. That's that's, you know, for starting with I gotta pay the rent. That's that's a wonderful story. Thank you. Right. Doesn't always happen, does it?
Nicolas Toper: I think it's easier than it looks. Yeah. [00:09:00] Yes. Cause when you have to pay the rent and you don't have, you kind of have to, so the motivation is actually maximum. Yeah. You don't have a lot of money, but that means that every mistake you're going to do are not going to be very expensive. Also everything is cheap.
Like for after a one or two months, we're making like 3k per month of revenue. I was like, Oh yeah, I'm really big. I mean, I'm making more than I could get as an employee, which was what I could get as an employee. So so I'm like, Oh, this is cool. This is awesome. But if you're if you're out of Google and you have like a really big paycheck things look more complicated because you have more options.
So this is kind of the, the pain of having too many options when you're kind of, when you have your back under against the wall, it's a little bit I'm not sure it's easier, but I know there is not a lot of decision to be made because
Matthew Dunn: you know what you have to do. It's very, very, very focusing. I've I've, I've run companies that are VC funded.
I've run companies that are bootstrapped. I like bootstrap because there's a, there's a, there's a clarity about [00:10:00] what you're doing. All right. And it's, it's, it's usually it's very personal, right? Got to make this work. Why? Rent, tuition, whatever, right? Got to make this work. Not because I'm going to get yelled at by the guy who loaned me a bunch of money.
Cause you can live getting yelled at. You can live with getting yelled at. And it's not pleasant, but so what? Bootstrap, you got to make it work. So you drop into Y Combinator and here's my Y Combinator question. Y Combinator, for better or worse, I, I, my mental picture is cutting edge, really interesting startups.
You don't usually put email in a sentence with those other two. Were they like, what do you mean you're going to focus on email at Y Combinator? Or were they...
Nicolas Toper: So actually we went in with a compiler startup, but they have companies doing email actually. It's not it's not really a problem per se.
No, like email is email is a big deal. It's very much under appreciated. But email is a big deal. I mean, [00:11:00] there is a couple, a lot of podcasts like yours about that. There are like lots of publications about that. It's just very old, but so is internet. So is the web. It's it's just it's, it's very under, and also it's an oligopoly of a couple of providers like Gmail, Outlook.
Somebody else . So it's but it's the only open network. I mean, if you look at, if you've heard everything about web three, like from last year email is already that. Yes. So it's underappreciated. Yes. It, it's already distributed network, it's permissionless and all that. So you already have a lot of factors.
Yes. So it's just very underappreciated and it's kind of the only open network. As far as I can tell, or you can email someone, like if I want to email the president of the USA, I can. Yeah. I mean, it's going to answer me. But if I have something to tell him, somebody on his staff is going to read it.
Yeah, this is kind of, and it's owned by no one in the sense [00:12:00] that if I want to open an email server, I can do it. I don't have to ask permission to, or, or, or have a credit card. This is the only this is kind of the only time you've been in that space. And those layers of communication of interpersonal communications has always been critical for the world.
Like fossils before this fossil service, they're all always has been operated by governments because they were important people. There has been a law about government not being allowed to operators and all that. So you're talking about actual very kind of very important elements. Of democracies of the world and email is the only one who can who have, who cannot fit that bill being owned by no one and with this upper network.
So I think people don't realize how important it is. And because of that, so you have Slack, you have alternatives, but if you want to receive an invoice, for instance, like an official notification, 20 years ago, you would have received it in your mail, physical mailbox. Now you're going to receive an email about it.
So so it is important. And and it's [00:13:00] a lot more important that people realize it because it's known by nobody. There is nobody who has a vested interest in explaining that you need to do that it can do better. So the fact that it's cutting edge or not is irrelevant in the sense that if it's not cutting edge, it's because nobody has invested in it.
It's not because there is nothing to do with it. Right,
Matthew Dunn: right, right. Well, I kudos to you. I agree with everything you just said about the the not obvious importance of... That of that particular channel email because because of all the facts you just listed off. There's also no commercial gatekeeper Not really.
There's no commercial gatekeeper saying oh you can use email, but we've decided to raise the price That's a big deal.
Nicolas Toper: Yes, and that's, I totally agree. And that is why and that's why we're trying to kind of fix the situation. And the goal of this company is to kind of make it more known, but also add some stuff.
Let me give you another example. Everybody's talking about AI. About how you're going to kind of learn how to [00:14:00] manage our AI overload. Or a future AI overlord, but that's literally and precisely what is a spam filter. And that's our job is to basically understand what this AI is doing. So human people can do something about it.
So this is already what we're doing. So it's, so when you're saying it's not cutting edge. It's just that it's not a tech crunch type of innovation. People don't care, but they buy, first of all, which is in a way the metric that matters. And it's important, which is the second metric that matters.
Now we probably need to, as a, as an ecosystem, as an industry, we absolutely need to do a better job of explaining how important it is.
Matthew Dunn: Well, we need to do a better job explaining how important it is. And we also need to do a much better job of reminding people how incredibly huge a channel it is. I've seen various studies about the volume of web page views, and the volume of this, and the volume of that, and da da da da.
And [00:15:00] they usually leave email off the chart. Because it's so damn big, almost everything else would disappear. We shove 320 billion emails a day around the planet. It's like, don't bother me telling me about your social network growing its peanuts by comparison. And it's so easy to forget because it's been around a long time and because everyone's got an inbox and they're used to doing it, et cetera, like we're a little snow blind, right?
Like, Oh yeah, it's just email. Hang on a second. That is one huge complicated channel you're talking about there.
Nicolas Toper: What's true though is in India they have less email and in chat they don't, they don't use email. But, but in, in the, in the part of the world and in in Africa, a lot of people are using email and they're okay with it, and there is no and that's normal.
So this is kind of there is nothing the, the privacy tools are really antiquated. Like for instance, we really the tools are antiquated and they're also to kind of rebuild it. That's more the thing. But if you do, the people will come and there is no there is no question. And again, [00:16:00] I mentioned I mentioned this example of a couple of companies going to several hundreds of millions of revenue by using old average email.
They're just not going to tell you about it because they don't want people to copy them. But this is really how they do it. So it's it's a big deal. I mean, Groupon, now it's a bit old, but that's how they used to grow big. Or even if you think about Facebook, they used to grow big with invitation.
So this was the big deal for them at that time. It was a very important problem. So how do you, so it is still it's something to grow off and it's important. On top of being from a business point of view, it's important for the world because you don't want your kind of communication layer to be owned by a gigantic corporation that can decide to shut you down at any time.
So this is kind of the type of problem we're trying to, where we
Matthew Dunn: want to fix. Yeah, or in, by contrast, right, China, specifically as a market, email is hardly used at all. And WeChat, I believe, is the [00:17:00] predominant channel and the owner there is the government. They get to say everything that goes on. Yes, but
Nicolas Toper: that's the design of their system in in in the democracies part of the world there is actually this there is another design, which is if you want to talk to someone, you need to be able to do it.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah.
Nicolas Toper: And if you're, and if you're not able to, then you need to kind of have a reason to do it. And it's kind of important because like for instance I've seen the Republican national. I think that's the name. They, they, they wanted to sue Google because they were getting, getting money in spam at Google and they had on Gmail and they had no reason, they don't understand what to do.
So the thing was dismissed and all that, but this is still the type of problem that that happens. Or in France, I remember during the presidential election, everybody was trying to email everybody else and the opt in law in this case don't apply because if you're a French citizen, you need to receive, to be able to receive the the electoral propaganda from every party.
[00:18:00] So you can choose to not read them, but you need to be able to access them. So how do you reconciliate that with with with the factor with with spam filters and the fact that it's a democracy, because my point is you need to receive those emails. Before you used to receive them in in physical mailbox.
We still do in France, but you can receive exactly the same by email. It would be exactly the
Matthew Dunn: same thing. Yeah, which is. Better, faster, cheaper. So let's let, I want to pick on one particular piece of the equation and I'll preface it by saying I'm, I'm a big user of and fan of many things that Google has done, but the fact that 66 ballpark, 66% of inboxes and now Gmail inboxes makes me.
a bit nervous because it's a big number. It's, it's the, you know, big company in control kind of number that email has stayed free of for a long time. And and the number's going up by the way, [00:19:00] quite, quite nicely, quite dramatically. And I'm like, do I want one company to end up in such a control position over this channel?
I really don't. I really, really don't and I would guess that a lot of what Inbox Booster does is essentially say what the hell's going on in the Gmail inbox, right? That's correct, yes. Yeah, okay. So, are you bothered by that? Is there anything we can do about it?
Nicolas Toper: Yes, that's our next step, but first of all, it's not, as dramatic as it sounds because a lot of those boxes are anti active because you actually need one to activate an Android system. And the second reason is we're actually planning to do so, so we've actually released an open source MTA. So like a computer to some grid and all that, that's OpenShift, you can install and run in your system.
We have customers running on it. And two we're so, and two, we're actually planning to, to, to launch an OpenShift system for, where you can host your email in the normal, like non crazy way where we actually have to run a lot of check on the lines and Unix to make it work. [00:20:00] So this is basically so this is kind of our roadmap here.
And we're starting with Gmail because we want also to understand the, well, because it's a market I know, but this is kind of the next step of what we want to do. We, the way I look at it is you should own your domain, you should own your email address, and then you can switch providers. If you want to, and if you don't want anyone to touch your email to have access to it, then it should be possible.
It used to be possible. Now it's not. So and the problem, and this is kind of a new situation also, because 10 years ago, like email was like a kind of password or just, it's all like what you're Now you actually have a very, very important information for instance, in my, with my personal mailbox, I said like all of my life, my administrative life and often that matters are there, not everything, but if I lose my mailbox, I'm in a big trouble.
Matthew Dunn: Yes. Yes.
Nicolas Toper: So the fact that it's [00:21:00] free from Google is good, but it's also but at the same time there is because it's free, they can decide to shut me down at any time for whatever, whatever reason they want. So, and then, and that first story, so I use the, the pixel for instance, at the smartphone and I've heard that they, they, they had problems when you were sending back the smartphone Google, and some people wanted to charge back, didn't get what they wanted.
And you had no way to talk to them. And when you issued the charge rate and Google shut you down from their service. So this is kind of scary because in my case I would be yeah, my life would be very, very complicated for us. Probably six months to a year. Even probably, maybe even more if I've lost,
Matthew Dunn: Everything.
Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. Yeah. You're absolutely right. It's It's grown invisibly enough, but rapidly enough in the past, what, decade or so, that that footprint of Gmail specifically, that conscious thought about the risk, the locus of control And the real, the lack of, the lack [00:22:00] of really slam dunk alternatives, right, super technical user, you can, I can, migrate stuff, we go, yeah, okay, do all this stuff, it's now in ProtonMail, it's now somewhere else, great, we can do that.
Men on the street, my wife, my mom, no frickin way, right? And their life is sitting in a Gmail inbox. And here's a question. Who owns that?
Nicolas Toper: I think it's Shoe, but they have, I don't think they've read your email. They're saying they don't, but then it's kind of complicated.
Matthew Dunn: But it's kind of complicated, right?
And is it possible to get that thing you own shut off? Yes. So do you really own it?
Nicolas Toper: Yeah, I agree. No, but that's the kind of things we'll talk, but that's why we, as first step, we're explaining why there's spam filter, how spam filter works. You can actually, as a marketer, do it because that's easier because marketers have and they write that decision.
And so the problem, so, because of it, they know how much money they can spend. And because we're even though we like combinator, we're not, like, it's not like we had to raise the 30 million and we could do that. [00:23:00] So we start with that. Then we, and then that's the second step is actually to build an efficient competing tool where exactly where you own your data and you can do what you want with it.
But you need to build an email client, which is more
Matthew Dunn: expensive. Not trivial. Yeah. I had I had a guest a couple of months ago Jacob Wenger from shortwave. Which is an AI driven email client, specifically sits on top of Gmail. And he said a couple things that still stick in my mind. He said email is a great candidate for applying AI technologies and techniques because it's probably the most personal collection of data you've got.
Like you want one collection of data that's you, your inbox is as close to being it as, as, as any single source is. But then he said, any email, building an email client is hard. It's hard because the technologies and protocols are old. The things we throw on top of email are just like [00:24:00] ungodly. I've got a correspondence going with, with some copyright lawyers for another business. And they do everything in email threads. Some of these email threads are months long. And reading them in reverse is like a freaking nightmare. But, like, that's standard operating procedure for lawyers. The things we put email to doing. are a bit shocking.
So, Jacob's point, building an email client, actually, it's surprisingly, surprisingly tough task. That's why they're, they're not that many of them out there.
Nicolas Toper: Really? No, they're not like that. Not a couple of the good ones are very few. And and it's underappreciated, but Not for my point of view, it's valued very well by the market when you actually cannot demonstrate scale and all that.
And it's not definitely not a bad business and and it's it's nothing to go on the front page of TechCrunch to be fair. And that's, I think, more an industry problem on our side. Yes. Collectively better job than a require. But if you look at the figure, like the [00:25:00] money flowing, the, the way it's working and importance of it's, it's actually pretty significant.
And yes, it's hard because if it were easy, then it would've been done
Matthew Dunn: already. Yeah. Yeah. And then, The, the fact that there's no one, no one in charge, which you alluded to really early on, right? No, no government, no big company or whatever. It's a bit of a free for all and anybody that enters the email market, building an ESP, which you have done, building an email client, which Jacob's team has done.
It's like, you've got to figure out how to play in the free for all. And deal with what someone else in that world might throw at you. Oh, we do, you know, we do we do this protocol slightly differently at Google and at Yahoo. We do it that way. You got to, you got to accommodate it because your customer doesn't want to have to care about it.
Okay. That's going to be hard. Yeah. Interesting space.
Nicolas Toper: Yes. But that's also That, that's like I remember, I, I, I talked at some point I talked to to re's founder and he told me that so the Twilio founder, [00:26:00] he built at that time, he built a, a, a fake e s P and Twilio to to, to figure. And she looked at, he, he threw some Google money and Google asked to see who was which business would outperform the other.
And it was the, the iiv r So the phone system with SMS and all that, that's perform email. Like, oh yeah. That's not, because email is something you do when you, I mean, that's obvious. Email is something you do when you have no money. Yeah, because it's, because you can that need to ask permission about it.
Yeah. And this is for $10,000 added. So if you have $10,000, yeah. You need to build to buy some special cars, to do, handle specific phone lines and all that, because that's a barrier. Two, three. So the has no barrier. 23 creates, It's supposed to be a harder ecosystem to operate as a script world that you mentioned because people copy each other all the time.
They're trying to add to one another. But that's also basically free market. And that has been demonstrated to create value for consumers. So so the fact that [00:27:00] people say, oh, yeah, we would prefer to be in a nice place where there is only one big companies taking care of us it's not really how the economy works.
I mean, we've done that path and it's not really good. So, and this is what you're seeing also a little bit with the Gmail and having evolved a lot. It's super slow as an app. So there has been competition popping up, like you mentioned shortwave. There's a super human who's very successful. And there are a couple of others up and coming companies.
And, and that's good. And that's where we want to be. We want people to put money and try to to improve the, the ecosystem. Yeah. And that's actually a good thing. If and that's a good thing. Now, if I want to improve WhatsApp, I don't think I can. Right. And if I'm actually improving WhatsApp significantly, then I'm sure I'm losing my money because Meta will copy me and not do me and there's nothing you can do about it.
Yeah. Like that's a, that's already, that's exactly what it is. You shut down or put the API in a very expensive way. So it's not a common, this is owned by [00:28:00] someone very specific. They want to make money because that's what businesses do. And there is nothing wrong with that. So but then you cannot rely on that email.
There is this kind of beauty in it because it's owned, but it's permissionless. It's owned by no one. So so Spanfield, for instance, in our business, Gmail, Outlooks are doing their job, which is preventing unwanted email from being delivered. Other people were trying to do their job, which is kind of try to circum the span filters with warmup technologies and all that.
Mm-hmm. And we're doing what we feel is the right thing, which is explaining why they, why the span filter took that, made that decision and what you can do to, to handle, to kind of fix it. And which means that you have one side of the problem of the ecosystem that took their own, their defunded their interest
Matthew Dunn: or it's their user's interest.
Nicolas Toper: There is a way to kind of circumvent the spam filter, which has been plugged a couple of months ago, which is the warmup. And there is our way, which is really to try to rebalance everything. This, and for most users, it's really good enough [00:29:00] for some users. It's not going to be good enough until try to look for something.
So you have this System where you can pick whomever you want. And and you can still build good businesses like that. So it's kind of that thing. And again, you don't need to ask permission because we didn't ask Google or Outlook for their permission. Now, we make sure that what we're doing is not going, again, they're uninterested, because for instance, we're trying to serve confidence as spam filters it's not the sort of battle you can win, it's not something you want to do.
This is not something I like and am comfortable doing, but... Some other people are, and they're doing a good job of it, and and there's nothing wrong, I mean my point is it's it's you can do it, and you can just look at what they're doing, and because you're not acting against them, they're not going to shut you down, because they just don't care, because it's not their part of the business.
If I kind of try to get on the territory of WhatsApp or Instagram or whatever. Yeah. At some point they'll, they'll try to do like, I remember, I know a business, they're doing a [00:30:00] video type of Instagram, so we're kind of doing an editor for that. TikTok is doing something similar because it's their, it's their compliments.
So they want, but they made it free because they don't really care because they're like, Oh yeah, if we actually give away this video edition tool and we put like a hundred people on it, then we'll grow our business by 10% and because our businesses were billion that's still that's a huge amount of money, so it's
Matthew Dunn: worth doing it.
Yeah. It's a big number. Yeah. You've got it. You've got to be careful. Where you put your, where you put your development investment, and it's not just a software issue. That's a control issue. Like we, we, we went down the rabbit hole once of. Integrating with a bunch of Facebook's APIs and just keeping up with them trying to stay ahead of, of the law and society was costing us a fortune, like, oh man, we have to tee this up again and apply for permission for that call.
And like, we eventually scrapped it. Because trying to dance to their tune just wasn't worth it after a while. And I'm guessing that's how a lot of Twitter add ons feel right [00:31:00] now. Like, you know, throwing up their hands and going, Cripe, you know, we've got years in this, but we, we really don't have any control, do we?
And email, you don't have that problem.
Nicolas Toper: On top
Matthew Dunn: Sorry, Nicolas Zoom just went stutter. Could you repeat the last
Nicolas Toper: sentence? There, there is also kind of a game theory problem. Like if you're Twitter and you have an app that's more successful than you, there is a, an inherent tension here. And if you don't have enough control control points on the ecosystem you are not going to be able to negotiate successfully because the the, the position will not be negotiating from position of force.
So it's going to be hard. And that seems to be what Microsoft during Windows did is they were like, Oh yeah, that's good. What you're doing. We'll just do the same. So with email, you don't have that problem because again, they don't own the protocol. So, and they're very [00:32:00] hard to evolve. And an example that happened, so I totally, we launched an m t a.
The reason we did that is because and before I built an E S P, so almost 20 years ago, I built an e S P. The reason is because at that time reputation was stuck on ip. And most customers, they don't know how to create a good IP reputation. Yeah. Now with D K I M and with I ai, our reputation has moved to the domain.
Which means that the IP doesn't matter, which means that what we did, we had a customer, they were on some grid. We moved them to their own cluster that they set up, their own cluster or system. And the day after they had migrated everything or almost because they were able to migrate the reputation of the domain, because the domain, there is no, it's just the same domain.
So they don't care for ISP to the same domain from their point of view. So they don't care where it was sent. So it worked out of the box. There was no problem. Wow. Nice. So why would you pay so, so you're talking about people paying a 50 to a hundred K to soundgrade and they move to a cost of like a couple of machines, so it went basically down to [00:33:00] zero.
So, so that's because of that problem. And now also it's starting to be this, they're going to look directly at the individual email instead of looking at the template level on top of the domain reputation. So that cannot deprioritize completely the IP. Yeah. For most you obviously mail and a little bit output is still important, but less, so why would you want to to, to so why would you pay for those providers in that case?
And and that's what we're saying. And so that's kind of and that has evolved, but that has been evolving for like 10 years. That's why people are so, but now it's really working and nobody really had to figure it out, but they don't understand because they don't care enough if you can show, Hey, look, you don't need to use a sun grid or spark bars or whichever can just use your own server and you'll get a 90% of the value for 1% of the cost.
Matthew Dunn: Wow. I'm going to have to look at this. That's quite interesting. Is that going to. Are you going to fit that in [00:34:00] under the InboxBooster brand or is that a separate venture? No, it's InboxBooster.
Nicolas Toper: It's an InboxBooster brand. It's just that we give away the MCIC and we sell the and we if you want the livability services on top of it, like making.
Something that's a great doesn't do unless you pay them a lot more money, which is really a telling you which emails are in common promotion and why and how you can. And and let's close the request because, so, so this is just what we're doing and because it's within our NTA, it's automatically integrated.
So, you know, I haven't just have, so it's much easier for us and we built it simply because we were tired of integrating with all those kind of sound grace, but Montreal and all of them. So we're like, I know what, let's just do it. It will be easier.
Matthew Dunn: Wow. Now that's a bold leap. You, you mean you, you'd built one before, so maybe that's a bitter shortcut, but that's still a lot of work.
Nicolas Toper: Well, actually not that much. That's kind of the thing is it's not that much work because it's really something my co founder did I was a person for a couple of months so it's really not that much. It's really not that hard. So you're [00:35:00] right. I had the architecture. Yeah. But that's kind of but that kind of thing is you that, but so I had that here, but it wasn't very much work because of a lot of problems disappeared in this case.
And like a lot of old problems are not there anymore. And you can, it's basically assembling a couple of libraries together and kind of knowing what are the right thresholds. So it's not as hard as it looks. The and that's interesting also, you know, cause basically if you think from an economical theory point of view, what some grid modules are, and so on, are doing is they're really doing run seeking, like they have built in a system 10 years ago.
They're profiting from it and they aren't really investing a lot of money into it because there hasn't been the, and you can just look at the new features here, which are basically they're just adding a consulting and I can pay a lot of money to them to do their job. So because it's permission led and we can do it, then we don't, and and that kind of removed the run seeking approach.
In the case of WhatsApp, they probably introduced new feature, but nothing you can [00:36:00] notice. So now if I want an open WhatsApp, I can have Signal, which has been created by the founding team of WhatsApp. So they all, so they're aware of that problem. But this is kind of the same. You still, if you have this idea that you want a permission system to kind of communicate with the other people, whether as a business or as person.
Trusting companies is kind of yeah, it's also like right now, for instance, a lot of people are doing sales for LinkedIn or Google ads. It's good, but they can decide to increase price by 10. They can decide that you compete with them. You always have that problem.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's a little interesting to me, and it's maybe a sign of the maturation of the role of internet and digital in the world, that frequently a technical discussion sounds like a civics.
Discussion, right? We're not just [00:37:00] talking about the technical issues here. We're talking about the societal issues. Well, the thing is
Nicolas Toper: tech has, but the way I explain it is before you used to have paper, now we move papers in bits. So you have electronic communication and paper are actually important for civic issues, for democracies and how people coordinate.
And now they have moved to this new systems. And nobody really knows how to do that. And if you think when we introduced the printing press, it's kind of created a wave of revolution and a lot of unrest in Europe. The key element here is we moved everything from paper to something else. Email is one of the pillars.
Matthew Dunn: One of
Nicolas Toper: them, yeah, yeah. But we don't understand really what that means yet. But if you look at what we did with postal services, they used to be private. Then they became owned by the government. They decided that it was important that everybody had access to that. And a lot of and then a
Matthew Dunn: lot of governments have privatized them, you know, in the last 20 years, which is interesting.
Nicolas Toper: Yes. [00:38:00] That's because also there is good service now everywhere. And now it has migrated to email. A lot of those communications.
Matthew Dunn: A lot of that. A lot of it. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's just the U. S. is, I lived in Australia, their post is private, I think the U. K. 's post has gone private, Canada post is, was privatized, the U.
S. is like half pregnant, the U. S. Postal Service is, you know, it's a quasi monopoly it's, is it a government agency or not? Eh, we're not sure. Does it work well? Not anymore.
Nicolas Toper: Yes, but they were able to, but FedEx is able to, and UPS and a lot of other companies were able to to get in business and nobody told them you don't have the right to do it.
And they were able to build a profitable business with SparkCell. France is public and they're getting privatized, but in France, what happens is the past, nobody's sending mail in like the, I think the number of actual physical mail has been decreased by five or 10.
Matthew Dunn: So no surprise, right? No surprise.[00:39:00]
Yeah. But it's
Nicolas Toper: been absorbed by email. Yeah. So but this email, but, but my, my, my point is more historically when they decided to build a, when they built fossil services, this was a key infrastructure element of the country. Like it was important. That's why it's been there was a USPS in the US, which was important in Australia, at some point it was public, in the UK it was public also, and then it became less important.
But there has been a lot of debate going on, like, what do the government has the right to open your private correspondences, like your mail, your mails? Do do they have to can you, what, what happens if you sent illegal content, which is, I mean, there has been a lot of discussions around this concept.
It's been very, very important during the 18th century and there has been a lot of debates going on, both in France, but in the US and and and so it's, it's been important. And we have the same debate and this type of conversation happens still through email and they're never going to happen on WhatsApp or on Signal.
So, [00:40:00] yes, yes. And these debates haven't been, didn't happen. Like Google, when they get your email, they have the right to open it. And they have the right to read it and they have automated tools doing it. Is this okay or not? I don't know. But what I know is we did not have, we don't have as a society a conversation about that.
And that is, and that is basically the, what you're raising. And that's why it goes to civic issues, because those issues are not solved. And they haven't been they're not dialed. They haven't been talked about and they haven't debated. Yeah. And the fact that I'm selling the deliverability tool and we're talking about it, it's kind of the symptom of the problem because we should not
Matthew Dunn: have to.
Yes. Yes. Well, Nicolas, we gotta wrap up. So because I'm, you got a startup to run and I think I have another zoom call in a minute here, but where, where someone who goes, wait a minute, I can find out why I'm going to spam. They're all ears. Where do they go? Inbox booster.com.
Nicolas Toper: Inbox booster com. Exactly.
And, and they can test it for free and they'll get free inbox placement and and, and they can see why, why, and they can analyze their [00:41:00] costs.
Matthew Dunn: Terrific. Well, thank you so much for the time. What a great conversation. Thank you for having
Nicolas Toper: me. It's been super
Matthew Dunn: interesting. I'll get in touch when we take the episode live and we'll see what we can do to help get word out.
Thanks again. This is Nicolas from Inbox Booster. Yeah. Thank you.