I’m a fullstack developer, and honestly, I’ve lost count of how many side projects I’ve worked on over the years. But one idea kept coming back to me: a different kind of email client. It first came to me in 2014: “What if we could handle emails more like conversations?”
Every year, I’d revisit this concept in my “Build Notes.” Ten years later, no one had built exactly what I had in mind — so I finally decided to do it myself. That’s how Talanoa was born.
I wanted something focused on people, not timelines. I was tired of marking messages as unread just to remember to reply later, or using labels as makeshift to-do lists. I wanted to see — at a glance — if I had important emails from my team or others needing a response, without wasting hours digging through my inbox.
I’m also pretty anti-Inbox Zero. After all, no one expects you to be “Slack Zero” or “WhatsApp Zero.” It doesn’t make sense to apply that stress to email either. But to change the relationship with email, you have to change the underlying logic: shift from a “task list” mindset to a conversation mindset. That’s what Talanoa does.
It took me several months to build it, but the result ended up exceeding even my own expectations. It’s now genuinely a joy to use every day.
Marketing Hack: Since February, I’ve been slowly building a waiting list. Every week, I personally onboarded 3 to 10 new users — gathering feedback, watching how they understood (or misunderstood) the new inbox experience, and improving the product before inviting the next wave. This “micro-launch” approach helped me refine Talanoa massively without burning through my early user base. If you’re launching something, I highly recommend doing it this way.
Stack: Talanoa is built with Electron (TypeScript + VueJS). There’s no backend, no servers — everything runs locally. It means it can scale massively without infrastructure costs. :)
Disclaimer: No, there’s no AI inside yet. I’m convinced you can still build great tools without AI — and in my case, user data privacy matters too much to just throw everything into an external LLM. Of course, I plan to integrate some features like email summarization and smart replies — but only when I can embed a custom model directly into the app, without third-party dependencies.
Thanks for reading, happy to answer any questions, and I’d love to hear your feedback! John
charmitro•7mo ago
If you want to appeal to power users and developers, consider adding these features:
* Support for development mailing lists * Good patch/diff syntax highlighting for code reviews via email * Plain text compose and reading experience (many devs prefer this over HTML)
These additions would open your app to a whole different segment of mailbox users who rely heavily on email for technical collaboration.
That is, if these features aren't already included.
bettercalljohn•7mo ago