Email is the only communication network everyone is already on. That is its entire value and its entire problem: because anyone can send anything to anyone, the format cannot change without breaking the network.
The replacement trap
Slack, Teams and every chat app of the last decade won inside companies by giving up on the outside world. Inside the walls you get presence, reactions, threads and edits. Outside them you fall back to email, and now you have two inboxes.
A layer, not a wall
Sodaroad's bet is different. A Sodaroad address is an email address, so anyone can reach it. But when two Sodaroad addresses talk, the message never leaves our network, and so it can carry things email cannot: a verified sender, a poll that tallies inside the thread, a file whose key can be destroyed, a message that can actually be unsent.
One message, two readings
Send a poll to five people. The two on Sodaroad vote in the conversation. The three on Gmail get a clean email with the options written out and reply with a word. Nobody is left out and nothing arrives broken. That is the whole design principle: every feature has to have a graceful email reading.
We think that is how a new network gets built on top of an old one. Not by asking people to switch, but by being the better place to be when both of you happen to be there.
By Spencer Nicolls