Sending recurring emails and getting aggregated results delivered right to your inbox with Keyory

So I read a tweet a couple months ago that made my head spin.

I immediately sent this to a friend and colleague, “We could build this”. His reply, “Oh I like that”. We have an inside joke that all of the customers we’ve ever had ask us for some level of “outlook integration” without knowing what that even means so he quickly followed up with, “It will need outlook integration”. This time it was for real though, we were going to build a product around emails. Not long before this Tweet, only about 6 months in fact, something else happened that would cause this not only to feel like a good idea, but a good idea with good timing. Rails 6 was just launched and it added a key feature, Action Mailbox, which meant we could build an extremely simple application that received and parsed emails very easily. I have a feeling Action Mailbox’s inclusion in Rails 6 has something to do with hey.com. Anyway, we put some time in on nights and weekends and today we’re introducing Keyory.com.

So why did that Tweet make my head spin? Well, I work in product development at a company that is functionally organized. We have services and operations, program management, product development, and business development teams all working together in a fairly flat structure to deliver products and services for our customers. When I read that Tweet I could immediately think of 10 use cases where I needed this myself, and even more when I started thinking about cross functional teams and adjacent industries. Now, we took some liberties with the interpretation of what a fully fledged product should do based on one Tweet but here are some of the best examples we could find that are a perfect fit for this product. I’ll stick to the business related use cases right now.

In Business You Might Ask

• As a team leader — Is there anything you’d like me to specifically address to the team during our weekly status meeting?
• As a sales manager — What feedback did you hear from customers this week about our product?
• As a product owner — What do you think should be our top 5 priorities for the next 3 sprints?
• As a scrum master — Is there anything that is currently blocking your objectives?
• As a DevOps Engineer— What should we cover during next week’s DevOps guild, are you struggling with any infrastructure related issues?

The list goes on and on. These are important questions that either aren’t getting asked, are asked too infrequently, or are asked too irregularly to make the difference they’re meant to make in business.

With Keyory, you can ask a recurring question for free to up to 5 recipients. We’ll aggregate the responses and send you an email with all the answers to your question. Over and over again until you tell us to stop. If you need more questions or more recipients we offer some really simple paid plans because maintaining infrastructure and sending email can get really expensive. We hope that we find a niche here and that this can evolve into something more, but we’re going to keep it simple for now and see what people do. By the way, we aren’t going to read responses to your email, the emails themselves get incinerated after 5 days and the answers we parse out of them are destroyed after we send the answers email. There’s more detail on the front page regarding privacy. We’re taking it very seriously because we’re talking about email here, it’s supposed to be private.

One last note — If you’re a teacher or educator and you want to use Keyory to send recurring emails to your students, sign up and then email us at teachers@keyory.com. Let us know how many students you have and what types of questions you want to ask and we’d be happy to apply a discount to your account and increase the number of recipients your questions can have.