Ex-Pinterest Team Redesigns Email with Extra — It’s Actually Better

When was the last time you got really excited about email? If you’re older, it was probably in 2004, when Gmail was rolling out its first beta invitations. If you’re young, probably never. Over the years, many startups have tried and failed to reinvent it, but the most successful companies have simply bolted new features like workflow improvements and AI agents into the same basic inbox.

Now, a new company founded by a team of former Pinterest designers and engineers is fundamentally rethinking the inbox. And you might actually find this exciting.

Extra, the first product from consumer technology company BuildForever, ditches subjects, folders, and tags in favor of an inbox organized around your life, consolidating everything that matters into one actionable overview within the Today tab. This tab is updated in real time with the latest important information extracted from the large number of emails in your inbox.

The rest of your inbox is automatically organized into custom categories that become tabs that reflect your life as determined by what’s already in your inbox. This means you can create tabs for family activities, travel plans, finances, newsletters, and more. The result of this reimagined inbox is a uniquely personalized experience that lets you finally feel like you have a chance to stay on top of everything.

The idea, like many companies in the consumer space, was born out of a personal problem the founders wanted to solve. It turns out his inbox was a mess.

“I was a daily religious inbox zero person. [at work] …You just keep checking this email. When I opened my personal email, all I saw was a wall of things to do. There was a lot of junk in there, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, where do I start? ’,” explains Naveen Gavini, co-founder and CEO of BuildForever and former senior vice president and chief product officer at Pinterest.

“Honestly, after texting 12 hours a day, I just stopped because I had no energy.”

As a result, he told TechCrunch, he missed messages, had friends unintentionally ghosted, and felt overall buried. He believes the problem is structural. As emails pile up, important emails fall off the page and are forgotten.

Extra is changing this paradigm with a completely new interface for email and AI intelligence inside it. It’s worth noting, though, that the team doesn’t market Extra as an AI app, and that’s intentional.

“I think people think very deeply in Silicon Valley. [AI]”But I don’t think the average person even knows where to start,” Gavini says. “When I think of AI, I think it’s a little bit ‘powerful and user-y,’ but I also think there are so many companies out there promising to be the AI ​​personal assistant in your life, and I don’t think people really need that. They just want some of these fundamental problems to be solved,” he says.

“That’s what we’re focused on: solving users’ problems rather than proposing the next AI that can do it all.”

But products like Extra couldn’t exist without AI technology that silently learns, understands, and organizes your inbox. In addition to background intelligence, there’s also an AI assistant you can talk to to help you find emails, unsubscribe, respond with voice, and more.

Instead of starting from the traditional inbox interface, Extra starts from the “Today” view. This page shows you everything you need to know about what’s happening in your inbox, categorized into Actions, What’s Happening Today, and Good to Know. You can treat actionable items like a to-do list, swiping to clear them when you’re done.

For each action item, Extra predicts the next step you need to take and highlights it, whether it’s a file you need to open and review, a link you need to click, or some other step.

Below you’ll find “good to know” items such as order and shipping confirmations, test results from your last doctor’s visit, and hand-picked news headlines from our daily news summary newsletter.

[今日]At the bottom of the tab[毎日のクリーンアップ]There’s a section where you can use Extra to see and take action on low-priority emails that are cluttering your inbox. From here, you can choose to unsubscribe from marketing emails and unnecessary updates. Extra also gives you the option to delete all emails from that sender from your inbox to save storage space.

Otherwise, you can mark the email as complete and archive it, which will also be reflected in Gmail. (Currently, Extra only works with Gmail, but that may change in the future. The company may offer its own email address at some point.)

In addition to a quick daily section in the Today tab, newsletter subscribers can browse headlines from their favorite writers within a dedicated News tab. Here, Extra uses wide images, headlines, and snippets to encourage you to read the full article, just like the Apple News app.

The Events tab will suggest events from your email that you want to add to your calendar, as well as your own appointments and plans. For example, local events that surface through local newsletters or emails from venues or other organizations. Then, when you add something from these suggestions to your personal calendar, Extra understands the next step (like buying tickets to the next concert) and suggests that action.

Meanwhile, the Shop tab reimagines shopping emails as a curated storefront of interesting finds, rather than unnecessary clutter. Extras use product photos along with promotional details to grab the user’s attention.

“We actually look at your emails and your shopping and pull out the products themselves…and that’s a huge difference for brands,” Gavini explains. Gmail makes branded emails unique.[プロモーション]He says it’s usually very unlikely that a branded email will be seen because it’s embedded in a tab. But these are the brands you want to hear about, so Extra delivers the information in a more engaging, visual format that makes you want to actually shop.

“What we found was [that] By giving people control over their inboxes, they can decide what they want to receive and receive and consume it in the most native and optimal format,” said Gavini.

The other tabs in the Extra app are unique to you and are places where you can view and archive your emails, intelligently organized for you and tailored to your own life and activities. (There’s a traditional “inbox” view if you want, but you can also move it to the end of the line if it’s no longer useful.)

The company says Extra’s beta testers are currently unsubscribing from more than 2 million emails per year en masse, and more than 4 million emails have been converted to summaries in the “Today” view.

Extra is currently releasing an app on iOS and the web for users on a waiting list who can invite other users using a special code.

Is email fun to use?

In TechCrunch’s first tests, we were surprised to find the product already well-polished, given its beta status at the time. This app is thoughtfully designed, easy to use, and dare I say it. — makes checking your inbox a very pleasant experience (I’m just as shocked as you, believe me).

I find great joy in unsubscribing from all the junk mail that litters my inbox, and in the process erasing all emails from spammers. I feel a sense of accomplishment when I mark what I have to do as complete. I’m finding concerts I want to see and new products I want to buy. We’re continuing to cover content that you wouldn’t normally miss. This is what email might have been doing all along to me if it hadn’t been designed by a bunch of engineers who spent time debating the best shade of blue for links.

There is some room for improvement, but my feedback so far has focused on small tweaks rather than major issues.

BuildForever was co-founded by Steven Ramkumar and Albert Pereta. Both have spent over 10 years at Pinterest. The broader idea is to combine their engineering and design talents to fix major consumer apps, including email.

“If we could bring the same kind of design and thought process that Pinterest does — joy, delight, and inspiration — to something as anxiety-inducing and boring as email, that was our goal,” Gavini said.

The company hopes to expand its approach to other products in the future, including messaging, calendars, contacts, and more.

BuildForever is backed by $9.5 million in seed funding led by Abstract, A* (Kevin Hartz), Felicis, and Elad Gil. Other angel investors include Pinterest co-founders Ben Silverman and Evan Sharp. Paul Bucheit, creator of Gmail. OpenAI Applications CEO Fidi Simo. Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra. Gokul Rajaram, board member of Pinterest and Coinbase; A24 Partner Scott Belsky. Partial CEO Shreya Murthy. Guillermo Lanci, CEO of Vercel. And others.

Extra is free to use and will remain free, with monetization planned for later. Available on the web and iOS.