Beemy · beemy.co
Printed from beemy.co/inbox-cost/for/founders/
Calculator · Founders
Customers, candidates, investors and your co-founder all land in the same queue, and there's no EA yet to hand any of it to. Start from a founder's week below, then move every slider until it matches yours.
Starting point: Founders
This is a starting point, not a measurement of any real founder's time. The inbox runs on customers, candidates and investors. The role often spills into the weekend. A recurring investor update adds more. Every slider below is yours to move. See the numbers for how we picked it.
Your numbers
Per year
Show the maths
Hours/day × working days = hours/week on email. Add recurring reports and newsletter/news reading, then multiply by 52 weeks. No hidden multipliers.
A placeholder for the value of your time, yours to adjust. Move the slider to match your own rate, and the rest of the maths follows it.
Triage (read, classify, decide, draft a first pass) is repetitive and depends on context. It needs little judgement. In most inboxes we have looked at in early beta, it is most of the time. The remaining share is judgement calls that still come back to you. This is our own working assumption, not a measured industry figure. We have not yet published usage data from our own beta to replace it.
We have not measured this figure. Every draft waits for a one-tap review until its category earns level 2. Only four categories can ever reach auto-send: meeting_confirmation, scheduling_ack, simple_ack and routing_filing. See /what-you-still-do for the full case. Twenty percent is our own guess at what that ongoing review costs you. It is not a study. Move the slider to your own number; this default exists to be replaced. See what you still do for the full case.
Want the deeper argument for why triage (not raw hours) is the real cost? Read the real cost of email overload.
Sources & assumptions: the 117-emails-a-day figure above is Microsoft WorkLab's own 2025 telemetry. The 60% reclaim rate is our own assumption, not a citation. So is the 20% review share we subtract back out. So are the starting numbers for every preset. Every number this calculator uses, sourced or assumed, is on /the-numbers.
Where the hours go
Pricing, the security review and the integration list come from a new contact every week. The answer already exists in last month's thread, so writing it twice wastes time. A saved answer, lightly edited, would take a fraction of that time.
A promising candidate stops replying after the second interview, and chasing them feels awkward without a script. A short, well-timed note brings most of them back before the role goes cold. Sending it takes almost no time, and it decides between a filled role and a restarted search.
A dozen newsletters and a few subreddits promise to keep a founder ahead of the market. Reading all of them properly would eat a whole morning, so most go unread instead. A short, curated version covers the same ground and leaves the morning alone.
The numbers for the update already exist somewhere in a spreadsheet before anyone starts writing. Pulling them together into one document each month is the part that eats the time. Once that first pull is done, the rest of the update is a quick read-through.
Read next
Beemy is in private beta. We send invites in rolling batches. We cannot promise a date. When your invite arrives, connect Gmail. Beemy sorts your inbox in that first session.
You're in the hive. You get no email now. We write to you once, when your invite is ready.
While you waitLast updated
Links do not work on paper. Open the address above to follow them.
To join the waitlist, go to beemy.co/waitlist.