Pro Tips: Gmail Search

Day after day, your email is buried underneath hundreds of new email. So even after a week, if you want to dig up a particular email, you get into trouble. Here are a few tips I'd like to share that you can use in Gmail search to help you save time digging up email.

1. is:unread

When I read an email, if it's something I need to take an action on (e.g. reply back or re-read it more thoroughly, etc.) but I don't have time right now, I mark it as unread so that I can go over it later. Then, later on when I want to find out all the unread email, I type in "is:unread" in the search box. Voila!

2. is:starred

Similar to the above tip, if you have email that you have favorited, you can dig them up by typing "is:starred" on the search box. Or I guess you can just simply click on "Starred" on your left pane, too! lol

3. from:<person> & to:<person>

Got an email from your girlfriend recommending you an awesome restaurant a while ago (hint: she's asking you to take her there)? You can find it simply by typing, for example, "from:John Doe" in the search box. If that email contained the word "restaurant", you can narrow the email list down by searching "restaurant from:John Doe". Similarly, if you want to dig up an email you sent to your friend Donald, you can try "to:Donald Lau".

4. has:attachment

"Where is my electronic bus ticket from greyhound?", "Where is the email that had these documents?" Email with attachment can be easily found with "has:attachment". If you are running out of your Gmail inbox space, you might want to find all the email with attachments and delete them first, too!

5. Mix and Match All of the Above

You can use AND & OR keyword to mix and match all of the above search techniques. For example, if you want starred email from John Doe, you can type "is:starred AND from:John Doe".


Those are the ones that I use the most often when I search my inbox. If you'd like to see the complete list of advanced search options, check out http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7190

I'll share a few more Gmail pro tips later. Keep an eye on them if you found this posting useful.

Know the Enemies (and Know Yourself)

If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself. -- Sun Tzu from The Art of War

Many war strategies from ancient era apply directly to startups. Entrepreneurs are not fighting physically with each other but they are working towards outperforming the competitors to win the market. As said by Sun Tzu, a great military strategist (and the author of The Art of War) in China around 6th century BCE, knowing the enemies, as well as knowing yourself, is crucial to win a battle. Thus, entrepreneurs should spend a good amount of time researching the idea, the market and the competitors and the inner strength of self before jumping into the battle by building the product that he/she envisions.


Many entrepreneurs come up with great ideas, which they dream of turning into the next billion dollar business. They are so excited and passionate about it and pour in a lot of effort, only to find out a few weeks/months later that there are many startups out there working on exactly the same idea and already have decent traction, which could be quite demotivating.


It is true that what matters the most is the ability to execute so some people may say it doesn't matter. However, if you knew your enemies earlier, you could've spent some time better positioning/strategizing your startup in the market, benchmarked against the existing startups/products and come up with a better solution/design. After all, you would like to avoid facing all-star teams heavily backed by well-known VCs directly. It would be stressful, frustrating and energy draining.


So what can one do to know the enemies better? (focused mainly on mobile apps because that's the future!)

• Look for similar apps on Apple App Store (iOS), Google Play Store (Android), Amazon App Store for Android, Chomp (iOS & Android). Choose a category your app belongs to and you should skim through at least a couple hundreds of apps in that category due to huge number of apps out there.
• Definitely try using the apps you thought are similar to your idea and/or you thought interesting quite extensively. I've met a successful serial entrepreneur (10+ startups and still counting) who has downloaded and used a few hundred photo apps on his iPhone in order to prep for his yet another startup.
• Jot down goods and bads of the apps you try and reflect it upon your idea. You can polish and refine your idea through this.
• For the ones you thought are quite similar to your idea, find the companies behind those apps and research them. Crunchbase would be a good starting point. You might be able to find useful information about the startup on AngelList.
• Also, go to the company website and read the blog if it has one. Find the founders of the company and read their blogs if they have it. You should check out their tweets, Linked in profile and Facebook page as well. You can email/tweet/call them and ask some questions as if you're an app user or someone else other than their competitor. They will probably get back to your email/tweet/call kindly with answers.
• You can probably get useful information by asking questions on Quora as well.

All of the above give you a better idea on who you are competing with. If you think you can do better than competitors after learning about them, push your idea as hard as you can. Otherwise, think about how you can position your startup/product idea so that it minimizes the friction with them. Remember, "a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels at winning with ease." (by Sun Tsu)

What other methods do you use to research your enemies and your idea? Please share!

Who thought this was a good marketing?

One day, I got a phone call from a number that I didn't recognize. The number looked like it's from the USA (and I live in Canada) so I had a suspicion that it might be a spam call.

Right on!

As soon as I picked it up, I heard a loud cruise ship horn sound followed by an automatic message starting with "Hello, ...". I just hung up. I don't even know what cruise company is behind that spam call because I didn't bother listening to it.

It was not my first time receiving this call. I probably got this call about 3~4 times in the past year. The marketing is definitely not working for me. It's not working for my (previous) co-workers either. I remember talking to people who received that phone call and they, surely, were annoyed by that.

Not only did they start the call with the annoying cruise ship horn sound, but they also put an automated message which we can't interact with anyway. This makes me want to avoid this company rather than making me want to book a cruise trip with them.

Marketing should be integrated into every aspect of the company. If a customer gets a phone call, it's a marketing. When a customer visits your website, it's a marketing. If your employee talks about the work life at your company, it's a marketing, too. And the list goes on... If people get positive experience from those things, I bet the company would get a lot more customers without having to spam people with annoying calls, which might actually have the opposite effect of what they intended.

Innovative Pen and Popularity

I was browsing the Internet and randomly came across this product Livescribe SmartPen. I watched a few videos and instantly fell in love with this product (I wish I had this pen when I was in school!). I was more amazed by this pen than when I first saw iPhone or iPad.

There are so many innovations embedded into it. Here are a few things that I thought were cool:

• It knows where you are writing using the little dots (almost invisible) printed on the paper.
  This pen has a little infrared camera close to the tip of it. By reading the dot pattern on the paper, it can figure out what page/what part of the note you are on. According to Jim Marggraff, CEO of Livescribe, if you layout the entire dot patterns on a piece of paper, it can "cover square miles of Europe and Asia combined." (see the video below @4:20). This technology opens up door for many other cool features.

• It can record audio while you're writing.
  I remember when I was in university, a lot of times I couldn't pay attention and digest what the professor was saying because I was busy writing while he/she was talking. So this feature would've been super useful.
  This feature alone is not that cool because you could've just used audio recorder to achieve the same effect. However, combined with the next feature, it becomes awesome!

• When you tap on certain part of your written note, it can replay the audio at the time of you writing that note.
  Whoa, this is so awesome and convenient. By combining the first and the second features, it can reply the audio at the time of your writing.

• When you connect the pen to your computer, it saves the digital version of your note on the computer.
  Since the pen knows where you wrote on, it can create a digital copy of your actual note without you having to scan it. It also supports OCR so that you can search for a certain keyword in the digital copy.

• And a lot more... A video is worth thousand words. Watch the video below.

In spite of the great innovation, it didn't seem to have taken off yet. This product, at least to me, is revolutionary. People gave very positive ratings to this product, too.

Why is it that I don't see as many people using this pen as they use iPhone/iPad? I heard it has sold more than one million pens so it's not few (and definitely not a failure), but since a lot of people write notes (or do they not anymore??), I feel like I should see more people using it around me. Maybe it just didn't hit the inflection point yet, even though it's been out there since 2008.

Does it lack appealing look? Was (or is) there lack of marketing push? Is it not as robust as it is seen on the video? Any thoughts?