Kismet now sends exactly one email
Until this week, Kismet had never emailed anyone. You signed up and heard nothing — which is admirably quiet, and also unhelpful if you’d just installed an app whose core mechanic you hadn’t seen yet.
So there’s now a welcome email. Exactly one.
What it says
The thing that makes Kismet make sense, in three beats: everyone drops one hidden pick, the picks seal at a lock time, and at the draw fate takes one — live, for the whole crew. Plus the fact most people are surprised by, which is that friends without the app can join by link and watch the same reveal.
That’s it. No feature tour, no checklist, no “5 tips to get the most out of Kismet.”
What it doesn’t do
There is no day-three email. No “you haven’t started a fate yet.” No “your friends are deciding without you.” No newsletter you were opted into by existing.
Those emails exist because they work, in the narrow sense that they move a metric. They also train people to ignore your name in an inbox, which is expensive and permanent. We’d rather be a sender you don’t filter.
The unsubscribe is real
One click in the footer, or the unsubscribe button your mail app shows natively. It takes effect immediately and it means what it says.
One detail we care about more than we probably should: the unsubscribe link shows a confirmation page rather than opting you out the instant it’s opened. Corporate mail scanners follow every link in a message before a human ever sees it, and a link that acted on being fetched would quietly unsubscribe people who never clicked anything. Leaving is a decision, so it takes a decision.
Account mail still reaches you
Opting out stops the introductions and anything promotional. It doesn’t stop messages about your own account — a sign-in you asked for, something about your data. Those aren’t marketing and they don’t have an opt-out, because you’d want them.
The same rule as the texts
Guests get exactly one text: the one telling them fate has decided. Members now get exactly one email: the one explaining what fate is. Both follow the same rule — send the message the person is actually waiting for, then stop.
Restraint is easy to write down and hard to keep. Writing it into the product is how it survives contact with a growth target.