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Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

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131–140 of 214 posts

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#131
I wonder who the target consumer for this would be. I mean, I get that the target users are probably marketing departments / communications people across the world’s companies.

But genuinely curious who’s the end-customer who reads these emails.

Email is a strange technology that is only used for _reading words_ more than anything else — office work, receipts, itineraries, bills etc etc. Even the best newsletters, imo, tend to be word-heavy than imagery (such as Candor or Levels.fyi or Chairman Mom).

Would be cool if a Mail IDE had a way to tell if the email I’m writing is _engaging_ enough simply by the words alone. Some day perhaps.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#132
post #13

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value…

Because if it's a one time fee, there will be no recurring income and the developer will have to stop development. The alternative is to do what older desktop apps did: release a new paid version / upgrade, often with a load of fluff added or a redesign to try and sell that an upgrade is worthwhile to the customers.

Agreed, selling non-subscription desktop software in a retail segment is crazy crazy hard. Not to mention that people want everything for free these days, so even SaaS is super-hard for desktop s/w.

I used to be pretty anti-sub, but I just don't see any alternative and I do want talented devs to continue working on their passions.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#134
post #73

I receive a lot of newsletters and communiqués, some of which I even signed up for. So, I don't know what designers use to receive e-mail, but here in the non-designer / non-linux world, Outlook is pretty popular. Now, Outlook - at least all configurations I have seen, has pictures via HTML disabled. I have sampled a few IT departments only, of course, but I feel like this is probably a pretty common policy. So let m…

Earlier in my career I decided to go around this by rendering photos in HTML Tables!

http://azimi.me/img2html/

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#135
post #125
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what Adobe does. That's not the same as saying it works for them, and it definitely isn't the same as saying it's the optimal pricing model for them. You have no way of knowing whether they'd make more or less money by moving to a different strategy. Copying what someone does without understanding how it works for them or why they did it is literally the definition of cargo cult behaviour. That's usually a bad i…

Adobe made a very successful switch from one off payments to SaaS for their creative suite, there's a pretty clear before and after to look at. https://producthabits.com/adobe-95-billion-saas-company/

Photoshop is a legendary piece of software when it comes to things of a visual nature, so legendary that they essentially had an annual subscription to use it since there were frequent new releases that a lot of folks felt compelled to grab to keep with the curb.

I think they tend to get a little too much credit for the subscription switch since their users were already being abused in such a manner. Office to Office360 is the one that's always astounded me. Very few people upgraded office outside of getting a new machine and most businesses tried to pin all of their users to a particular version of office (it was more important that everyone used the same version rather than everyone using the latest version) and, additionally, people weren't actually used to "paying" for microsoft stuff with actual cash. Generally the software you got from MSFT was bundled into the system when you purchased it, and while your money certainly ended up in MSFT's pockets you didn't directly interact with them.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#136
post #13

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value…

I don't get it either. I mean yes, I understand that making people pay regularly is nicer for daily users(sometimes) and the developer. But it completely cuts out the users who are willing to pay for products that go beyond "demo version" or "Spyware As A Service" but don't get paid for using it. In many cases it would be absolutely possible to offer a middle tier that lacks some advanced features but also doesn't gr…

> cloud storage for the 2 files you create per month?

This is particularly frustrating because I already pay for cloud storage and don’t want another cloud store. I liked the old days when companies would layer on top of Dropbox instead of trying to sell me a “value not upsell.”

I liked the old ynab where my desktop and phone pushed files to Dropbox. When they switched to saas with their own storage they sucked so much I stopped using them.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#137
post #13

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value…

It works for Adobe.

I use my pirated copy of photoshop5 (I think) from 20 years ago for my infrequent uses of photoshop. But I have friends who use photoshop every day and pay their monthly fee, and are pretty happy.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#138
post #73

I receive a lot of newsletters and communiqués, some of which I even signed up for. So, I don't know what designers use to receive e-mail, but here in the non-designer / non-linux world, Outlook is pretty popular. Now, Outlook - at least all configurations I have seen, has pictures via HTML disabled. I have sampled a few IT departments only, of course, but I feel like this is probably a pretty common policy. So let m…

Outlook is probably the most common desktop client, but I think most people (even in corporate settings) are using webmail these days; either Google Apps Suite or Office 365. The former at least displays images by default (Google re-hosts them and rewrites the email source). Not sure if MS does the same.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#139
post #36

HTML in email is legacy hell. I wonder if someone wants to create a new MIME-type like text/html+css, and clients who want can implement it. In theory you could have representations of the message like video/mpeg4 and text/plain, and depending on the client capabilities and configuration, the receiver could watch a video or read plain text. The information content of the 2 (or more) don't even have to be the same! Fo…

It boggles my mind that Microsoft hasn't updated the Outlook desktop app to use the rendering engine from Edge rather than the 10+-year-old IE engine. That would resolve so many e-mail rendering issues. I imagine it must be due to security concerns.

Yea it’s bec you can send emails directly from word which I do all the time.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#140
post #13

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value…

Because if it's a one time fee, there will be no recurring income and the developer will have to stop development. The alternative is to do what older desktop apps did: release a new paid version / upgrade, often with a load of fluff added or a redesign to try and sell that an upgrade is worthwhile to the customers.

> Because if it's a one time fee, there will be no recurring income and the developer will have to stop development.

Here's a crazy idea in 2020: That's totally fine. There's a point where adding more features becomes a negative ROI. That's when you know you need to move on solving a different problem. That's the alternative.

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