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Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

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Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#61

Post by mromaine »

coderdude wrote: post #56
pwim wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for only $29/month you can. How much is your time worth? If the service saves you even an hour per month, surely it is worth it.

>How much is your time worth? I hate this argument. It's so narrowly focused (and for some reason, often regurgitated). Money adds up a lot quicker than that one hour of your time. If you save yourself 10 hours of work per month because of a couple services you pay for, but end up spending an extra $300/month while your startup isn't making any money -- is that actually smart time/money management? There are more fac…

two words - "opportunity cost".

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#62

Post by moe »

bobds wrote: post #60
moe wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense, lots of people do that. Lots of people also believe in astrology. Anyone is free to do what they deem good for their karma, you just shouldn't expect a measurable impact towards your deliverability. The big ESPs don't look at these lists.

> The big ESPs don't look at these lists. Some of them do. AOL uses GoodMailSystems. http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.Whitelist.php http://www.goodmailsystems.com/ Hotmail uses ReturnPath. http://mail.live.com/mail/services.aspx#Safelist Yahoo seems to run their own. I remember them using one of the big ones but I can't find any mention in their help pages now. http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bul…

Oh my, do I have to put it even more bluntly to get the point across: These commercial whitelists are effectively extortion scams and affiliate rings.

Their sole purpose is to extract money from you. They're businesses, that is their business model.

The value they provide in return is rather minimal - unless getting e-mail out is at the very core of your business and you need to pull every last string to absolutely maximize it.

Otherwise there are cheaper ways to get reasonable deliverability even at AOL and Hotmail. The default deliverability is already quite good, which is what services like SendGrid largely bargain on. I firmly doubt SendGrid signs each of their customers up for the aforementioned whitelists. They probably offer "assistance" with the process, which probably amounts to sending you a link to a nice HowTo document, and which probably yields them a small affiliate kickback when you actually follow through.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#63

Post by zackham »

coderdude wrote: post #56
pwim wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for only $29/month you can. How much is your time worth? If the service saves you even an hour per month, surely it is worth it.

>How much is your time worth? I hate this argument. It's so narrowly focused (and for some reason, often regurgitated). Money adds up a lot quicker than that one hour of your time. If you save yourself 10 hours of work per month because of a couple services you pay for, but end up spending an extra $300/month while your startup isn't making any money -- is that actually smart time/money management? There are more fac…

I think the question still applies. How much your time is worth does not need to be hypothetical - it can take into consideration how much your employer (presumably your startup) can afford to pay you for your time.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#64

Post by bobds »

moe wrote: post #62
bobds wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big ESPs don't look at these lists. Some of them do. AOL uses GoodMailSystems. http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.Whitelist.php http://www.goodmailsystems.com/ Hotmail uses ReturnPath. http://mail.live.com/mail/services.aspx#Safelist Yahoo seems to run their own. I remember them using one of the big ones but I can't find any mention in their help pages now. http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bul…

Oh my, do I have to put it even more bluntly to get the point across: These commercial whitelists are effectively extortion scams and affiliate rings. Their sole purpose is to extract money from you. They're businesses, that is their business model. The value they provide in return is rather minimal - unless getting e-mail out is at the very core of your business and you need to pull every last string to absolutely m…

> Oh my, do I have to put it even more bluntly to get the point across: These commercial whitelists are effectively extortion scams and affiliate rings.

You made a few points.

First is that nobody reaches out to get themselves whitelisted in advance. Lots of people do that and some ESPs even offer their own whitelist request forms.

Second is that none of the big ESPs look at third-party whitelists. AOL and Hotmail say they do.

Third is that even if the above is true, the impact on deliverability is minimal. I would guess you are right about that but I'd love to look at some data.

Intermediaries like SendGrid would be well within reason to be paying for such services. I don't think they have to signup their individual customers on the whitelists. They just say they are intermediaries and promise to vet their customers.

I think anyone sending low volumes of email is much better off using an intermediary. They get to use well-configured mail servers, IPs with good reputation, etc. Doing it yourself, IMHO, is not worth all the trouble compared to paying $20/month.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#65

Post by mono »

robert_mygengo wrote: post #39
mono wrote: post #38

Wow. Looks like you have outsourced every imaginable job when there's a webservice for it. Are you doing this because of bad experiences when servicing your own or did you do this from the start? Did you compare the running costs/reliability between outsourcing and self administration with a positive result into outsourcing?

Interesting. I think most of this stuff is not a core competency for a startup. I guess my responses are: 1. Zendesk We needed a good system , not really outsourcing of support. So, we do our support in-house but we use the Zendesk SaaS system to manage it. 2. GetSatisfaction As above. 3. SendGrid Email deliverability was not a piece of expertise we had in-house, especially when we were 2-3 people. Now we're 10-ish,…

Thanks for this long version! Might learn to stop trying to maintain every solution on myself.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#67

Post by coderdude »

mromaine wrote: post #61
coderdude wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How much is your time worth? I hate this argument. It's so narrowly focused (and for some reason, often regurgitated). Money adds up a lot quicker than that one hour of your time. If you save yourself 10 hours of work per month because of a couple services you pay for, but end up spending an extra $300/month while your startup isn't making any money -- is that actually smart time/money management? There are more fac…

two words - "opportunity cost".

Why do you think that opportunity cost is specifically applicable to this situation? If it's "just in general" then I don't believe that opportunity cost is a good argument for continuing the meme of "How much is your time worth?" in these kinds of discussions. If it is applicable, it would have to be on a case-by-case basis to even make sense, no?

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#68

Post by smhinsey »

swombat wrote: post #3

I'm not convinced about the need for SendGrid. Learning to set up an email server isn't that hard in this day and age, and we seem to get very decent deliverability with our own SMTP server - and don't pay a penny for any emails sent. I'm planning to build an email subscription feature for swombat.com soon, and was looking at options like SendGrid, but I just can't justify the cost. When you send people a sign-up con…

My company uses it because we run our web front ends on various cloud providers, most of whose IP space is blacklisted. I don't even bother to verify that they are anymore and just assume that they are. Sendgrid gets rid of this entirely, which is a pretty big win.

Re: Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

#70

Post by malcolmong »

rodh257 wrote: post #50
Klonoar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postmark App ( http://postmarkapp.com ) has worked well for me in terms of sending large quantities of emails in the past. Easy integration, good team, active development.

I've just used PostMarkApp on a site, I love their interface, all works great but they only allow 'transactional' emails, which I guess is like 'click here to activate your account', whereas my site was sending out alerts to people (kind of like facebook does, but not as often), which they didn't seem to like too much. Does sendgrid allow this? I've signed up to SocketLabs which seems to do it but haven't been able t…

wait, what do you mean Postmark doesn't allow sending "alert" (notification) emails? Can you elaborate?
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