Are the top use cases for this sending emails for in-product actions or do people also use it for your marketing website too (eg to send a drip sequence when a customer requests a demo)?
Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
51–60 of 62 posts
Re: Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
#52Congrats on launching to HackerNews! First step on a journey of many. Some Feedback: - The biggest words on the landing page are "Behavioural Email Tool" but I don't know what this means. Maybe I'm not in your market. - As I read through what Plunk does, it sounds more like "email automation". However, Plunk is not like other email automation because... (insert your wildest dreams) - Your pricing is too low. In the w…
+1 for "I don't know what that means". I think I'm the target demographic, but I don't feel like can effectively compare the pros and cons of this product with something like MailChimp with the information available on the site.
I'd love to see a clearer breakdown of the features: - how come I trigger an event instead of sending an email directly? It seems like a neat abstraction with a lot of potential, but I haven't found the reasoning behind it in the site. - what can I do with workflow automation? Can I do complex logic based on multiple events? Can I do branching logic? Etc. - why wouldn't a larger company choose you? What's missing that's present in a more established product, and what advantages do you give over that product? I'm assuming cheaper and simpler, but I'd love to get a better idea about the now specific tradeoffs.
Overall, it seems like a really cool idea . I have a project in mind that I may use it for
Re: Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
#53Awesome stuff. How did you validate your tool? Also did you validate before or after MVP?
Validating was really easy. I am really active on Twitter and saw loads of people complain about terrible APIs offered by some tools and the ridiculous pricing of others.
+ I also had this problem myself so I knew it was a big point of frustration.
I had pretty much validated the idea before creating the MVP!
Re: Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
#54I'm not understanding. What is the benefit of this? This is better than sending emails from my own server using smtp?
The fact that you don't need to set up and manage your own SMTP server is a big advantage I believe.
Re: Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry about the confusing wording, with bounce I mean both hard bounces, rejects and complaints (they are all monitored appropriately). They are all taken into account when calculating the % because they all have impact on the domain reputation.
But how do you know a message lands in the SPAM folder in Google?
I believe email clients send back a rejection if it landed in spam. It is one of the metrics AWS SES can track for you.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/monitor-sending-ac...
Re: Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
#56Are the top use cases for this sending emails for in-product actions or do people also use it for your marketing website too (eg to send a drip sequence when a customer requests a demo)?
It was built for in-product actions but you can use it for whatever suits your needs. It may need some extra code on your side to make that work though.
I am currently using it to check up on my users after they have either skipped or completed the onboarding so it is definitely doable!
Re: Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
#57Congrats on the launch! Just so you know, the awstrack me URL used to verify accounts is blocked by my NextDNS tracking protection and my Firefox tracking protection. It’s not a special setting, just ended up on their block lists. Something to be aware of though. You might want to switch that to use your own domain.
Thank you very much for this, I wasn't aware of that!
Re: Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
#58Congrats on launching to HackerNews! First step on a journey of many. Some Feedback: - The biggest words on the landing page are "Behavioural Email Tool" but I don't know what this means. Maybe I'm not in your market. - As I read through what Plunk does, it sounds more like "email automation". However, Plunk is not like other email automation because... (insert your wildest dreams) - Your pricing is too low. In the w…
Pretty good feedback here. Learned a thing or two myself.
Re: Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how do you know a message lands in the SPAM folder in Google?
I believe email clients send back a rejection if it landed in spam. It is one of the metrics AWS SES can track for you. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/monitor-sending-ac...
Not quite. If a user actively reports a message as spam and also tells their service provider to report it to the sending service provider, then the sender will receive a report per RFC 6449: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) , https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6449. That's what SES exposes.
If you get more than a tiny handful of these, shut the account down. Whatever the reason, users don't want the messages and it'll destroy your deliverability quickly. Assuming the sender is legit, they need to figure out why users don't like the messages.
However, the much more common case is that a recipient's mail provider categorizes a message as spam on its own, without any user involvement. That's what parent commenters are referring to.
That can be for any reason. Maybe the user has reported similar past messages as spam. OTOH, maybe other users at the recipient service have had low engagement with messages from the same sender. Or maybe there was a sudden increase in sending volume from a given netblock or domain.
Emails that the receiving system categorizes as spam do not trigger any notification to the sender. Other than by trying to deliver messages to canary accounts or waiting for customer complaints, you won't know this is happening.
Re: Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
#60I'm an indie hacker and I send 2M emails per month on Sendgrid. It costs around $1k per month. I use sendgrid because it just works, but I'm always curious when a new thing comes around and I'd love to save some money. How does this work at scale?
Random but idk how to dm people on HN - how did you find the problem and validate closingCredits? How did you market it?