I see a lot of security concerns with this. Many, if not all databases are not public accessible, nor should they ever be. Asking people to open their database up to you, sketchy and dangerous.
Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
31–40 of 105 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#32I think there are some good ideas here, but the target audience imho is not clear. Email marketing cheaper is a great attention grabber: kudos for the good copywriting. Step 1: Link to AWS SES... humm, for that your target audience must be tech-savvy. Step 2: Query your database... humm, linking my database to a strange system? No freaking way! But assume for an instant that this would be ok. For this, your target au…
1. is tech-savvy and runs an app/service with a bunch of users
2. has tried existing emailing platforms and feel that they're too expensive
3. wants full freedom of who they target their emails to
A tech-savvy person could make their own solution, and that's what I wanted to do with my site CubeDesk, but it's surprisingly difficult and time-consuming, which gave me the idea for this service.
The English -> SQL thing is just a fun feature I added since I'm excited about LLMs. Comes in handy for folks who aren't SQL experts (like me).
Totally agree on the security concerns. That seems to be the main feedback in this thread and will be my main focus going forward!
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
You dont need to go open source to allow self hosting, and, youll likely lose money that way. Its entirely possible to allow self hosting without being open source. Plenty of other projects do it. That being said, self hosting doesnt solve all issues. You, and whoever uses this product, will need MANY IPs because of blacklisting and throttling limits applied almost worldwide to all mail servers. Theres a reason why t…
You realize that the sending is done by Amazon SES right?
At that point id just configure SES outright and not even use this solution. Most other services use direct mailing from their own servers
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#34This looks great! Sounds like you track events like opens, clicks SES features.. does that mean you need a specific table in my database? What data about my users would be stored in your database, vs my database?
As for the data question, when you create a campaign, the following gets stored for each email that will get sent:
- email address - JSON blob of the required variables that exist in the subject and body of the email (ex: {first_name: "John"}
That's pretty much all the data that will be stored in our database which is sourced from your database. This data is stored for 30 days then removed, but I'd like to make this be configurable.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#35Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#36This does seem cool. When the service matures, are you going to eventually move it to production?
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#37How do you manage reputation?
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#38I think there are some good ideas here, but the target audience imho is not clear. Email marketing cheaper is a great attention grabber: kudos for the good copywriting. Step 1: Link to AWS SES... humm, for that your target audience must be tech-savvy. Step 2: Query your database... humm, linking my database to a strange system? No freaking way! But assume for an instant that this would be ok. For this, your target au…
The target market is someone who 1. is tech-savvy and runs an app/service with a bunch of users 2. has tried existing emailing platforms and feel that they're too expensive 3. wants full freedom of who they target their emails to A tech-savvy person could make their own solution, and that's what I wanted to do with my site CubeDesk, but it's surprisingly difficult and time-consuming, which gave me the idea for this s…
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#39Lots of really good stuff going on here, a few bits of feedback, ideas, etc, and also responding to some of the comments in other threads.
* The quick explanation of how this works is pretty strong, but I think the differentiator/value over other services maybe isn't called out as well. To me, this seems pretty clearly ideal for smaller teams all in on JAMstack/serverless with a lean stack that don't/won't have an easy place to create an automated process for synchronization, and are more likely to be using a planetscale/supabase/neon where this model is more attractive. I would suggest adding some of that info, not only to help target customers better recognize the value prop, but also help discovery via SEO.
* While the landing page gives a good overview, as a dev, before I sign up, I want more details of how it works, more complete examples, etc. For SaaS apps targeting the general market, after landing/product pages,the most visited pages are generally use cases, success stories, industry specific info, etc. But from my experience and talking with many others, for dev audience, docs are the next thing people visit (if they aren't ready to sign up). You don't need every doc at once, but things like a quick start guide, concept overview, feature overview, etc can all be high value docs that you generally need anyways for your first customers
* With docs, you can better address and explain the security side of things. I would do less on the landing page in regards to security and push that to more in depth detail in the docs. Talk about best practices of creating a read-only user. Create guides for most popular db vendors, etc
* As has already been mentioned, you will get concerns about any access to the db and "why not an API". I think these commenters are right that this will be a deal breaker for many companies, but I don't agree that you want an API. Not only because I think that reduces some of the value prop but also because then you would need to store customer data. I obviously don't know what you are storing today, but I would think that this model could have a big advantage if you didn't need to store any PII data in cc.dev. The complexity of dealing with compliance and regulatory requirements is no small part of why something like MailChimp is expensive is that burden. I don't know if this is something you currently consider a value prop (or if you have engineered to support this)... But I certainly would :)
* To address the reality of private dbs/giving access to a db, I would look at potentially implementing an agent. This agent would then run the queries (still provided by the user) and just-in-time deliver the results when needed. Getting the model of this right that works across different companies view of security will mean this is probably best to do with a handful of potential customers.
* As far as deployment and monetization model... I would only open source it if you are giving up on commercialization or if you can open source a subset that can be useful enough to build a community. Once again, returning to JAMstack, maybe solve in open source (but integrate) some problem unique to those teams. As far as a paid self-hosting, given that this seems like a one man show, I would resist it. Trying to do SaaS and support of self-hosting is rough, even for well funded VC backed teams..
Quite a bit here, but if you want follows up on anything, my email is in profile or will reply to comments.
Congrats again and hope it goes somewhere :)