Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

cc.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 105 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#61

Post by jacobsimon »

kashnote wrote: post #32
carlossouza wrote: post #22

I 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…

Been wanting something like this for years over at Exponent. We do a lot of targeted and dynamic emails to our users based on their role and progress through our courses, and it’s a pain to not only synchronize the database with the mail provider, but to agree on a system for capturing the state of the user that works with the platform - we’ve ended up creating a complex system of tags that has to be maintained across both systems.

Re: non technical users, one idea would be an ability to save “audiences” using smaller SQL queries, that way non-technical collaborators could easily send a campaign to a well-defined group of users, and update the group definition once instead of across all your emails.

If you could infer the structure of the connected database automatically and control which tables are visible in the product, people might find that really helpful too (check out Metabase as an example product that does a great job at querying data sources with UI and raw SQL)

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#63

Post by Exuma »

kashnote wrote: post #14
CableNinja wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going open source will not solve your problems. The issue is that youre asking customers to open database access to you/your company. The reason why the method youve chosen isnt already out there is because of all the implications it has. You better have one hell of a security team to ensure youre locked down tighter than a ducks ass. Look at how many data breaches there have been, even in the past year. The solution…

Definitely taking all the security measures I can, but you're right, things can go wrong. I do encourage (and would like to enforce) that db credentials provided should have very limited read access to only the tables/columns that the user wants to query. Having said that, it's totally understandable that some orgs won't want do open up their db. The idea with going open source would be that they can host the platfor…

I'm not a security expert, but at the very least if I were you make your docs very good for people who dont want to wade through 1000 different documentation to find how to very simply create a read-only user with access to specific table + columns. Or better yet even, how to create a read only view with ONLY the email/name and not any other PII, and then give access to that.

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#64

Post by c0brac0bra »

zenorocha wrote: post #41
kashnote wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah cool! I actually hadn't heard of this. Would be cool if I can integrate this into the platform. Been thinking of adding other backends like Sendgrid and Resend.

Resend founder here - let's make it happen

Haven't heard of resend before. I've been pretty unhappy with Sendgrid, especially their usability when running lots of subaccounts.

Since you're here, how would you say you compare vs them or say sparkpost? I looked for comparisons on your site but I wasn't able to find anything.

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#66

Post by carlossouza »

jonathanbull wrote: post #44
carlossouza wrote: post #22

I 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 market for entrepreneurs/companies who know how to create IAM credentials but don't have the time or skills to build an entire email marketing platform on top of Amazon SES is bigger than you think (I co-founded EmailOctopus which does the same thing without the database hookup, which is a cool idea). Good luck with it @kashnote

I'll update my beliefs after your data point :)

Congrats on EmailOctopus; it looks like a nice product!

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#67

Post by kashnote »

8organicbits wrote: post #58
failTide wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd still be exposing the database system itself to the public regardless of the credentials you were using for the email service, as opposed to keeping it all within a VPC which seems to be what most guides recommend. I assume the difference would be that having your database exposed presents additional surface area for attacks. A rube-goldberg style setup probably presents its own risks, but personally I just use…

Using a public facing database, but using an IP address allow-list to restrict access is pretty secure. cc should publish the IP addresses they use.

It’s listed on the Data page! No need to open the database up to the whole internet. Just whitelist one IP.

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#68

Post by dangus »

kashnote wrote: post #32
carlossouza wrote: post #22

I 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…

My first thought when I read this post was “did you try someone besides MailChimp?” My understanding is that they’re not really a market leader and that there are competing solutions that are either better, cheaper, or both.

That said I think this is an interesting niche to be in, because I think there are some customers out there who don’t need the technical hand-holding of other marketing platforms.

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#70

Post by jroesner »

dangus wrote: post #68
kashnote wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My first thought when I read this post was “did you try someone besides MailChimp?” My understanding is that they’re not really a market leader and that there are competing solutions that are either better, cheaper, or both. That said I think this is an interesting niche to be in, because I think there are some customers out there who don’t need the technical hand-holding of other marketing platforms.

How do you define market leader? In 2021 they had 14 million paying customers and a market share of 72 percent. If that’s not a market leading position, I don’t know what is. I don’t favor them, it’s a real pain sometimes, but they operate a tanker, not a speed boat.
Post reply on HN