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Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies

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Re: Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies

#101

Post by adamkaz »

o-o- wrote: post #82

I'm in the middle of bootstrapping a SaaS company and spent the last few days evaluating e-mail providers. I think my requirements are really simple, yet I seem to fall outside what most offer. Here it goes: * A user-friendly WYSIWYG template editor (web fonts = nice to have but not crucial). * An API that lets me set the to-address and the e-mail content in markdown. How can this pose an edge case?!

As far as the fonts - font support across email clients is.... not great. We offer it but warn our users that their chosen font might not be displayed in most cases.

Ideally, you'd be able to paste any markdown into our editor and have it render properly, but still something we need to work on.

A markdown to HTML (email) converter would be neat though.

Re: Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies

#103

Post by technovangelist »

Congrats on the launch. We are using it for our emails out to folks and it’s working well for us. I also had the pleasure of working with Adam for a while when I hired him to join the Training group at Datadog soon after I started the team. When he said he was leaving to start an email company I thought he was crazy. But it’s a really cool product.

Re: Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies

#105

Post by selcuka »

adamkaz wrote: post #100
winrid wrote: post #94

I have no idea what contacts means in your pricing. Everytime I send a transactional email to a new address is that a new contact?? Pass on that. Mailgun and Brevo don't bill on that...

We're trying a different model - pay for your core audience and any emails (product updates, user touch points, and transactional) are all included. If you have a use case that sends outside of your core audience (maybe sharing content with non-users of your product, we bill on a more traditional email volume pricing.

Potential SaaS customers register trial accounts all the time. Do each address count as a new contact even though they only receive, say, an activation email once and never come back?

Re: Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies

#107

Post by alx-ppv »

I don't get why the pricing is based on contacts. Why not charge based on emails sent? This is probably where most of your expenses are, instead of charging on storing contacts in the DB and querying them. I have a SaaS B2C with more than 10k contacts and I don't send lots of emails.

That's why Sendy is a good option for me.

Re: Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies

#108

Post by o-o- »

hu3 wrote: post #85
o-o- wrote: post #82

I'm in the middle of bootstrapping a SaaS company and spent the last few days evaluating e-mail providers. I think my requirements are really simple, yet I seem to fall outside what most offer. Here it goes: * A user-friendly WYSIWYG template editor (web fonts = nice to have but not crucial). * An API that lets me set the to-address and the e-mail content in markdown. How can this pose an edge case?!

How would markdown play in this case? I would expect API to parse JSON with variables to replace in the templates.

Think of the markdown as the variable I'm sending (I'm doing the replacements myself before sending). I'd simply like to dress it in a template and send it to x.

Re: Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies

#110

Post by santiagobasulto »

Congrats on the launch. I’m currently starting my own startup, so I can give you my impressions as a potential customer.

Contact-based pricing is bad. You’re trying to create an email platform for SaaS, from the features perspective (yey!) but you’re charging just as mailchimp and everybody else does (nah!).

Instead, as a founder, I’d rather prefer “active user”. If someone tries my product, but they never return, I don’t want to be charged for. So, in any given month, count how many people I have emailed (during that period), and that counts as pricing.

Just my 2c. Good luck!

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