Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign
wildbit.com

> When you do something for this long, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. The team knows we’ve always joked about opening a hotel one day. But that, like any other wild ideas, always felt like a distant fantasy. Over the last year, we realized that we’re ready to explore a world outside of software. We’re ready to slow down a bit, be more present with our kids, and discover ourselves again.

(This is also why it's important to plan for a company eventually changing hands – even if it's bootstrapped, even if you love it and consider it your life's work. People change, as do companies, products, and teams. You're probably not going to be running it at age 80. Acknowledge that and don't be totally unprepared when it's time for a change.)

On one hand, it's awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them.

On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Support is fantastic of course, but it was really the little things that made the experience great.

An example, they manually vetted each of their API consumers to ensure one bad apple doesn't spoil the bushel. It's probably not cost effective to gate customers like this, but in the end I don't have to worry about MY email not being delivered by one of the major providers because some other person used Postmark to send a spam campaign. Stuff like this happened all the time with Sendgrid and the only remediation I've ever seen was "upgrade to our $90/mo plan and manage it on your own."

Maybe ActiveCampaign will keep this level of quality and care (it is the same team after all), but I can't help but be a little cautious. I've been burned one too many times by an acquisition of a great product by a not-so-great company.

I don't think that a Marketing company is the right type of company to run Postmark.

Postmark care about deliverability not about "engagement". Everything is about being sure your mail get to your clients not about how to craft marketing campaign from their product.

How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some email editor and campaign management feature to Postmark ?

I truly hope they won't touch their acquisition and let it run how it always has instead of adding feature that doesn't make sense with the product just to compete with MailChimp and other big names.