Further evidence that "if you aren't monitoring it, it isn't happening"! Ensuring that code is monitorable needs to be right up there with ensuring it's testable.
Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
#22This could be solved an even more fundamental way: Don't run your own mailer as a startup. There are lots of companies that will be responsible for email deliverability on your behalf, via an API. If it took them 3 months to notice no mail was being sent at all, imagine how long it's going to take them to figure out that their IP is blacklisted in Spamhaus or any number of other deliverability issues?
If you want to send bulk email blasts from a large list then definitely use a 3rd party, but it seems their emails were triggered programmatically from many different parts of their application. The email providers I have used don't make this easy so it is usually better to run the server yourself. You don't need much knowledge or experience to run an email server (if you are competent at general IT tasks already) bu…
I've used SendGrid for transactional emails and it works like a charm.
Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
#23This could be solved an even more fundamental way: Don't run your own mailer as a startup. There are lots of companies that will be responsible for email deliverability on your behalf, via an API. If it took them 3 months to notice no mail was being sent at all, imagine how long it's going to take them to figure out that their IP is blacklisted in Spamhaus or any number of other deliverability issues?
Excellent advice, the only thing I'd add is that it's like this for everything that isn't core to your service when you are getting started.
Maybe true, but a mail server in particular is one of those things that's a lot harder to set up and maintain than it looks.
Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
#24This could be solved an even more fundamental way: Don't run your own mailer as a startup. There are lots of companies that will be responsible for email deliverability on your behalf, via an API. If it took them 3 months to notice no mail was being sent at all, imagine how long it's going to take them to figure out that their IP is blacklisted in Spamhaus or any number of other deliverability issues?
If you want to send bulk email blasts from a large list then definitely use a 3rd party, but it seems their emails were triggered programmatically from many different parts of their application. The email providers I have used don't make this easy so it is usually better to run the server yourself. You don't need much knowledge or experience to run an email server (if you are competent at general IT tasks already) bu…
I recently migrated a couple of my sites away from directly sending transactional email, to using MailChimp's Mandrill service. A few months later, I only wish I had done that sooner.
Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
#25This could be solved an even more fundamental way: Don't run your own mailer as a startup. There are lots of companies that will be responsible for email deliverability on your behalf, via an API. If it took them 3 months to notice no mail was being sent at all, imagine how long it's going to take them to figure out that their IP is blacklisted in Spamhaus or any number of other deliverability issues?
If you want to send bulk email blasts from a large list then definitely use a 3rd party, but it seems their emails were triggered programmatically from many different parts of their application. The email providers I have used don't make this easy so it is usually better to run the server yourself. You don't need much knowledge or experience to run an email server (if you are competent at general IT tasks already) bu…
>> The email providers I have used don't make this easy so it is usually better to run the server yourself.
Mandrill, Mailgun, Sendgrid all make this easy.
Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
#26I don't think terms like "Fuck-ups" or "screwed" should belong in corporate communications, start-up or not. It's cool they are talking about this openly, but unfortunately what I took from their write-up is that their communication style is less than professional.
Sorry, fuck-up is an acceptable professional term now. A fuck-up is an error that is so bad that from CEO to customer, there is no sense in calling it anything other than what it is. Send 10 emails at once to a customer? Sorry, we fucked up. Lose 25% of revenue for several months? Sorry, CEO, I fucked up. It is an admission that you have made an error that will happen less than once a year and hopefully only once a career.
Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
#27This could be solved an even more fundamental way: Don't run your own mailer as a startup. There are lots of companies that will be responsible for email deliverability on your behalf, via an API. If it took them 3 months to notice no mail was being sent at all, imagine how long it's going to take them to figure out that their IP is blacklisted in Spamhaus or any number of other deliverability issues?
Not everyone wants to outsource transactional mail handling to a third party.
This is the whole idea behind economic specialization & division of labor[1]. And even if you were to be better at sending email than Mailchimp it's likely that you're even more better at your core competency which means that you should farm out your email sending and focus on your specialization.
Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to send bulk email blasts from a large list then definitely use a 3rd party, but it seems their emails were triggered programmatically from many different parts of their application. The email providers I have used don't make this easy so it is usually better to run the server yourself. You don't need much knowledge or experience to run an email server (if you are competent at general IT tasks already) bu…
>> The email providers I have used don't make this easy so it is usually better to run the server yourself. Mandrill, Mailgun, Sendgrid all make this easy.
It has been a few years since I have been saddled with email responsibilities so it's not surprising I am a little behind the times. But it still doesn't mean you shouldn't be checking that customers are receiving your emails.
Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
#29If you don't outsource this type of service (preferred solution imho) then from the very beginning you have to monitor internally (the solution done after the fact) and also and most importantly externally, in this case having one or more monitored client-like email accounts.
Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight
#30"I am single, 41 and pregnant"... I don't know when pregnancy became a part of a person's identity. I guess this adds to the coolness factor these days because you have to try harder? Sigh.
The pregnancy is just as relevant as being single and 41. Why are you complaining about it and not the others?
> The pregnancy is just as relevant as being single and 41
ie. not at all