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Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

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Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

#31

Post by joshuacc »

mason55 wrote: post #27
spacefight wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

I think the specific term you are looking for is comparative advantage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

#33

Post by meritt »

protonfish wrote: post #20
rbadaro wrote: post #17

I 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.

I don't care what language they use, personally. However I am at work and having the F-word in 72pt font blaring from the top of my browser made scroll down very quickly. I doubt my bosses would be thrilled to see that.

Man, I'm sorry, but what sort of job do you have where seeing the word "Fuck" is like an actual job risk?

Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

#35

Post by ceejayoz »

stef25 wrote: post #30
ceejayoz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All are fairly relevant in the user's profile, which is where this appeared.

Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

#36

Post by netcan »

tankenmate wrote: post #5
shizcakes wrote: post #2

This 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?

I'd modify that by saying; if you really know how to run a mail server go for it, but if you don't then leave it to someone who does know. Same goes for just about every other service your start up relies on; accounting, legal, etc. Cost benefit analysis (even a brief one) will always help, even if you get the answer wrong. It's just a part of planning; your plans don't always work, but if you don't plan then you'll…

To ad a couple more cents to the pile: email is serious business, get serious about it. That doesn't mean spend a lot of time. Use services. But, be serious about it.

Figure out if you're sending the right mail at the right time. Cut out unnecessary emails and unnecessary junk in the emails. Make sure they get delivered and read.

Any service from a dating site to an app for accountants a wholesaler of underpants needs emails and how well you use them is important. You can be minimalist. Analytical. Formal, casual.. There are as many approaches to this as there are to anything else. Just don't take it lightly. Get good at email. Just because it's simple doesn't mean it's not important.

Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

#37

Post by brusch64 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #16

As someone who has created quite a few of these mailers, the queue getting stuck on a single piece of mail and hanging indefinitely is incredibly common. As time has gone on my solutions have become simpler and more pragmatic, since additional complexity breads additional problems. For example, if I was going to design an emailer today: -Grab the email from a database save it to a file (likely one or several XML file…

Sounds like you just recreated Microsoft Biztalk.

But to sound less like a dick - communicating with a low probability of errors is hard !

Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

#38

Post by mason55 »

joshuacc wrote: post #31
mason55 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

I think the specific term you are looking for is comparative advantage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Yup - that is indeed what I meant to put. That's what I get for posting while on the phone.

Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

#39

Post by clickbyclick »

w0rd-driven wrote: post #14
zrail wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone wants to do that then they've never tried to handle even a moderate volume of transactional mail themselves. Or they're starting a transactional mail service provider. Either way, my hat's off to them. It's a giant pain in the ass that can be resolved for less than $20 per month.

I completely agree. I think unless your startup or core competency is something like that, why shard your core product's development/IT/whatever work to support an in-house product that's bound to have bugs(tm) right out of the gate? There very much should be a cost/risk analysis but there's an awful lot of NiH that honestly should be avoided if you can genuinely help it. You're still more than welcome to roll your o…

That's the straight dope. #truth

Having worked on the IT and Biz side of tech companies (happily SaaS closing that gap daily) I can tell you the logic patterns are diametrically opposed.

IT = born problem solvers, nothing is too big, small or complicated BIZ = friction solvers, nothing can be too efficient

The struggle isn't that 'you' could do it (better, faster or even cheaper) in your mind... but that if isn't a core competency moving your business forward, write a check and let someone else handle the core. Break free from the burden of 'undifferentiated heavy lifting' and improve your core product.

We sell a SaaS solution and in turn I write ~20 checks to other SaaS providers a month to keep me focused on improving our customer's experience.

Re: Startup Fuck-ups: How we lost 25% of our monthly revenue overnight

#40

Post by wmt »

What we found was that a number of failed jobs were being kept by the system, which meant that these were taking up a ton of space that they shouldn’t have been.

To fix the issue, we put together a script to delete the failed items, since any retries to send them didn’t appear to work.

At this point my head was screaming "NOOOOooooo!" and made me feel bad for author for the whatever disaster would soon follow.

Not only was the problem not fixed, it wasn't even understood. Hiding the problem by fixing its symptoms will rarely get you far. I don’t think I'm even Captain Hindsighting here, as I've learned over and over that not understanding the root cause of any issue means you will be screwed by the issue sooner or later, and it likely will not be pretty.

Sure, sometimes you don't have the time to get to bottom of an issue, but even then you cannot pretend that it's fixed. It'll be back with a vengeance.

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