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

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

#1
Hello HN! We're the team behind Loops (https://loops.so), a platform aimed at simplifying the email experience for SaaS companies. We support creating and sending marketing, product, and transactional email.

Email is important but painful to manage. If you've ever dealt with the frustration of coding emails by hand, testing them across multiple clients, or integrating them into various SaaS tools, you might find our approach interesting.

We make it simple to design and send email to your users either manually in the app, via API or triggered via an integration. We offer unlimited team seats, so your product team can help align copy, your marketing team can send newsletters, your revenue team can work on dunning and your engineers can have a solid API to help orchestrate the sends.

Most of our competitors use email editors that are licensed from a third party. Our editor is built from the ground up on the Lexical text editor from Meta, extended beyond just text nodes. It supports mobile editing and dark mode, and it autosaves your changes.

Our REST API is straightforward, and we have integrations with tools like Segment and Census. Documentation is available at https://loops.so/docs. On our homepage, right under the fold, we list endpoints and sample payloads.

One issue we've worked hard to address is email compatibility across devices and platforms. It's a problem full of edge cases that we've mitigated by extending MJML, a markup language designed for responsive email, to be even more compliant across different platforms. We don't think you should have to code and test your emails. Email copy shouldn't live in your codebase.

If you're concerned about spam, we are too. We educate our users on CAN-SPAM rules and automatically add compliant footers to emails. We actively monitor to ensure our platform isn't used for spam, and we do not allow cold sales emails.

Our pricing is upfront and available on our website. You can try the platform for free without a credit card. We launched publicly a week ago. We're really interested in any technical feedback you have, as we aim to make this tool as developer-friendly as possible.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

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

#6
post #4

Any plans of open sourcing your MJML extensions? We hand-code MJML for our mails and fairly frequently run into compliancy problems. Runs kinda counter to your business-case I suppose, but might help someone (me) out :)

I would really like to eventually open source core parts of Loops.

I think parts of the editor makes sense, including the MJML. We spent an entire weekend extending MJML for Superhuman and it would be cool to release that work some way.

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

#7
post #4

Any plans of open sourcing your MJML extensions? We hand-code MJML for our mails and fairly frequently run into compliancy problems. Runs kinda counter to your business-case I suppose, but might help someone (me) out :)

Its definitely come up! I think it would be cool to have a community working on the translations to MJML from Lexical. There are so many corner cases and email clients out there, it's definitely a challenge to get things working everywhere. What type of compliancy problems have you run into?

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

#8
Personally, I find the Product Hunt upvote stuff front & centre to be quite distracting (and verging on devaluing to the product offering, in a lot of cases).

I understand the reasoning for it being there, but perhaps kick it further down the page so the service / offering is the focus.

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

#9
post #3

How are you different from other tools? Why would I switch?

Depends on use case and which tools you’re using today but we try to make gains everywhere we can.

In pricing, we try to simplify by ditching the tables and anchoring around one metric.

For engineers, our documentation is decent and updated regularly. We try to have a performant API, support the integrations you’re most likely to use and include a versioning system with our transactional email.

For marketing, we built our editor around a text-based interface and make it highly customizable. We also take the pain out of having to test across multiple platforms.

For product teams, we offer templates that cater to specific touchpoints in the SaaS lifecycle.

Across all of that we offer unlimited team seats so you can actually have your entire team onboard and technical support for when things don’t work as expected or you have questions.

We create slack connect channels with any team that needs one (we have almost 1,000) and try to provide fast, technical support.

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

#10

Personally, I find the Product Hunt upvote stuff front & centre to be quite distracting (and verging on devaluing to the product offering, in a lot of cases). I understand the reasoning for it being there, but perhaps kick it further down the page so the service / offering is the focus.

Totally fair, we just launched a week ago (and it went well) so we wanted to keep it up till the end of the month.

Will certainly place it in the footer and switch off the upvote portion in the future.

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