[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for in... ___________________________________________________________________ Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs Author : driaug Score : 48 points Date : 2022-07-25 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.useplunk.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.useplunk.com) | boberoni wrote: | Congrats on launching to HackerNews! First step on a journey of | many. | | Some Feedback: | | - The biggest words on the landing page are "Behavioural Email | Tool" but I don't know what this means. Maybe I'm not in your | market. | | - As I read through what Plunk does, it sounds more like "email | automation". However, Plunk is not like other email automation | because... (insert your wildest dreams) | | - Your pricing is too low. In the wise words of patio11, "Charge | more!" For a detailed guide to pricing SaaS and how to _think_ | about your pricing, check out patio11 's writing on the Stripe | blog[1] | | - There's a typo in your free plan: it should be "1 seat", not "1 | seats". | | - Don't offer "Amazing Support" on your free plan. Reason (1) is | that users on the free plan tend to squeeze the most support out | of you, and they're not even paying you. You can reach out to | help them if you want, but don't _promise support_ to free users. | Reason (2) is that adding support is a good incentive for a | serious business to upgrade to the pro plan. If I 'm a business | who's success/revenue relies on Plunk for my success, I surely | would upgrade from a plan without support to one with support. | | [1] https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas-pricing | driaug wrote: | Thank you very much for this incredible feedback, very kind of | you! | | I have already made some minor changes (fixed the typo and | moved dedicated support). | | Tomorrow I will be looking into altering the copy because I do | understand what you are saying and have heard the same feedback | about the term "behavioural email tool"from a couple of people! | | Thank you very much for linking Stripe Atlas' guide, seems | really helpful and in-depth! | Cyberdog wrote: | What a very websitey web site. My first thought when I saw that | home page was "boy, I bet if I keep scrolling, there's going to | be empty areas on the page where things obnoxiously animate into | place" and BOY HOWDY. | | For your free tier which claims to offer unlimited emails, how | are you stopping people from signing up and using it to blast out | spam until you find it and kill their account (after which they | will just sign up for another free account)? Services like these | need to be very careful they're not sending out spam lest spam | daemons start dropping all messages from their servers, causing | emails from legitimate users to never hit their destination. If | you don't have some extreme limits on this (like maybe one | outgoing message per five minutes) I would suggest you do away | with the free tier. Given the enormity of the problem of email | spam and the disastrous effects being seen as a spam collaborator | will have on your legit users, there's really no shame in getting | a card on file and maybe even doing other identity validation | before letting users send email with a tool like this. | jppope wrote: | looks cool. unfortunately I don't have a ton of use for it at the | moment... but I'll be saving the link :) | driaug wrote: | No worries! Thank you for the kind words. | altdataseller wrote: | "Completely free, no strings attached" | | * Sees that I can't email from my own domain unless I pay. (I'm | all for paying, but don't say completely free, no strings | attached) | driaug wrote: | I get what you mean by this! Let me clarify what my way of | thought is behind the "completely free, no strings attached". I | do not ask for your credit card info, I don't put you on a | trial that magically renews at the end of the month, I don't | offer you a sketchy sign-on deal with an unexpected bill at the | end of the month. I try to make it as ethical as possible, | unlike some other marketing/emailing tools. | | That is my meaning behind no strings attached. Of course I put | some features behind a subscription because they demand | significant work from my side (managing the domains is one of | those). | gnicholas wrote: | I was confused by this. How is the email sent for free | customers? From your domain? If so, that seems like a totally | different (and worse, generally) thing than the competitors | you list. It's fine to have a free tier, but then you can't | really compare it to those competitors. | cercatrova wrote: | Write all that as bullet points on the website itself | buf wrote: | I'm an indie hacker and I send 2M emails per month on Sendgrid. | It costs around $1k per month. | | I use sendgrid because it just works, but I'm always curious when | a new thing comes around and I'd love to save some money. | | How does this work at scale? | driaug wrote: | At scale this should work fine. Some parts of the dashboard are | not yet prepared for that amount of data to flow in though, may | be hard to navigate and monitor. | | I am also looking at the pricing for that because right now I | offer unlimited emails but I need a good way to compensate for | power users like yourself without going completely overboard. | babyshake wrote: | I think one of the big value-adds of email tools is they help | emails not end up in spam. It would be good if the website | mentioned this if it is something that Plunk helps with compared | to sending your own emails. | driaug wrote: | It is very hard to make statements about this. It very much | depends on the reputation of your own domain (if you are not | using our domain to send your emails) and the content of your | emails if they will end up in spam. I have yet to see one of my | own emails origination from @useplunk.com end up in somebody's | spam folder! I believe that is a great start and further down | the line (with more data) I may be able to make specific claims | about it! | rglover wrote: | Guessing you've already done it, but I worked on something | loosely related to this a couple years back and best things | you can do to avoid it are: | | 1. Make sure you've done DKIM and SPF verification via your | SMTP provider. | | 2. Use an SMTP provider with a solid sender reputation (e.g., | Postmark). | | 3. Help users keep lists clean. Aggressively handle bounces | and make sure unsubscribe is easy to avoid spam complaints. | | P.S. Dig the design/feel of everything. No immediate use but | I've bookmarked to come back and give it a try when I do. | [deleted] | eappleby wrote: | It sounds like the free version sends emails from the | useplunk.com domain. If that is the case and some of those | emails get marked as spam, won't all emails from the | useplunk.com domain be more likely to be identified as spam? | driaug wrote: | I have built-in an automatic catch, if x% (still looking at | what a good value for x is) of your emails bounce then your | account gets quarantined and we see what we can do about | that. That way we can prevent damage before other users get | affected. | | Does that make sense? | djbusby wrote: | Bounce is different than spam. Are you DMARC monitoring? | driaug wrote: | Sorry about the confusing wording, with bounce I mean | both hard bounces, rejects and complaints (they are all | monitored appropriately). They are all taken into account | when calculating the % because they all have impact on | the domain reputation. | jdthedisciple wrote: | Looks great! Plans to turn it into a SaaS? | alexchamberlain wrote: | Is it not a SaaS already? | jdthedisciple wrote: | mobile makes me blind sometimes ... my bad | letterlib wrote: | I wish there was more copy on this site about what the tool is | and why it's useful. It looks interesting, but there's not enough | information there for me to figure out if it's worth investing | more. | | I could do the free version to find out, but it'd be nice to have | a 2-3 min video or page that goes more in depth on the features | that are there. | driaug wrote: | Valuable feedback, thank you for this! How would you feel about | a demo video where I show you how to set it up and go through | the features at the same time? | djbusby wrote: | Don't waste my attention on the one-time setup BS. Show why | it kicks ass in less than 30s. | LanceJones wrote: | Features, sure. Common use cases solved by the features, even | better. | eappleby wrote: | I agree that it would be helpful to show a simple use case on | the home page. Maybe I'm not the target customer (although I | am a soloproneur), but your user flow of (1) user clicking a | button, (2) plunk receiving an event, (3) plunk sends an | email, isn't really a problem that I have, since sending an | email after an action is taken is pretty easy to manage. Are | you are focusing on categorizing users into groups and | sending them progressive emails? | driaug wrote: | A very big part of what Plunk does is giving you the | opportunity to link multiple events together and delay | emails. You can extend it to users that have clicked button | A and B but not button C and send those an email after 5 | days. Significantly harder to implement and a lot of code | that isn't really used elsewhere! | eappleby wrote: | Yeah, makes sense | gumby wrote: | Replace all the text "above the fold" (readable without | scrolling) with _benefit_ not _features_. In other words, _why_ I | should keep reading, not _how_ you do it. | | That first text has one job: convince the person who clicked on | the link to learn more (or, if they aren't a prospect, send them | away so they don't waste your, and their, time). It's an elevator | pitch, though not to an investor but to a customer. | So: Make it easy to send mail from inside your app. Or: | Mail should be an easy part of your marketing. Plunk makes it | easy. | | I'm not even sure what behavioural email is so either I'm not | part of your target market or you're accidentally sending me | away. | | Also, I like the indy hacker solopreneur part, even though my | currrent startup is neither. That's why I clicked. But are you | using those terms to pull in people who are discouraged by how | clumsy the incumbents are (that would be me)? Or are you | accidentally excluding people who could use this too (when apple | launched the "airport" wifi access point around 2000 it was | designed as a consumer product, but lots of people bought them | and stuck them in the drop ceiling to get work done by getting | around IT). There's no good answer to this, and perhaps the right | thing is to start where you are and expand (like, say, Dropbox | did). The reason other mail sending things are so hard to use is | because big companies want lots of knobs to twiddle, and one of | your benefits is not having those knobs. You don't want customers | who want extra control knobs. | | Is this for the back end or for mobile? | mousetree wrote: | We use Segment->Vero as our main automated email marketing flow | (~5M emails per month so not huge, we use Sendgrid via Vero to | actually send the emails). We're looking to change to something | more established like Iterable/Customer.io as Vero is very slow | (UI and latency to send emails). More than happy to provide | feedback as to what works/doesn't in your competitors. | driaug wrote: | That would be very valuable to my development! You can always | reach out to me at dries@useplunk.com | mattl wrote: | Name is similar to splunk.com -- I wonder if that'll be an issue? | driaug wrote: | Splunk is in a very different part of the landscape than Plunk | so legally there isn't that much of an issue. Verbally it may | be more confusing but it'll be fine! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-25 23:00 UTC)