Why email startups fail

I was engineer 12 at SendGrid and left after IPO and subsequent acquisition by Twilio. Being infrastructure and the backing many email marketing companies, we did really well. Kind of like selling shovels in the gold rush. We struggled more on the product front breaking into the much larger marketing space. Learned a lot there leading and scaling teams and scaling the email infrastructure to support over 8 billion daily sends.

> email marketing companies

This means spammers, right?

No, in order for their traffic to not get blackholed, places like sendgrid have to follow the rules and make their customers follow the rules. The marketing emails they send will be somewhere between things people actually want to see and mildly annoying. There are plenty of things I subscribe to which are marketing emails I want to see.

"mildly annoying"

That's another name for spam.

marketing emails are mildly annoying until you want to buy something and they become useful for the 20% coupon

Perhaps historically, but these days I think spam refers to senders that don't play by the rules. Unsolicited (ie didn't obtain the recipient's address in a legitimate manner), no unsubscribe link (or not honored), technical measures intended to circumvent various filters, etc.

Or the band you love is in town

If I want certain marketing emails for these purposes, I create a rule to mark it read on arrival and moved directly to a certain folder where I can find it when needed. It will still never see my inbox.

> places like sendgrid have to follow the rules and make their customers follow the rules

i.e. juggle between allowing allowing some paid spam and not being outright blocked by google/microsoft. That's the service they provide: VC-backed connections to get traffic unblackholed on behalf of their spammer customers.

I agree. These days I don't report email as spam if it has a (working) unsubscribe link.

You may define it that way, but the original property of spam seems to apply nevertheless: They are low quality and noone really likes them.

The fact that you have to frame it your way speaks mostly to the fact that apparently your income depends on spam being seen as acceptable and not a scourge to humanity. But that's just my perspective...

Looking for a job, I see :P

That's what opt-in is for.

But it almost never is, isn't it?

Oh, so a day is not rainy if your coat dries after it?

Sure, would you be kind enough to publish your personal phone number on this public thread?

I'm sure you'll get mostly useful feedback.

Or there is a discount for Viagra

More likely bacn than spam. Stuff that you agreed to receive, but don't especially want. Even though people don't really want bacn, it's the compromise that society has generally accepted in terms of drawing a line against spam while still catering to allegedly legitimate marketing.

I own and operate a public facing company with my name on it. This is already the case. Par for the course.

Most people don't know what a rule is.

What if the product just cost 20% less in the first place?

That's a rather baseless assumption about my income. Does it really seem so unlikely to you that a reasonable person might not use the exact same criteria as yourself? Why are you so confident in the generalization of your own perspective to the population at large?

Define "low quality" and "not liked". Each person will classify a given message differently. At least in the general case it's hardly realistic to expect a sender to classify a message from the perspective of a specific recipient prior to sending it.

On the other hand, it is reasonable to expect addresses to be acquired via legitimate means (ie collected only with the consent of the recipient) and to cease attempts at contact when requested. That's essentially the boundary between reasonable conduct and harassment.

No, rain is still rain. I just stopped complaining about it as it rains 24/7.

Then your company crashes in sales.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2017/02/24/a...

exactly, then a leader says:

>There are plenty of things I subscribe to which are marketing emails I want to see.

Therefore: that's how I feel about my e-mail, meaning let's send a billion messages a day, surely a billion people also feel same as me about it.

The ugly and awkward thing about the unsubscribe link is I never subscribed in the first place. Someone else did on my behalf. To even ask to be unsubscribed, I feel, is taking some ownership of the subscription and playing into a crooked system. It's like being sent an invoice for something I never ordered and needing to cancel the invoice. And even if you say, "buzz off", who is to say someone won't decide to "resubscribe" you next day, given it's outside your control.

Me personally I won't give a pass to business with an unsubscribe link, I have extreme disgust that we're in some make-believe pretend world that I asked for this in the first place

I’m with you. I learned about the concept of “implicit opt-in / consent” while I was building an email marketing feature on a platform and I found the concept disgusting, but was told that because it’s technically legal, our customers considered it table stakes.

It's a classic example of anecdotal framing. Email traffic is blackholed by default and these mass-emailing services are needed precisely because majority of email traffic is marketing and majority of that subtraffic is spam.