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Why email startups fail

(forwardemail.net)
140 points skeptrune | 5 comments | 01 Jul 25 00:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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sethammons ◴[01 Jul 25 02:11 UTC] No.44429940[source]▶
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.
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zaik ◴[01 Jul 25 04:18 UTC] No.44430554[source]▶
> email marketing companies

This means spammers, right?

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colechristensen ◴[01 Jul 25 04:41 UTC] No.44430641[source]▶
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.
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BiteCode_dev ◴[01 Jul 25 04:53 UTC] No.44430694[source]▶
"mildly annoying"

That's another name for spam.

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fc417fc802 ◴[01 Jul 25 05:32 UTC] No.44430887[source]▶
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.
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1. selcuka ◴[01 Jul 25 06:34 UTC] No.44431195[source]▶
I agree. These days I don't report email as spam if it has a (working) unsubscribe link.
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2. BiteCode_dev ◴[01 Jul 25 15:22 UTC] No.44434801[source]▶
Oh, so a day is not rainy if your coat dries after it?
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3. selcuka ◴[02 Jul 25 00:27 UTC] No.44439216[source]▶
No, rain is still rain. I just stopped complaining about it as it rains 24/7.
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4. amy214 ◴[02 Jul 25 21:05 UTC] No.44448821{3}[source]▶
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

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5. SaucyWrong ◴[02 Jul 25 23:15 UTC] No.44449832{4}[source]▶
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.