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Why email startups fail

(forwardemail.net)
140 points skeptrune | 2 comments | 01 Jul 25 00:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.461s | 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. s1mplicissimus ◴[01 Jul 25 09:54 UTC] No.44432242[source]▶
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...

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2. fc417fc802 ◴[02 Jul 25 00:26 UTC] No.44439213[source]▶
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.