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Why email startups fail

(forwardemail.net)
140 points skeptrune | 2 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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friendzis ◴[01 Jul 25 05:48 UTC] No.44430970[source]▶
> 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.

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1. amy214 ◴[02 Jul 25 20:58 UTC] No.44448744[source]▶
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.

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2. friendzis ◴[03 Jul 25 06:03 UTC] No.44452090[source]▶
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.