[HN Gopher] Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign
___________________________________________________________________
Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign
Author : inopinatus
Score : 174 points
Date : 2022-05-03 12:07 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wildbit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (wildbit.com)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Oh fuck this sucks. I love Postmark, I hope they don't screw it
| up.
|
| Who am I kidding, they will screw it up, they need to recoup
| their investment. Where to now?
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Congrats to the founders and ( hopefully ) the team for the big
| payday.
|
| Postmark has always been an high quality product and I think all
| their success is deserved.
|
| As for their customers.. well we all know how that's going to
| play out overtime. Hopefully that takes a few years and not
| months.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Who and who?
| plantain wrote:
| Of the SaaS services my own SaaS service depends on, Postmark has
| given me the least (zero) problems, and I'm genuinely concerned
| about what will happen now.
|
| Their deliverability has always been absolutely stellar.
| adhoc_slime wrote:
| speak of the devil: https://status.postmarkapp.com/
|
| I wonder how/if this relates to the acquisition at all.
| daenney wrote:
| > In the end, the team at ActiveCampaign really showed up. The
| majority of our team will continue 4-day work weeks through the
| end of the year.
|
| But then what? They have to accept a 5-day work week again in 6
| months or find work somewhere else? Getting an extra day off a
| week is a huge benefit, and I bet losing it will have a pretty
| big impact on those that had grown accustomed to it.
| brianbreslin wrote:
| This is excellent news for the wildbit team. They bootstrapped a
| super successful product, and sold it when it wasn't their
| passion anymore. They should be celebrated.
| cersa8 wrote:
| Great service and deliverability but pricey if you are in the
| 125k emails / month bracket. I found Amazon SES to be just as
| good (or good enough) for just 12% of what postmark asks.
| polote wrote:
| > was a team with great empathy and values, and a true desire to
| make this an acquisition that served all the human constituents
| as best as possible.
|
| Every acquisition announcement almost paint the acquirer as an
| amazing company, that care deeply about the mission of the
| acquired company and that is aligned with its vision. But 99% of
| the time it is false.
|
| This is especially false when the founders don't even stay in the
| company. We should allow founders to say "We sold the company to
| get money and do something else, we hope the acquiring company
| will take great care of our customers"
| troydavis wrote:
| > But 99% of the time it is false.
|
| Another possibility: it's true far more than 1% of the time,
| yet that's not enough reason for the acquirer to make the same
| decisions as the previous owners would have.
|
| The acquirer can be amazing, care deeply about the mission of
| the acquired company, and see it as aligned... and after a year
| or a few years, decide that it's not the best use of their
| resources. The difference doesn't need to be that the acquirer
| isn't amazing or doesn't care; often, it's simply that their
| decisions have different inputs.
| rchaud wrote:
| What can they really say, honestly? "Hey, we sold out to the
| highest bidder. No clue how this is going to go, but we felt
| the time was right to cash out. Bye!"
| tullo_x86 wrote:
| Trouble is, you can do this once just fine. But it means the
| next time you want to get investors or sell a company,
| potential payers will also weigh your past performance. If you
| say "yeah we have no idea what's going to happen, good luck"
| and the company tanks after being sold, who would trust that it
| wasn't your actions at fault?
|
| As much as it sucks for consumers, the self-interested thing to
| do is sing the praises of your buyer -- because your reputation
| is at stake otherwise.
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| This is the game right? Build something people need, and
| ideally situate such that a larger player with deep pockets
| goes "yes, this" and cashes you out. Much like the "Thank you
| for smoking" film trope, you can't take the money AND call the
| press for the expose on how dirty the whole thing is. I'm
| reminded of the South Park founders more or less laughing "yeah
| we sold out" because why wouldn't you? Everyone has a number
| (unless you're a martyr, bless you, or already fuck-you-money).
| That number turns out to be much lower than you might expect
| when the real deal knocks on your door.
| onphonenow wrote:
| Man, this feels like the chrome extension buyouts by marketing
| companies.
|
| A bit of a backstory. Postmark was a delivery first company.
| Initially they were actually transaction email ONLY (not even
| product updates, release notes). They broadened eventually, but
| manually reviewed each new customer AND if you were doing
| marketing often pointed you elsewhere
|
| "If your needs are less about supporting application-based
| sending and more around enabling marketing promotion, there are
| other tools that may be a better fit for you than Postmark."
|
| ActiveCampaign is the opposite. Marketing first. Fingers crossed.
| nik736 wrote:
| Wow, that's a surprise! I love Postmark and I am using it for all
| my products. This kind of feels wrong though, hopefully it won't
| go downhill from here.
| asdfqwertzxcv wrote:
| https://smtp2go.com maybe? Just discovered them the other day
| but yet to give it a whirl. Just when I was starting to double
| down on Postmark, they did this. Not blaming them, but we all
| know this is going to go badly (as a previous Active Campaign
| user).
| tanto wrote:
| Years ago I loved mandrill. After they got acquired by Mailchimp
| it became toast. The user experience went downhill and wasn't
| comparable to products like Postmark at all. I fear Postmark will
| go down the same road now. Many great products unfortunately
| become quite bad after acquisitions. I hope ActiveCampaign is a
| better new owner than most.
| mbStavola wrote:
| Extremely mixed feelings on this one.
|
| On one hand, it's awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on
| their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then
| walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to
| them.
|
| On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over
| Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much
| smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers.
| Support is fantastic of course, but it was really the little
| things that made the experience great.
|
| An example, they manually vetted each of their API consumers to
| ensure one bad apple doesn't spoil the bushel. It's probably not
| cost effective to gate customers like this, but in the end I
| don't have to worry about MY email not being delivered by one of
| the major providers because some other person used Postmark to
| send a spam campaign. Stuff like this happened all the time with
| Sendgrid and the only remediation I've ever seen was "upgrade to
| our $90/mo plan and manage it on your own."
|
| Maybe ActiveCampaign will keep this level of quality and care (it
| is the same team after all), but I can't help but be a little
| cautious. I've been burned one too many times by an acquisition
| of a great product by a not-so-great company.
| themanmaran wrote:
| I'm hopeful that the product remains the same. I chose Postmark
| because it was the most simple transactional email provider I
| could find.
|
| ActiveCampaign on the other hand was always a nightmare for me
| at my prior company. Their API had a 5 request / second rate
| limit. Which made it almost impossible to use for 50,000+
| customers (syncing up emails / tags / campaigns).
| Toutouxc wrote:
| I worked on a project that used the ActiveCampaign API. It
| had tens of thousands of users and an elaborate tagging
| system.
|
| There were operations that we'd have liked to be synchronous
| (in the browser), but the rate limit and no useful batching
| mechanism (AFAIK at that time) meant they took over a minute
| to complete.
| shafyy wrote:
| Give MailPace a try [0]. The creator seems like a great guy,
| and the service does what it says without any bs. I've been
| using it for a while now for side projects, and can only
| recommmend it.
|
| 0: https://mailpace.com/
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Do they offer templates? I couldn't find any mention of it in
| their docs.
|
| As in, I write a template in mailpace.com with {{foobar}}
| placeholders, and make an API hit with the vars to replace.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| MailPace founder here. No we don't, but it is in the
| roadmap for later this year.
|
| However we did create some Tailwind based templates here
| that you can use manually:
|
| https://github.com/mailpace/templates
| joshstrange wrote:
| Same here. I saw the email this morning and my heart sunk. I
| know I'm not a big customer (I'm on the lower tier plan,
| $10/mo) but Postmark was a rock solid part of my setup and now
| I'm not sure how long that will last or when/if my plan will be
| seen as a waste of time/money. Postmark was so incredibly
| refreshing after having been exposed to a number of other
| products in the same space. I'm glad for the team but
| apprehensive about the future.
| robinhood wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| I have the biggest respect for Postmark. Excellent product.
| Extremely well done APIs. Incredible performance and
| reliability. I've always chosen them for my projects and
| recommended it many times. And most of all, I wanted to support
| an independent product, made by awesome people.
|
| I really, really hope they will remain like they are now.
|
| Congratulations to the owners for staying true to their values
| all these years. Wilbit has always been a huge, huge source of
| inspiration for everything I've done. And congrats for the
| payout!
| Belphemur wrote:
| I agree with you, such a bittersweet taste in the mouth.
|
| I don't think that a Marketing company is the right type of
| company to run Postmark.
|
| Postmark care about deliverability not about "engagement".
| Everything is about being sure your mail get to your clients
| not about how to craft marketing campaign from their product.
|
| How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some email
| editor and campaign management feature to Postmark ?
|
| I truly hope they won't touch their acquisition and let it run
| how it always has instead of adding feature that doesn't make
| sense with the product just to compete with MailChimp and other
| big names.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some
| email editor and campaign management feature to Postmark ?
|
| Seems unlikely given AC is already incredibly cheap and a
| simple email sender won't be sophisticated enough to convince
| marketing teams to move over from a full featured ESP to
| something simpler.
| kakwa_ wrote:
| I'm also not convince this is a good fit, but for another
| reason: if you're a pure Deliverability Company, it's far
| easier to maintain healthy relations with email hosting
| providers and get useful information or data from them.
|
| By contrast, if you're a Marketing Company, well 'enemy'
| might be bit strong but these providers will definitely be
| far less cooperative, and your service might suffer from it.
| pascal07 wrote:
| Hey there, Rian here (Head of Product at Postmark). We
| definitely understand the "mixed feelings" response for an
| acquisition like this. A couple things I want to reiterate:
|
| * The entire Postmark team is joining ActiveCampaign, and we
| are going to continue to operate the way we have always
| operated for the foreseeable future. That includes the support
| team you love!
|
| * We definitely don't plan to change any of the things we do to
| ensure the highest deliverability in the industry. We are not,
| for example, making any changes to the manual approval process
| --that will definitely continue.
|
| Also keep an eye on the FAQ as we will be updating it
| throughout the day: https://postmarkapp.com/postmark-
| activecampaign-faq
| traeregan wrote:
| Congratulations to you and the rest of the team! Longtime
| satisfied customer here, managing more than 20 Postmark
| accounts for our clients.
|
| Your no-frills, reliable service has been our go-to over the
| years. We dabbled in competing services when clients asked,
| but they paled in comparison.
|
| Gosh, I hope what you've stated all holds up!
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| History has shown, over and over again, that all these sorts
| of pledges are utterly worthless.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _The entire Postmark team is joining ActiveCampaign, and we
| are going to continue to operate the way we have always
| operated for the foreseeable future. That includes the
| support team you love!_
|
| While I appreciate you saying this, you have to have in mind
| that just some 6 months down the line it won't be you calling
| the shots. The business priorities will be determined by
| other people and they can and will command you to shift your
| policies as they see fit.
|
| I want to believe but history has shown, time and again, that
| these pledges never materialize.
|
| It's OK, you are feeling relief because you likely received a
| huge sum of money. Who wouldn't be happy!
|
| There's a proverb: "Never promise anything when you are
| feeling happy".
|
| Maybe let's talk again in 6 months.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, I believe when some says this, they actually mean it.
| They just don't have the power to ensure it actually
| happens.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Oh I am sure they 100% believe it. I wonder why people
| always forget about the power structures. I guess that's
| what happens when people work what they love and money is
| just a positive side effect... as opposed to this being
| exactly the opposite for 99% of the other population.
| rabidonrails wrote:
| I think you often forget about this because promises are
| made that they won't touch anything. So you're being
| genuine when you say "nothing is going to change" because
| that's what leadership promised.
|
| Trying to maintain this is a major fight that generally
| gets you fired or you end up leaving out of frustration.
|
| It's hard to see if when you come in with business like
| Postmark that is loved by its customers because you think
| "We're a great business and we know how to do things, why
| would you want to blow that up?" but you need to remember
| that the acquirer (ActiveCampaign) is looking out for
| themselves (ActiveCampaign) first.
| ayewo wrote:
| Exactly. This is a case of "He who pays the piper calls the
| tune."
| pkulak wrote:
| Exactly this. Postmark is my go to when the mail actually needs
| to show up. I don't do campaigns or other bullshit. When a
| service I've written sends an email, it's a password reset or
| similar.
| sandstrom wrote:
| What are some other options in this space?
|
| What I need:
|
| - Focus on transactional email.
|
| - Support for inbound emails, sent to us via POST webhook.
|
| - Good developer documentation and overall good product
| obviously.
|
| - DKIM, SPF and DMARC support.
|
| - Decent UI to troubleshoot delivery problems, i.e. easy to
| inspect the status for any one email.
|
| - Happy to pay for it, price not a big factor.
|
| I've looked at Mailgun, but happy to hear other suggestions.
| kevincox wrote:
| I run an email based service and while I send most email on my
| own I have been using the following providers for fall-back
| (for inbox providers that have very strict policies).
|
| - https://serversmtp.com/
|
| - https://aws.amazon.com/ses/
|
| I prefer SES for a number of reasons:
|
| - The price is about the best you will get.
|
| - You can DKIM sign messages yourself if you want (although
| IIRC they remove the ability to verify your domain with DKIM
| from the console recently. Hopefully they don't drop this
| support).
|
| - Pay as you go Pricing means that you don't pay for unused
| quota.
|
| - Regional service may be more complicated but in theory you
| should be able to tolerate localized issues. The main downside
| is that you need to verify in each region which is very
| annoying.
| slices wrote:
| just transitioned a client off mailgun due to repeated
| deliverability issues caused by other mailgun customers on a
| shared IP. The client doesn't have enough email volume to
| justify a dedicated IP, so there didn't seem to be anything
| else we could do while sticking with mailgun.
|
| wouldn't you know it, we transferred them to postmark...
| joekrill wrote:
| This sounds like great news for the founders and the team.
| Congratulations to them!
|
| I met Natalie and Chris years ago when I interviewed for a
| position at Wildbit (one I really wasn't qualified for). I'm sure
| they don't remember me, but I was super impressed with them -
| their approach to business and respect they had for their
| employees. At a time when I was becoming disillusioned, they
| showed me that it was possible for a company to be successful
| without putting profits above all else, and actually showing
| compassion for their employees. They were one of the first
| companies I'd heard of who were actually experimenting with
| 4-day-work weeks.
|
| I think this mindset is becoming a _bit_ more common today, and
| will only become more common (maybe that 's wishful thinking?) -
| but I think they were _way_ ahead of the curve.
| rglover wrote:
| Oh man this is really bad news. They were one of the only hold
| outs for good delivery and UX/DX. Guaranteed will be destroyed
| now.
| tnolet wrote:
| They are giving 10% of the sum to all employees, based on tenure.
| They didn't have to do that as the article mentions as they never
| had employee stock options. So I guess a great bonus for
| employees? Not sure if this works out the same as having an
| option pool from the start?
| phphphphp wrote:
| options are so often unevenly distributed and eventually
| diluted to basically nothing that this is probably a better
| outcome for employees who've remained with the business.
|
| They only have ~40 employees so if the sale price is ~150m,
| that's hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee -- much
| better than most people make out of the sale of their employer.
| eric4smith wrote:
| Happy user of Postmark here for multiple projects.
|
| I get it.
|
| Working all those years brings a toll and at some point your
| heart is no longer in it. It's like you realize... damn I want to
| do something else with my life. Anything else but this.
|
| Hope Active Campaign keeps it running and hopefully it won't end
| up like Mandrill.
| jonkratz wrote:
| This makes me sad (even as I wish them the best). Postmark may be
| one of my favorite services 1) to actually use and 2) as a
| company. Their product is actually fun to use and powerful. As a
| company, Wildbit is one I've always had high respect for. Their
| "People-First" approach says it all, and they seem like a company
| that truly acted on that.
|
| I understand the reasons for the acquisition, and I hear the
| message that product continuity is the goal, but I can't think of
| an example of a product acquisition that hasn't resulted in a
| worse experience (at least with a product as good as this one).
| I'd love to hear examples if anyone has any.
|
| I'm happy for Postmark overall though, and I want to express
| gratitude for creating a great product and company.
| bsparker wrote:
| ActiveCampaign is a huge company, I remember when they were the
| scrappy new guys
| StanAngeloff wrote:
| I've been through something very similar with Mailgun. Mailgun
| was acquired by Rackspace in 2012. <<Rackspace will make Mailgun
| available to its Rackspace Hosting customers for integrating
| cloud-based email services into applications and websites>> Up
| until the acquisition, Mailgun was a solid product with a core
| set of features, i.e., an <<API for creating and managing online
| email inboxes for apps and websites>>. And then it grew, and grew
| and grew. In my own view it tried to do too much which inevitably
| meant pricing changes for its customers.
|
| SendGrid started off similarly, very early on it was named
| smtpapi.com. The focus was on the API, developers, UX, etc. I
| keep getting reach out emails from Twilio these days trying to
| upsell me on all the amazing "new" SendGrid features they have in
| 2022 (of which I need exactly none).
|
| I don't have high hopes for Postmark's acquisition.
| ActiveCampaign will start "integrating", then comes the raft of
| new features, products, solutions. Today's Postmark does very
| little of what the competition tries to offer. At some point I'm
| already preparing myself for the inevitable price change ^^.
|
| All in all, good pay day for the founders after 12 years of
| bootstrapping, not much to celebrate as a customer.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| SendGrid was great, but between the countless upsells and the
| fact they keep terminating my azure marketplace-based accounts
| for lack of use (not true) with no way to recover (create a new
| account!) is super annoying. I don't doubt the people at
| Postmark think nothing will change as they're still as
| dedicated as yesterday, but they no longer drive the ship and
| will do what they're told, then probably leave.
|
| No blame and expected, but still sad.
| julienmarie wrote:
| Just when they announced it, their live statistics started to
| degrade noticeably on their dashboard.
| https://status.postmarkapp.com/ with a huge slow down of their
| emails.
| grenoire wrote:
| This is absolutely crazy, almost an order of magnitude. What
| could've triggered this? All Postmark addresses suddenly under
| 'marketing content/spam' scrutiny?
| petercooper wrote:
| I love Postmark and wish them well with this (especially since
| I'm a customer) but as a Sendgrid customer (also) who experienced
| things after _they_ were acquired, I 'm bracing myself(!) But if
| I owned a company like this, would I be looking for a nice way to
| take some money off the table right now? Absolutely. So
| congratulations!
| maxclark wrote:
| Always happy when a founder exits on their terms - so congrats!
|
| As a postmark and dmarc digest customer I hope the services don't
| see drastic changes to our detriment.
| troydavis wrote:
| Kudos to Natalie and Chris for a clear, honest announcement and
| for stating this:
|
| > When you do something for this long, it's hard to imagine doing
| anything else. The team knows we've always joked about opening a
| hotel one day. But that, like any other wild ideas, always felt
| like a distant fantasy. Over the last year, we realized that
| we're ready to explore a world outside of software. We're ready
| to slow down a bit, be more present with our kids, and discover
| ourselves again.
|
| (This is also why it's important to plan for a company eventually
| changing hands - even if it's bootstrapped, even if you love it
| and consider it your life's work. People change, as do companies,
| products, and teams. You're probably not going to be running it
| at age 80. Acknowledge that and don't be totally unprepared when
| it's time for a change.)
| jmacd wrote:
| Wildbit has sold the family business work-for-other-reasons-than-
| monetary-renumeration trope for a couple of decades. They've had
| some great products like Beanstalk and Deploybot and some total
| follies like Converyor.
|
| Employees had no ownership, products were often sold or put up
| for sale, and my understand is that compensation was middle of
| the road at best. It was 37Signals-lite.
|
| They seem like good people, but if you sell your employees and
| customers on a moralized construction then you do have a moral
| obligation. The great irony is that there is no good way for
| something like this to end unless the owners are ready to hand
| off their business to new leadership on terms that set it up to
| remain independent. A power of the capital class is that it eats
| succession for lunch.
|
| I wonder why there was no employee buyout. I suspect it wasn't
| the most attractive offer from the perspective of the current
| owners.
| troydavis wrote:
| > I wonder why there was no employee buyout. I suspect it
| wasn't the most attractive offer from the perspective of the
| current owners.
|
| Even assuming that employees wanted to own this business... how
| do you envision that employees would have funded an offer?
|
| I guess you could propose that they raise outside debt to be
| serviced by the business (like any other LBO), plus contribute
| their own funds as a 10-40% equity cushion, but that seems
| unlikely regardless of how such an offer would be evaluated.
|
| Wanting to work for a business does not necessarily mean
| someone wants to own it, let alone wants to have their capital
| at risk for it. (Not specific to this business.)
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Presumably the owners already have more money than they will
| need to live a comfortable life. Why not just give it to the
| employees?
| friendlybanzai wrote:
| > They've had some great products like Beanstalk and Deploybot
| and some total follies like Converyor.
|
| .. is every product supposed to be a perfect fit and wild
| success?
|
| > Employees had no ownership
|
| To what end? To be paid in the event of an acquisition? That
| happened.
|
| > products were often sold or put up for sale
|
| In 21 years there was one product sold, including one you
| described as great. I'm not sure where you're getting this
| from.
|
| > and my understand is that compensation was middle of the road
| at best
|
| That understanding is incorrect.
|
| > I wonder why there was no employee buyout.
|
| There has been and likely will be more, just not Postmark.
| rapind wrote:
| > Wildbit has sold the family business work-for-other-reasons-
| than-monetary-renumeration trope for a couple of decades.
|
| I didn't realize this was a pattern with them before now
| (selling out). I was using Postmark specifically because it was
| (I thought) a sort of mom and pop type business. There are
| cheaper and better options, but sending emails was always such
| a small expense for me that I didn't care.
|
| I don't mean to sound anti-capitalist or anything. I just
| prefer spending my money on the small guys when possible.
| friendlybanzai wrote:
| It's not a pattern, the original comment is nonsense:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31247296#31250037
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