[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for in...
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Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and
solopreneurs
Author : driaug
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-07-25 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.useplunk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.useplunk.com)
| boberoni wrote:
| Congrats on launching to HackerNews! First step on a journey of
| many.
|
| Some Feedback:
|
| - The biggest words on the landing page are "Behavioural Email
| Tool" but I don't know what this means. Maybe I'm not in your
| market.
|
| - As I read through what Plunk does, it sounds more like "email
| automation". However, Plunk is not like other email automation
| because... (insert your wildest dreams)
|
| - Your pricing is too low. In the wise words of patio11, "Charge
| more!" For a detailed guide to pricing SaaS and how to _think_
| about your pricing, check out patio11 's writing on the Stripe
| blog[1]
|
| - There's a typo in your free plan: it should be "1 seat", not "1
| seats".
|
| - Don't offer "Amazing Support" on your free plan. Reason (1) is
| that users on the free plan tend to squeeze the most support out
| of you, and they're not even paying you. You can reach out to
| help them if you want, but don't _promise support_ to free users.
| Reason (2) is that adding support is a good incentive for a
| serious business to upgrade to the pro plan. If I 'm a business
| who's success/revenue relies on Plunk for my success, I surely
| would upgrade from a plan without support to one with support.
|
| [1] https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas-pricing
| driaug wrote:
| Thank you very much for this incredible feedback, very kind of
| you!
|
| I have already made some minor changes (fixed the typo and
| moved dedicated support).
|
| Tomorrow I will be looking into altering the copy because I do
| understand what you are saying and have heard the same feedback
| about the term "behavioural email tool"from a couple of people!
|
| Thank you very much for linking Stripe Atlas' guide, seems
| really helpful and in-depth!
| Cyberdog wrote:
| What a very websitey web site. My first thought when I saw that
| home page was "boy, I bet if I keep scrolling, there's going to
| be empty areas on the page where things obnoxiously animate into
| place" and BOY HOWDY.
|
| For your free tier which claims to offer unlimited emails, how
| are you stopping people from signing up and using it to blast out
| spam until you find it and kill their account (after which they
| will just sign up for another free account)? Services like these
| need to be very careful they're not sending out spam lest spam
| daemons start dropping all messages from their servers, causing
| emails from legitimate users to never hit their destination. If
| you don't have some extreme limits on this (like maybe one
| outgoing message per five minutes) I would suggest you do away
| with the free tier. Given the enormity of the problem of email
| spam and the disastrous effects being seen as a spam collaborator
| will have on your legit users, there's really no shame in getting
| a card on file and maybe even doing other identity validation
| before letting users send email with a tool like this.
| jppope wrote:
| looks cool. unfortunately I don't have a ton of use for it at the
| moment... but I'll be saving the link :)
| driaug wrote:
| No worries! Thank you for the kind words.
| altdataseller wrote:
| "Completely free, no strings attached"
|
| * Sees that I can't email from my own domain unless I pay. (I'm
| all for paying, but don't say completely free, no strings
| attached)
| driaug wrote:
| I get what you mean by this! Let me clarify what my way of
| thought is behind the "completely free, no strings attached". I
| do not ask for your credit card info, I don't put you on a
| trial that magically renews at the end of the month, I don't
| offer you a sketchy sign-on deal with an unexpected bill at the
| end of the month. I try to make it as ethical as possible,
| unlike some other marketing/emailing tools.
|
| That is my meaning behind no strings attached. Of course I put
| some features behind a subscription because they demand
| significant work from my side (managing the domains is one of
| those).
| gnicholas wrote:
| I was confused by this. How is the email sent for free
| customers? From your domain? If so, that seems like a totally
| different (and worse, generally) thing than the competitors
| you list. It's fine to have a free tier, but then you can't
| really compare it to those competitors.
| cercatrova wrote:
| Write all that as bullet points on the website itself
| buf wrote:
| I'm an indie hacker and I send 2M emails per month on Sendgrid.
| It costs around $1k per month.
|
| I use sendgrid because it just works, but I'm always curious when
| a new thing comes around and I'd love to save some money.
|
| How does this work at scale?
| driaug wrote:
| At scale this should work fine. Some parts of the dashboard are
| not yet prepared for that amount of data to flow in though, may
| be hard to navigate and monitor.
|
| I am also looking at the pricing for that because right now I
| offer unlimited emails but I need a good way to compensate for
| power users like yourself without going completely overboard.
| babyshake wrote:
| I think one of the big value-adds of email tools is they help
| emails not end up in spam. It would be good if the website
| mentioned this if it is something that Plunk helps with compared
| to sending your own emails.
| driaug wrote:
| It is very hard to make statements about this. It very much
| depends on the reputation of your own domain (if you are not
| using our domain to send your emails) and the content of your
| emails if they will end up in spam. I have yet to see one of my
| own emails origination from @useplunk.com end up in somebody's
| spam folder! I believe that is a great start and further down
| the line (with more data) I may be able to make specific claims
| about it!
| rglover wrote:
| Guessing you've already done it, but I worked on something
| loosely related to this a couple years back and best things
| you can do to avoid it are:
|
| 1. Make sure you've done DKIM and SPF verification via your
| SMTP provider.
|
| 2. Use an SMTP provider with a solid sender reputation (e.g.,
| Postmark).
|
| 3. Help users keep lists clean. Aggressively handle bounces
| and make sure unsubscribe is easy to avoid spam complaints.
|
| P.S. Dig the design/feel of everything. No immediate use but
| I've bookmarked to come back and give it a try when I do.
| [deleted]
| eappleby wrote:
| It sounds like the free version sends emails from the
| useplunk.com domain. If that is the case and some of those
| emails get marked as spam, won't all emails from the
| useplunk.com domain be more likely to be identified as spam?
| driaug wrote:
| I have built-in an automatic catch, if x% (still looking at
| what a good value for x is) of your emails bounce then your
| account gets quarantined and we see what we can do about
| that. That way we can prevent damage before other users get
| affected.
|
| Does that make sense?
| djbusby wrote:
| Bounce is different than spam. Are you DMARC monitoring?
| driaug wrote:
| Sorry about the confusing wording, with bounce I mean
| both hard bounces, rejects and complaints (they are all
| monitored appropriately). They are all taken into account
| when calculating the % because they all have impact on
| the domain reputation.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Looks great! Plans to turn it into a SaaS?
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| Is it not a SaaS already?
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| mobile makes me blind sometimes ... my bad
| letterlib wrote:
| I wish there was more copy on this site about what the tool is
| and why it's useful. It looks interesting, but there's not enough
| information there for me to figure out if it's worth investing
| more.
|
| I could do the free version to find out, but it'd be nice to have
| a 2-3 min video or page that goes more in depth on the features
| that are there.
| driaug wrote:
| Valuable feedback, thank you for this! How would you feel about
| a demo video where I show you how to set it up and go through
| the features at the same time?
| djbusby wrote:
| Don't waste my attention on the one-time setup BS. Show why
| it kicks ass in less than 30s.
| LanceJones wrote:
| Features, sure. Common use cases solved by the features, even
| better.
| eappleby wrote:
| I agree that it would be helpful to show a simple use case on
| the home page. Maybe I'm not the target customer (although I
| am a soloproneur), but your user flow of (1) user clicking a
| button, (2) plunk receiving an event, (3) plunk sends an
| email, isn't really a problem that I have, since sending an
| email after an action is taken is pretty easy to manage. Are
| you are focusing on categorizing users into groups and
| sending them progressive emails?
| driaug wrote:
| A very big part of what Plunk does is giving you the
| opportunity to link multiple events together and delay
| emails. You can extend it to users that have clicked button
| A and B but not button C and send those an email after 5
| days. Significantly harder to implement and a lot of code
| that isn't really used elsewhere!
| eappleby wrote:
| Yeah, makes sense
| gumby wrote:
| Replace all the text "above the fold" (readable without
| scrolling) with _benefit_ not _features_. In other words, _why_ I
| should keep reading, not _how_ you do it.
|
| That first text has one job: convince the person who clicked on
| the link to learn more (or, if they aren't a prospect, send them
| away so they don't waste your, and their, time). It's an elevator
| pitch, though not to an investor but to a customer.
| So: Make it easy to send mail from inside your app. Or:
| Mail should be an easy part of your marketing. Plunk makes it
| easy.
|
| I'm not even sure what behavioural email is so either I'm not
| part of your target market or you're accidentally sending me
| away.
|
| Also, I like the indy hacker solopreneur part, even though my
| currrent startup is neither. That's why I clicked. But are you
| using those terms to pull in people who are discouraged by how
| clumsy the incumbents are (that would be me)? Or are you
| accidentally excluding people who could use this too (when apple
| launched the "airport" wifi access point around 2000 it was
| designed as a consumer product, but lots of people bought them
| and stuck them in the drop ceiling to get work done by getting
| around IT). There's no good answer to this, and perhaps the right
| thing is to start where you are and expand (like, say, Dropbox
| did). The reason other mail sending things are so hard to use is
| because big companies want lots of knobs to twiddle, and one of
| your benefits is not having those knobs. You don't want customers
| who want extra control knobs.
|
| Is this for the back end or for mobile?
| mousetree wrote:
| We use Segment->Vero as our main automated email marketing flow
| (~5M emails per month so not huge, we use Sendgrid via Vero to
| actually send the emails). We're looking to change to something
| more established like Iterable/Customer.io as Vero is very slow
| (UI and latency to send emails). More than happy to provide
| feedback as to what works/doesn't in your competitors.
| driaug wrote:
| That would be very valuable to my development! You can always
| reach out to me at dries@useplunk.com
| mattl wrote:
| Name is similar to splunk.com -- I wonder if that'll be an issue?
| driaug wrote:
| Splunk is in a very different part of the landscape than Plunk
| so legally there isn't that much of an issue. Verbally it may
| be more confusing but it'll be fine!
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(page generated 2022-07-25 23:00 UTC)