[HN Gopher] Show HN: Tabular - Email design tool that generates ...
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Show HN: Tabular - Email design tool that generates bulletproof
email HTML
Author : maxnando
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-02-28 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tabular.email)
(TXT) w3m dump (tabular.email)
| niklearnstodev wrote:
| I've spent quite a bit of time building basically this exact tool
| within a greater app, and have to say that this looks amazing.
| Well done!
|
| Now I'm just curious what you have in mind in terms of next
| steps, as you've done the technically hard part, and there are so
| many market options available.
| maxnando wrote:
| Cool to hear you've worked on something similar before, thank
| you for the compliments!
|
| With steps in mind you mean product direction or growth
| strategies? You could send me a DM on our Twitter, if you want
| to chat a bit on these topics.
| maxnando wrote:
| Hi HN,
|
| I've developed http://tabular.email (Tabular), a new email design
| tool that generates hybrid mobile-first email HTML. Think of
| emails for your app, such as user verification or welcome,
| newsletters, or marketing emails.
|
| My goal was to make designing emails as quick and intuitive as
| possible. To make a tool where everything is done visually
| (adjusting margins, paddings, gaps, dimensions etc.), without the
| user having to worry about writing email HTML code.
|
| Cool thing is that you get full control over how your email looks
| on mobile devices. When designing, you can switch to mobile mode,
| and any styling changes that you make will overwrite how it looks
| on desktop.
|
| Tabular's algorithm generates responsive HTML code that renders
| on all major email inboxes and devices, including older desktop
| Outlooks (e.g. Outlook 2010, 2013 etc.). At the moment, I've
| implemented 8 integrations so you can connect your email service
| provider (e.g. Sendgrid, Mailgun) to use it there directly, or
| download the HTML and upload it manually.
|
| You can create any design structures using the row and column
| blocks. Nest the blocks however you like without constraints on
| how you use them to create structures. Combine the blocks to
| create complex designs or data tables for example.
|
| I'd love to hear your feedback.
| yodon wrote:
| This looks really exciting. I just did a major search looking
| for tools like this, specifically around making high grade
| transactional emails. At first glance Tabular looks like a much
| better fit than anything else I found.
|
| One request - from a security perspective I'd much prefer using
| google to sign in than having to give you a password I then
| need to manage (particularly given that you're using Auth0 so
| it should be just clicking a checkbox on your end)
| maxnando wrote:
| Really nice to hear that you think it's a much better fit.
| One of my goals is to make it even more transactional-email-
| friendly by adding more cool-looking templates and
| integrations (with Auth0 for example) in the future.
|
| Totally forgot on enabling the social connections, I just
| flipped the switch in Auth0 for Google sign-in. Thanks for
| pointing it out!
| yodon wrote:
| Directly supporting transactional emails for Auth0 is a
| great idea. Given all the people that are using Auth0 for
| our login flows, it's amazing you're the first person (I've
| seen) that's come up with the idea of offering good looking
| transactional emails integrated directly into the Auth0
| flows.
|
| I confess I'm not sure whether that's a thing folks will
| pay for, but I can easily see it being a great "loss
| leader" to get folks using your product and then you upsell
| them for all the other emails they'll need to design.
| maxnando wrote:
| Also haven't seen it done yet. Maybe because Auth0 is a
| developer product, most of the developers ended up just
| adding HTML manually. But still I can imagine having a
| direct integration is way more convenient.
|
| I get what you mean, but it could definitely be a nice
| way to get users familiar with the tool.
| hmcamp wrote:
| Well done.
| maxnando wrote:
| Thanks!
| joshstrange wrote:
| Looks very cool. I've been using PostmarkApp to send my
| transactional emails but considered switching as their prices are
| increasing and I'd be much better served by something that is
| completely "pay for usage" like SES (my usage is very
| bursty/spiky and over 50% of the time I send next to no emails in
| a month) but one big thing holding my back is email design.
| PostmarkApp has some decent tools/templates that I've enjoyed
| using and I'm lazy (and the higher prices haven't gone into
| effect for me yet)
|
| That said, this is a bit of a hard sell for me because I have
| like 3-4 email templates per service I run (currently 3) and
| $12/mo is a hard sell for something I'll probably tweak 1-2 times
| a year at most. I guess I could just pay when I actively need to
| use it but that's a bit of a pain itself
| (subscribing/unsubscribing). If I was writing marketing-type
| emails regularly then I'd be very interested in this.
|
| What I probably need to do is find an open source email
| templating library, take the time to build my emails using that,
| and call it a day.
| maxnando wrote:
| Interesting, I can imagine that if you only edit your templates
| 1-2 times a year you wouldn't need a recurring subscriptions.
| With the always free plan you can download 3 HTML emails per
| month, so if you only need to tweak 3 of your templates per
| month you wouldn't have to resubscribe.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Looks awesome. I wish a tool like photoshop to open email, edit
| and save on git, without copy/paste thing. Maybe even a plugin to
| VSCode.
|
| But it is just wishes. Nice work!
| maxnando wrote:
| Thanks! Do you mean an integration that would push the email
| HTML file to your git repo directly? That's a really cool idea,
| I'll look into it!
| tacone wrote:
| can it call webhooks, i.e. on save?
| tasn wrote:
| Shameless plug: OP, if you need help with webhooks, we make
| webhook sending super easy.
|
| https://www.svix.com/
| maxnando wrote:
| Interesting! I'll be sure to keep Svix in mind if we're going
| to add webhooks.
| ianhawes wrote:
| Webhooks are notoriously hard to engineer, I'm so glad a
| service like this exists. I hear IsOdd.dev uses your service.
| tasn wrote:
| Yup, exactly why we exist. :)
| maxnando wrote:
| Currently not, how would you want to use the webhooks?
| lancesells wrote:
| Really nice. What sets this apart from the template builders
| inside of software like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, or Hubspot?
| maxnando wrote:
| Thanks! It's different from the other builders in that Tabular
| is more flexible and really focused on speeding up your email
| production. Designing is done more intuitively and visually
| (adjusting styling, margins, paddings, gaps, dimensions etc.)
| and you get to design complex design structures.
|
| One of the biggest USPs is the ability in Tabular to switch to
| mobile mode and visually design a completely different look-
| and-feel for when your email is opened on mobile devices. For
| now, when almost 50% percent of email opens is done on mobile
| phones a good mobile email experience is equally as important
| as desktop.
| yodon wrote:
| Small user flow issues: on mobile, after registering for an
| account I'm hitting the homepage and the only link I see is "sign
| up". When I clicked on sign up the site correctly detected me as
| a logged in user but the lack of a "login" button in the
| hamburger menu was confusing.
|
| Also, if you click a second time on the "verify your email" link
| in the new user email, you get a scary/unhelpful warning "This
| email could not be verified" but right below the scary warning
| there is a button that says "continue to dashboard" that takes me
| right into my account. It seems like presenting either the scary
| message (when it's needed) or the friendly button (when it's
| available) but not both would be ideal.
| maxnando wrote:
| Ah yeah at the moment the marketing pages do not detect if
| someone is logged in so it doesn't alter the buttons yet. I can
| understand it's confusing, so I'll add this soon.
|
| That error page is hosted by Auth0 but definitely bad user
| experience. I'll research if I can work around their solution
| and improve the experience.
|
| Thanks for all the feedback!
| michilehr wrote:
| I have already designed a prototype and I really like it! Well
| done.
| maxnando wrote:
| You're quick! That's amazing to hear!
| radiojasper wrote:
| Nice! You do have some z-index issues here [0] and there [1].
|
| [0] https://jasper.monster/sharex/firefox_9XSI6hce2E.png
|
| [1] https://jasper.monster/sharex/firefox_lqQ4rx5JfD.png
|
| But will definitely check this out, looks promising. Good luck.
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