[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) - Email for SaaS Companies
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Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) - Email for SaaS Companies
Hello HN! We're the team behind Loops (https://loops.so), a
platform aimed at simplifying the email experience for SaaS
companies. We support creating and sending marketing, product, and
transactional email. Email is important but painful to manage. If
you've ever dealt with the frustration of coding emails by hand,
testing them across multiple clients, or integrating them into
various SaaS tools, you might find our approach interesting. We
make it simple to design and send email to your users either
manually in the app, via API or triggered via an integration. We
offer unlimited team seats, so your product team can help align
copy, your marketing team can send newsletters, your revenue team
can work on dunning and your engineers can have a solid API to help
orchestrate the sends. Most of our competitors use email editors
that are licensed from a third party. Our editor is built from the
ground up on the Lexical text editor from Meta, extended beyond
just text nodes. It supports mobile editing and dark mode, and it
autosaves your changes. Our REST API is straightforward, and we
have integrations with tools like Segment and Census. Documentation
is available at https://loops.so/docs. On our homepage, right under
the fold, we list endpoints and sample payloads. One issue we've
worked hard to address is email compatibility across devices and
platforms. It's a problem full of edge cases that we've mitigated
by extending MJML, a markup language designed for responsive email,
to be even more compliant across different platforms. We don't
think you should have to code and test your emails. Email copy
shouldn't live in your codebase. If you're concerned about spam,
we are too. We educate our users on CAN-SPAM rules and
automatically add compliant footers to emails. We actively monitor
to ensure our platform isn't used for spam, and we do not allow
cold sales emails. Our pricing is upfront and available on our
website. You can try the platform for free without a credit card.
We launched publicly a week ago. We're really interested in any
technical feedback you have, as we aim to make this tool as
developer-friendly as possible. Looking forward to hearing your
thoughts!
Author : chrisfrantz
Score : 106 points
Date : 2023-09-21 11:48 UTC (11 hours ago)
| j45 wrote:
| This shared inbox approach reminds me of helpmonks.com, but more.
|
| This is a neat concept - reminds me in some ways of mailgun when
| they were able to take a spin on email hosting to allow multiple
| domains relatively cheap but measure the number of emails.
|
| I'll be signing up at least two things I can try it out with. The
| pricing information seems limited at present - until you realize
| it says 5000 poeple. Having one more paid category listed would
| be ideal.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Chris, congrats on the launch!
|
| Just a few questions, how does this compare to Substack, Beehiiv,
| Mailchimp, etc, looking to create an automated newsletter, will
| Loops work for this usecase?
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Sure, what we've found is that many companies (including our
| own) publish a changelog, product update or newsletter at a
| monthly/weekly cadence. We can help solve for that.
|
| There are also quite a few strictly newsletters using us as
| well which we're happy to support! We own workspaces.xyz and
| publish that as well via Loops.
| smca wrote:
| Congrats, Chris!
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Thank you!
| wallawe wrote:
| This is great, congrats on the launch. I can't wait to get away
| from customer.io but unfortunately the Make.com integration is a
| necessity for us. As soon as you have that, we'll be customers!
| adamkaz wrote:
| Thanks! We actually have an integration with Make launching
| soon. I can invite you to the private version, shoot me an
| email -> adam@loops.so
| Maultasche wrote:
| I like your website: it's simple and mostly easy to find things.
| I also like the concept.
|
| I was looking for an API reference to see what I could do with
| your API, but didn't find one. It seems that information about
| API calls is scattered among more "how-to" oriented
| documentation. That's just fine, but it would also be nice to
| have some documentation oriented around endpoints and details of
| the API.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Thank you! API docs here, we should put it more front and
| center. I will adjust that.
|
| https://loops.so/docs/add-users/api-reference#rest-api
| petecooper wrote:
| Personally, I find the Product Hunt upvote stuff front & centre
| to be quite distracting (and verging on devaluing to the product
| offering, in a lot of cases).
|
| I understand the reasoning for it being there, but perhaps kick
| it further down the page so the service / offering is the focus.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Totally fair, we just launched a week ago (and it went well) so
| we wanted to keep it up till the end of the month.
|
| Will certainly place it in the footer and switch off the upvote
| portion in the future.
| j45 wrote:
| Producthunt seems more like feature hunt with the multiple
| launches (releases).
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Yeah I noticed they moved to a "hub" model which I think
| encourages that. Not a bad thing imo, companies were already
| treating it this way and they just formalized it. Fwiw, this
| was our first product hunt post for our product.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Agreed. Product hunt climbers and what hackers like is mutually
| exclusive these days. As soon as I see product hunt badge I
| think oh it's for them...
| marban wrote:
| Isn't 98% of email about having a clean IP range these days?
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| There's a surprising amount of classifying happening at the
| content level. If you have a clean ip but then send content
| that raises flags (includes hot words, adult content, etc) then
| you're going to be categorized differently in the inbox
| regardless.
|
| Even without the borderline content, if it seems promotional,
| it may end up in promotions regardless.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| When I click "Pricing", I get no response.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Sorry about that. This link should work and happy to answer any
| questions here. https://loops.so/pricing
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Do you send emails directly or are you using a separate service
| like Mailgun? Do you provide dedicated IPs? How do you guarantee
| delivery and avoid being blacklisted?
|
| FWIW, your service seems priced in a way that encourages spam
| (send unlimited emails to an address).
| adamkaz wrote:
| Right now we're using AWS SES for our MTA. We've had a pretty
| great experience with them to date. We don't currently offer
| dedicated IPs but we likely will in the future. When we do, we
| want to make sure that customers have the required send volume
| to actually see a benefit from using one. I think a lot of
| services offer dedicated IPs too early as a panacea for
| increasing delivery rates. What we've noticed is that these
| initial IPs are warmed up so perform well, but over time, if
| the send volume is too low, it's reputation can atrophy.
|
| We monitor our delivery platform wide and proactively contact
| customers if there are issues with their account.
|
| As far as spam, yes, we allow you to contact within your own
| audience as much as you like but we do monitor this for abuse.
| codegeek wrote:
| how are you different than resend (another YC company) ?
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Generally, we don't believe email copy belongs in your code
| base.
|
| You can upload MJML if you'd really like to, along with
| designing in Figma via an integration, but really your best bet
| is our editor.
|
| We've extended MJML to support additional platforms and it's
| lightning fast to just send an email.
|
| If we can save a few engineering hours just by having the
| product person who needs to update the emails with new copy
| actually update the copy instead of pinging engineering, we
| think we've improved things.
|
| We also support product and marketing email, along with
| transactional emails.
|
| Happy to expand on it if you have additional q's
| akayaian wrote:
| We've been trying Loops for a while and love it. Using it
| currently on our web design curation site (seesaw.website) and it
| was the easiest tool we could find to integrate.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Thanks! We're very focused on ease of use so glad it worked out
| :)
| Multiplayer wrote:
| How does this contrast with sendgrid? We use their api and do not
| upload contacts to them.....
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| We actually have a transactional API
| (https://loops.so/docs/transactional/guide#sending-your-
| first...) so similar in that way.
|
| Beyond that, our goal is to offer the single platform for email
| for your SaaS. So we're focused on bringing together product,
| marketing and engineering in a single, hopefully cohesive and
| delightful, experience.
| nibab wrote:
| this is a layer on top of sendgrid. common functionality that a
| lot of users have to implement before any sendgrid api endpoint
| is invoked.
| tln wrote:
| Have you thought about integrating with Sendgrid? Eg, if I'm
| set up on sendgrid NOW and could just plug that in and start
| using the service.
|
| (I'm actually using Mailgun FWIW)
| adamkaz wrote:
| ah so bring your own MTA - that's an interesting idea and
| would definitely make it easier to switch over. How would
| you expect pricing to work at that point?
| tln wrote:
| The same? You price per contact not per send after all
| ignoramous wrote:
| Loops seems similar to the likes of Mailmodo [0], not Sendgrid?
|
| [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mailmodo
| kareemm wrote:
| How are you different from other tools? Why would I switch?
| tikkun wrote:
| I've used it (no affiliation to the company).
|
| I like it because it's easy. I'm not sure what the alternatives
| are, but I have the sense they'd all be more complex and more
| annoying to use (even if they might be cheaper).
| adamkaz wrote:
| Thanks! We're aiming for an easy to use modern platform, so
| thats great to hear.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Depends on use case and which tools you're using today but we
| try to make gains everywhere we can.
|
| In pricing, we try to simplify by ditching the tables and
| anchoring around one metric.
|
| For engineers, our documentation is decent and updated
| regularly. We try to have a performant API, support the
| integrations you're most likely to use and include a versioning
| system with our transactional email.
|
| For marketing, we built our editor around a text-based
| interface and make it highly customizable. We also take the
| pain out of having to test across multiple platforms.
|
| For product teams, we offer templates that cater to specific
| touchpoints in the SaaS lifecycle.
|
| Across all of that we offer unlimited team seats so you can
| actually have your entire team onboard and technical support
| for when things don't work as expected or you have questions.
|
| We create slack connect channels with any team that needs one
| (we have almost 1,000) and try to provide fast, technical
| support.
| o-o- wrote:
| I'm in the middle of bootstrapping a SaaS company and spent the
| last few days evaluating e-mail providers. I think my
| requirements are really simple, yet I seem to fall outside what
| most offer. Here it goes:
|
| * A user-friendly WYSIWYG template editor (web fonts = nice to
| have but not crucial). * An API that lets me set the to-address
| and the e-mail content in markdown.
|
| How can this pose an edge case?!
| hu3 wrote:
| How would markdown play in this case?
|
| I would expect API to parse JSON with variables to replace in
| the templates.
| kevsim wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! For teams that are using something like
| customer.io, how does this fit into the picture? Is it a
| replacement or a companion?
|
| And to nerd out a bit - how was working with Lexical? We chose
| Slate.js for our editor in Kitemaker.co but it's not as actively
| maintained as it once was.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Thanks! Yep, we often replace CIO for early and mid-stage
| teams.
|
| Pricing, performance and UX are the primary drivers for
| switching that we have seen so far.
|
| We were on Slate previously and actually rewrote our editor to
| support our switch to Lexical. It's very early but it's a cool
| platform. Wish they had a community outside Discord but that's
| more personal preference.
| risico wrote:
| This looks like a really nice and polished product, I am in the
| same space, I've been working for a while on a similar project,
| pretty much feature parity but with one caveat, it's pay-once and
| use forever (1 year of free updates), self-hosted, no
| dependencies, one binary.
|
| I'll be keeping a closed eye to you guys, it's pretty much what I
| wanted when I started my project.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Thanks!
| mtmail wrote:
| My Firefox browser consumes 600% CPU browsing the homepage. Maybe
| an endless loop somewhere? I use adblock.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Oof don't love that! I'll test with FF later today.
| pembrook wrote:
| Wondering how this differs from something like Customer.io or
| Userlist?
|
| Have some friends also working in a somewhat adjacent space
| (Audienceful) so will be watching you guys closely.
|
| But in general it seems email is pretty crowded these days and a
| lot of the sub-niches are also pretty crowded (eg. Klayvio in
| ecomm, Customer.io in Saas, Substack/ghost in newsletters,
| Convertkit for wordpress bloggers, etc).
|
| And for the most part all these apps are just sending on the big
| API-based senders under the hood (Eg. Amazon SES or Sendgrid).
| Even the newcomer API-based senders like Resend are just a
| wrapper around Amazon SES. Which makes any claims around
| differentiated deliverability on any email platform dubious at
| best.
|
| Is the plan to build your own sending infra long term?
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| I would like to! It's probably a bit further down the line for
| us.
|
| You can do a lot to improved deliverability once you approach
| it at a platform level. We have access to various datapoints at
| scale that we can use to help individual users improve their
| deliverability vs working directly with the sending infra.
| Beyond that, we offer a platform that helps reduce pain and
| friction that might exist with more barebones, infrastructure
| focused services.
| deofoo wrote:
| They offer a free plan :)
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Hah yeah that too! Free, no credit card required.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Not sure if this is a good or bad signal. The others don't
| offer free no CC plans because as soon as you get even the
| smallest bit well known you get swamped with spammers signing
| up.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| We do a lot to prevent it, part of the reason we waited to
| launch. There are also hard caps with the free plan.
| luthfur wrote:
| How are you different than a Klayvio or Attentive?
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| To the best of my knowledge, Klaviyo is more focused on
| e-commerce and Attentive more on e-commerce but especially SMS.
| I'm not familiar enough with their platforms to give a point-
| by-point comparison, but we're focused on the needs of our
| users within SaaS. If a customer needs a thing, we're going to
| work with them to understand it and build it for them. I think
| if we follow that compass long enough we'll end up
| differentiated quite a bit.
| nicoraga wrote:
| Loops is the backbone of our enterprise lead qualification
| system. We'd built Lambdas on SNS to take care of a bunch of this
| emailing logic and were very happy to see Chris took care of it
| all. Every time we have a feature request or question, turns out
| it's on the roadmap.
|
| Happy to share how we use it.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Thanks, your early support means a lot! Hope we freed you up to
| spend less time on email and more time on the rest of your
| company :)
| MPiccinato wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Any plans to support multiple channels? (SMS, push, etc) And are
| you in the long run looking to compete with Braze, Airship, etc?
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| We've moved companies off of Braze already, but we still need
| to add multi-channel support. We'll likely add it in the future
| unless customer needs materially change.
| CrackpotGonzo wrote:
| Many email providers have black listed companies that have any
| connection to crypto. Do you support crypto companies?
| xmattx wrote:
| Any plans of open sourcing your MJML extensions? We hand-code
| MJML for our mails and fairly frequently run into compliancy
| problems.
|
| Runs kinda counter to your business-case I suppose, but might
| help someone (me) out :)
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| I would really like to eventually open source core parts of
| Loops.
|
| I think parts of the editor makes sense, including the MJML. We
| spent an entire weekend extending MJML for Superhuman and it
| would be cool to release that work some way.
| adamkaz wrote:
| Its definitely come up! I think it would be cool to have a
| community working on the translations to MJML from Lexical.
| There are so many corner cases and email clients out there,
| it's definitely a challenge to get things working everywhere.
| What type of compliancy problems have you run into?
| acomms wrote:
| This is good timing. Currently evaluating email send for a new
| app.
| adamkaz wrote:
| Cool, let us know how we stack up!
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Any thoughts on the differences with Resend [0] (also a YC
| company coincidentally enough)?
|
| I like them because they integrate quite nicely with their other
| product, React Email [1], where our devs can just write emails in
| React and it'll render to email-compliant HTML and CSS. I suppose
| you guys have a GUI as well but I believe they're looking to add
| that too.
|
| [0] https://resend.com
|
| [1] https://react.email/
| areichert wrote:
| fwiw you can use React Email pretty easily with anything by
| using their @react-email/render package [0] to render your
| email React components to HTML (this is effectively all Resend
| is doing in their Node library [1])
|
| Just FYI since I happened to be looking into this recently as
| well :)
|
| [0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@react-email/render
|
| [1] https://github.com/resendlabs/resend-
| node/blob/90a7225c21db9...
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Sure! Generally, we don't think email copy belongs in your code
| base.
|
| You can upload MJML if you'd really like to, along with
| designing in Figma via an integration, but really your best bet
| is our editor.
|
| If we can save a few engineering hours just by having the
| product person that needs to update the emails with new copy
| actually update the copy instead of pinging engineering, we
| think we've improved things.
|
| If a competitor ends up building a GUI, glad to see they agree
| too :)
| deofoo wrote:
| I'm a happy user! for sure there are some small basic things I'd
| love to get (better filtering, user editing, etc...) but overall
| they get the job done. Good luck!
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Oh nice! Thanks, yep there's lots to improve. If you haven't
| already, drop us a line in slack or live chat and we're happy
| to log feedback then we'll ping you when it makes its way into
| the app.
| deofoo wrote:
| Will do :)
| amilner42 wrote:
| I'll be needing email soon for what I'm building, I may try this.
| I've worked on emails at a past startup and would like to avoid
| the dread...
|
| I will say I find the pricing quite concerning. Free until 1000,
| 50 / 5000, but then I have to contact you? Am I understanding
| correctly, 5000 subscribed users doesn't seem like that much.
|
| For what it's worth I went to customer.io to compare pricing and
| found there's so confusing I was lazy to figure it out...so I do
| appreciate the simplicity
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Nope, hit "view pricing tiers" on the pricing page for a full
| list of pricing up to 100k contacts.
|
| It needs to not be hidden behind a button, that's on the list.
| amilner42 wrote:
| Ah missed it, thanks
| ralferoo wrote:
| From the home page, clicking on Pricing does absolutely
| nothing. Clicking on other things in the menu goes to those
| pages, although by opening a new tab in a very user-
| unfriendly way. Maybe it's gated on having created an account
| first, but personally I wouldn't create an account without
| first having any information on pricing first, because
| there's a high likelihood that I might just be wasting my
| time.
| adamkaz wrote:
| Our intention is that it's clickable - I can't replicate
| this but others have mentioned it. What browser are you on?
| owfwduke wrote:
| Happy customer of Loops - congrats on the launch!
| [deleted]
| aresant wrote:
| Random endorsement - the founder Chris' twitter maintains a
| remarkably high signal to noise ratio in the
| marketing/startup/growth content niche - worth a follow -
| https://twitter.com/frantzfries
| obeavs wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Its been a far better experience than
| Mailchimp for us, even during the very early beta days.
|
| How has your experience been using Lexical? Would love to get a
| sense of where you've run into limitations/etc as we're exploring
| it (albeit, for a very different use case).
| adamkaz wrote:
| Lexical has been great. I think the biggest drawback is that
| its an earlier project (compared to alternatives) so there are
| not always best practices for what we want to do. That said,
| the community is pretty active (in discord) and generally
| responsive to bug reports.
| rusl1 wrote:
| It looks interesting but where is the pricing section? Do I have
| to contact you to know how much I will pay? That's a big deal for
| me
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| https://loops.so/pricing
|
| Click "view pricing tiers" for all tiers up to 100K :)
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Must go paid at $50/mo after waitlisting 1000 emails, got it
| adaml_623 wrote:
| We starting using your API for light volume transcriptional
| emails a few weeks ago and honestly the integration process was
| so smooth it was anticlimactic. It just all worked.
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| that's what we're hoping happens! it should just work so you
| can get back to work
|
| thanks for giving us a try :)
| danr4 wrote:
| Looks really good! but with 200K subscribers I'm a bit hesitant
| to move from mailjet, who do I talk to to be able to try it with
| our upcoming campaigns?
| chrisfrantz wrote:
| Talk to us! We're happy to take a call, email, etc. :)
|
| Shoot me an email (chris@loops.so) and happy to walk you
| through any questions you may have.
| danr4 wrote:
| on it!
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