8 ms·

Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign

183 points by inopinatus 5y ago

rglover 5y ago
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.
maxclark 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.)
PedroBatista 5y ago
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.
mbStavola 5y ago
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.
- Belphemur 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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_ 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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 https://postmarkapp.com/postmark-activecampaign-faq
eric4smith 5y ago
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.
brianbreslin 5y ago
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.
nik736 5y ago
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 5y ago
  https://smtp2go.com 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).
tnolet 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
petercooper 5y ago
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!
plantain 5y ago
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 5y ago
  speak of the devil: https://status.postmarkapp.com/ https://status.postmarkapp.com/ I wonder how/if this relates to the acquisition at all.
jonkratz 5y ago
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.
jmacd 5y ago
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.
- rapind 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    It's not a pattern, the original comment is nonsense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31247296#31250037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31247296#31250037
    - rapind 4y ago
      Understood. I’ll do my own research.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    Are you rethinking that perspective in light of how the valuable distinction might have less to do with big vs small capitalist and more something to do with the workers
StanAngeloff 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
Just when they announced it, their live statistics started to degrade noticeably on their dashboard. https://status.postmarkapp.com/ https://status.postmarkapp.com/ with a huge slow down of their emails.
- grenoire 5y ago
  This is absolutely crazy, almost an order of magnitude. What could've triggered this? All Postmark addresses suddenly under 'marketing content/spam' scrutiny?
joekrill 5y ago
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.
sergiotapia 5y ago
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?
axiosgunnar 5y ago
Who and who?
daenney 5y ago
> 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.
polote 5y ago
> 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"
- popcorncowboy 5y ago
  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.
- rchaud 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
- troydavis 5y ago
  > 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.
cersa8 5y ago
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.
onphonenow 5y ago
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.
sandstrom 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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://serversmtp.com/ - https://aws.amazon.com/ses/ 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 5y ago
  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...
- rbut 4y ago
  I now use Postal Server for all my SaaS, which is self-hosted via docker, and has all those those features. The good thing is your maintain the IP reputation yourself and your not paying exorbitant prices when sending large volumes of transactional emails (really it's just the cost of the server you install it on). https://github.com/postalserver/postal https://github.com/postalserver/postal
bsparker 5y ago
ActiveCampaign is a huge company, I remember when they were the scrappy new guys
tanto 5y ago
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.
mekster 4y ago
What is the second best email delivery service next to Postmark in case it gets ruined down the road?

183 points by inopinatus 5y ago

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.

maxclark 5y ago

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 5y ago

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.)

PedroBatista 5y ago

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.

mbStavola 5y ago

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.

Belphemur 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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_ 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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 https://postmarkapp.com/postmark-activecampaign-faq

eric4smith 5y ago

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.

brianbreslin 5y ago

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.

nik736 5y ago

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 5y ago
https://smtp2go.com 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).

tnolet 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

petercooper 5y ago

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!

plantain 5y ago

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 5y ago
speak of the devil: https://status.postmarkapp.com/ https://status.postmarkapp.com/ I wonder how/if this relates to the acquisition at all.

jonkratz 5y ago

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.

jmacd 5y ago

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.

rapind 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  It's not a pattern, the original comment is nonsense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31247296#31250037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31247296#31250037
  - rapind 4y ago
    Understood. I’ll do my own research.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Are you rethinking that perspective in light of how the valuable distinction might have less to do with big vs small capitalist and more something to do with the workers

StanAngeloff 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago

Just when they announced it, their live statistics started to degrade noticeably on their dashboard. https://status.postmarkapp.com/ https://status.postmarkapp.com/ with a huge slow down of their emails.

grenoire 5y ago
This is absolutely crazy, almost an order of magnitude. What could've triggered this? All Postmark addresses suddenly under 'marketing content/spam' scrutiny?

joekrill 5y ago

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.

sergiotapia 5y ago

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?

axiosgunnar 5y ago

Who and who?

daenney 5y ago

> 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.

polote 5y ago

> 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"

popcorncowboy 5y ago
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.
rchaud 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.
troydavis 5y ago
> 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.

cersa8 5y ago

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.

onphonenow 5y ago

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.

sandstrom 5y ago

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 5y ago
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://serversmtp.com/ - https://aws.amazon.com/ses/ 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 5y ago
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...
rbut 4y ago
I now use Postal Server for all my SaaS, which is self-hosted via docker, and has all those those features. The good thing is your maintain the IP reputation yourself and your not paying exorbitant prices when sending large volumes of transactional emails (really it's just the cost of the server you install it on). https://github.com/postalserver/postal https://github.com/postalserver/postal

bsparker 5y ago

ActiveCampaign is a huge company, I remember when they were the scrappy new guys

tanto 5y ago

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.

mekster 4y ago

What is the second best email delivery service next to Postmark in case it gets ruined down the road?