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I think I would much rather roll out my own solution using Mailgun/Amazon's API with a basic RoR/Golang prototype than use these shady monkeys. It's their busi

by neya 13y ago

I think I would much rather roll out my own solution using Mailgun/Amazon's API with a basic RoR/Golang prototype than use these shady monkeys. It's their business and they have every right to price it the way they see it fit, but when there's something deceptive going on, as an end user I think I have every reason to point it out. For example, when you start with a free plan and you decide to upgrade to a paid plan, you actually need to go about 5 levels to actually get over 2000 users! And it's not pretty cheap either. I mean $100k to send just emails? (Keep scrolling down) I once used them when Feedburner bailed out on us, only to never look back at these monkeys (that's their trademarked mascot) and I rolled out my own basic solution on my VPS in just good old PHP (with Wordpress) and it worked well. And I definitely didn't spend $5 for 50 emails, just $20 for my basic Linode.

patio11 13y ago
If you're capable of banging out basic RoR/Golang prototypes which can be used by non-technical email marketers, this skill alone can get you $20k+ engagements to build them with a bit of company-specific secret sauce in them. The sauce doesn't have to be that complicated at all -- for example, "I wish there was a way to send people an email on day N of their trial if their account had less than X objects in it... and I want N, X, and the object type to be editable without having to talk to Engineering" justifies $X0k at a lot of places. (That's sort of software-firm specific because that's who I typically sold that to. Let's see, what's a more prosaic option. Oh, OK: consider a small insurance company in Kansas which collects a meagre $20 million in premium income per year. There exists a non-technical marketing manager within that company who wishes that there was a way to email business customers a solicitation in December to pre-pay their premiums for the following year to book a current-year expense for tax purposes. She calculates that getting an extra 6 months of float on 20% of their $12 million in business policies is worth approximately $100,000. Can you imagine what you could sell her for $40,000?) In related news: businesses pay serious money for things which make them money. Consider adapting one's behavior to optimize for this. You can use the resulting money to buy lots of fun things, including stupefyingly large amounts of MailChimp credits if that floats your boat.
- neya 13y ago
  Thanks :D
- adyus 13y ago
  I've been following your advice and newsletters, and I get great value from them. However, one thing that I still haven't figured out is this: how would I find say, that small insurance company in Kansas who has $100k to spend on a solution I could offer to their problem? Where would I begin to look? Cold-contacting seems unscalable. I know networking goes a long way toward such contacts, but it can't be just that. Is there a way to search for clients that's between cold-calling and a personal network contact?
  - patio11 13y ago
    Go to the local Chamber of Commerce, or other watering holes for businesses, and say you're going to teach a free lecture on business use of email at the VFW hall, with reception to follow. The hall rents out for ~$20. Buy donuts and Starbucks coffee for the reception. Talk for an hour on how to solve business problems with email. After the hour is over, you're going to be mobbed with people who want to pick your brains about email. At that point you just continue teaching them things until you win the engagement. This built Brennan Dunn's business (to a ~7 figures consultancy with 10ish FTEs if I recall correctly), in a very not-generally-associated-with-great -Rails-sales-environment part of the country. It was also, broadly speaking, a major portion of my lead generation when I was consulting. (I sold consulting services primarily to B2B software companies, so speaking at events likely to be attended by them was generally a win.) n.b. "I follow your newsletters and get great value from them" a) Thanks, that really makes me happy and b) this points the way towards another option for you, since if the small insurance company in Kansas was saying that about your newsletter then you're pretty much made for pipeline. Also, with regards to cold-calling: I've never done it, partly because it would give me stress hives and partly because I've never needed to do it, but I disagree that it is necessarily unscalable. After all, if you're selling $40k engagements, then adding ~10 qualified leads to the pipeline every month would easily sustain a small consultancy. That's not all that much calling. As your consultancy grows you tend to collect recurring engagements / referrals organically, but if you absolutely positively have to make e.g. $2 million this year to cover all employee salaries, that's still only one engagement a week, and if you're counting in the millions you have throw-money-at-this-problem options to being tired of all the talking on the phone.
ibrow 13y ago
I use Sendy[0] for this very reason. It uses Amazon's SES and whilst it isn't as feature full as Mailchimp it does the job, costs about $60. Note, I'm not affiliated in any way I just started to use it as I needed auto-responders and Mailchimp was too expensive for my use-case. [0] http://sendy.co/ http://sendy.co/
- oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
  Until Amazon stop being US region-only for SES, it's a non-starter for mass emailing; we moved off it when ~ 4,000 sends was taking 2-3 hours nightly, and the flaky Joomla extension sending the mail would bail out halfway through, leaving me to pick up the pieces and resend. Still use SES for transactional stuff, though.
  - ibrow 13y ago
    Thanks for the info. We haven't hit near that number yet, we mainly use it for the autoresponder stuff and some simple mailings to a few hundered addresses.
  - goldvine 13y ago
    I don't understand why people refuse to pay marginal (<$100/mo) amounts for SaaS services. Look at the miserable, billable time going towards solving a problem that's already been solved by many.
davidw 13y ago
Mailchimp has a lot of handy stuff: * You can just dump email addresses in it, and it'll keep eliminating ones that it's already seen that have unsubscribed/bounced/whatever. * Analytics/tracking/stats. * They work hard to make sure the emails get delivered/are not seen as spam. * The system is fairly user friendly. So... I've built similar systems in the past myself, but there's some value in doing it really well that I'm not sure I could "build in a weekend".
- bigiain 13y ago
  "* Analytics/tracking/stats." This can be _gold_. I use Campaign Monitor much more than Mailchimp - and whenever I can, I always try to be on-hand when a client sends out at least one of their early/important mailouts, and I direct them to Campaign Monitors real-time map view of opens. You can see their eyes light up (and sometimes their heads explode) as they get a continuously updated view of people's names popping up in a map showing they've just opened the email - and even better when they're clicking on the links. If I possibly can, I try to be on-site so I csn open up one browser window with that Campaign Monitor view, and another with Google Analytics realtime report. For me - that's usually one of the biggest "Oh, now I get it!" moments I can hand-feed to clients…
_delirium 13y ago
Amazon SES is cheaper, but still pretty expensive at the volume where you'd be paying Mailchimp six figures. Sure, $100k to send emails is a lot, but that's the tier with 300 million emails per month! If you moved that to Amazon, it'd still cost you $30k (Amazon is $0.10 per thousand emails).

by neya 13y ago

patio11 13y ago

If you're capable of banging out basic RoR/Golang prototypes which can be used by non-technical email marketers, this skill alone can get you $20k+ engagements to build them with a bit of company-specific secret sauce in them. The sauce doesn't have to be that complicated at all -- for example, "I wish there was a way to send people an email on day N of their trial if their account had less than X objects in it... and I want N, X, and the object type to be editable without having to talk to Engineering" justifies $X0k at a lot of places. (That's sort of software-firm specific because that's who I typically sold that to. Let's see, what's a more prosaic option. Oh, OK: consider a small insurance company in Kansas which collects a meagre $20 million in premium income per year. There exists a non-technical marketing manager within that company who wishes that there was a way to email business customers a solicitation in December to pre-pay their premiums for the following year to book a current-year expense for tax purposes. She calculates that getting an extra 6 months of float on 20% of their $12 million in business policies is worth approximately $100,000. Can you imagine what you could sell her for $40,000?) In related news: businesses pay serious money for things which make them money. Consider adapting one's behavior to optimize for this. You can use the resulting money to buy lots of fun things, including stupefyingly large amounts of MailChimp credits if that floats your boat.

neya 13y ago
Thanks :D
adyus 13y ago
I've been following your advice and newsletters, and I get great value from them. However, one thing that I still haven't figured out is this: how would I find say, that small insurance company in Kansas who has $100k to spend on a solution I could offer to their problem? Where would I begin to look? Cold-contacting seems unscalable. I know networking goes a long way toward such contacts, but it can't be just that. Is there a way to search for clients that's between cold-calling and a personal network contact?
- patio11 13y ago
  Go to the local Chamber of Commerce, or other watering holes for businesses, and say you're going to teach a free lecture on business use of email at the VFW hall, with reception to follow. The hall rents out for ~$20. Buy donuts and Starbucks coffee for the reception. Talk for an hour on how to solve business problems with email. After the hour is over, you're going to be mobbed with people who want to pick your brains about email. At that point you just continue teaching them things until you win the engagement. This built Brennan Dunn's business (to a ~7 figures consultancy with 10ish FTEs if I recall correctly), in a very not-generally-associated-with-great -Rails-sales-environment part of the country. It was also, broadly speaking, a major portion of my lead generation when I was consulting. (I sold consulting services primarily to B2B software companies, so speaking at events likely to be attended by them was generally a win.) n.b. "I follow your newsletters and get great value from them" a) Thanks, that really makes me happy and b) this points the way towards another option for you, since if the small insurance company in Kansas was saying that about your newsletter then you're pretty much made for pipeline. Also, with regards to cold-calling: I've never done it, partly because it would give me stress hives and partly because I've never needed to do it, but I disagree that it is necessarily unscalable. After all, if you're selling $40k engagements, then adding ~10 qualified leads to the pipeline every month would easily sustain a small consultancy. That's not all that much calling. As your consultancy grows you tend to collect recurring engagements / referrals organically, but if you absolutely positively have to make e.g. $2 million this year to cover all employee salaries, that's still only one engagement a week, and if you're counting in the millions you have throw-money-at-this-problem options to being tired of all the talking on the phone.

ibrow 13y ago

I use Sendy[0] for this very reason. It uses Amazon's SES and whilst it isn't as feature full as Mailchimp it does the job, costs about $60. Note, I'm not affiliated in any way I just started to use it as I needed auto-responders and Mailchimp was too expensive for my use-case. [0] http://sendy.co/ http://sendy.co/

oneeyedpigeon 13y ago
Until Amazon stop being US region-only for SES, it's a non-starter for mass emailing; we moved off it when ~ 4,000 sends was taking 2-3 hours nightly, and the flaky Joomla extension sending the mail would bail out halfway through, leaving me to pick up the pieces and resend. Still use SES for transactional stuff, though.
- ibrow 13y ago
  Thanks for the info. We haven't hit near that number yet, we mainly use it for the autoresponder stuff and some simple mailings to a few hundered addresses.
- goldvine 13y ago
  I don't understand why people refuse to pay marginal (<$100/mo) amounts for SaaS services. Look at the miserable, billable time going towards solving a problem that's already been solved by many.

davidw 13y ago

Mailchimp has a lot of handy stuff: * You can just dump email addresses in it, and it'll keep eliminating ones that it's already seen that have unsubscribed/bounced/whatever. * Analytics/tracking/stats. * They work hard to make sure the emails get delivered/are not seen as spam. * The system is fairly user friendly. So... I've built similar systems in the past myself, but there's some value in doing it really well that I'm not sure I could "build in a weekend".

bigiain 13y ago
"* Analytics/tracking/stats." This can be _gold_. I use Campaign Monitor much more than Mailchimp - and whenever I can, I always try to be on-hand when a client sends out at least one of their early/important mailouts, and I direct them to Campaign Monitors real-time map view of opens. You can see their eyes light up (and sometimes their heads explode) as they get a continuously updated view of people's names popping up in a map showing they've just opened the email - and even better when they're clicking on the links. If I possibly can, I try to be on-site so I csn open up one browser window with that Campaign Monitor view, and another with Google Analytics realtime report. For me - that's usually one of the biggest "Oh, now I get it!" moments I can hand-feed to clients…

_delirium 13y ago

Amazon SES is cheaper, but still pretty expensive at the volume where you'd be paying Mailchimp six figures. Sure, $100k to send emails is a lot, but that's the tier with 300 million emails per month! If you moved that to Amazon, it'd still cost you $30k (Amazon is $0.10 per thousand emails).