4 ms·

Not everyone wants to outsource transactional mail handling to a third party.

zrail 12y ago
If someone wants to do that then they've never tried to handle even a moderate volume of transactional mail themselves. Or they're starting a transactional mail service provider. Either way, my hat's off to them. It's a giant pain in the ass that can be resolved for less than $20 per month.
- w0rd-driven 12y ago
  I completely agree. I think unless your startup or core competency is something like that, why shard your core product's development/IT/whatever work to support an in-house product that's bound to have bugs(tm) right out of the gate? There very much should be a cost/risk analysis but there's an awful lot of NiH that honestly should be avoided if you can genuinely help it. You're still more than welcome to roll your own everything but you're just delaying your core competency to maintain something you could offload to someone that specializes in X, Y, or Z. I would also suggest if you do go that route, have accurate metrics on everything. How much time are you spending maintaining what essentially is a separate product? How much is it taking from your MVP or is it part of it? If you can translate that to cost then you can judge how much offloading that service would be to someone that specializes in it.
  - clickbyclick 12y ago
    That's the straight dope. #truth Having worked on the IT and Biz side of tech companies (happily SaaS closing that gap daily) I can tell you the logic patterns are diametrically opposed. IT = born problem solvers, nothing is too big, small or complicated BIZ = friction solvers, nothing can be too efficient The struggle isn't that 'you' could do it (better, faster or even cheaper) in your mind... but that if isn't a core competency moving your business forward, write a check and let someone else handle the core. Break free from the burden of 'undifferentiated heavy lifting' and improve your core product. We sell a SaaS solution and in turn I write ~20 checks to other SaaS providers a month to keep me focused on improving our customer's experience.
rtpg 12y ago
Just because you don't want to doesn't mean you shouldn't. The major advantage to outsourcing it is that the people you're handing the job over to actually know what they're doing and are experts at it. Plus they can spend 24 hours a day checking this stuff instead of you. The arguments for being in-house on absolutely anything but your core competency when you're an early-stage startup are really hard to justify.
- Cyranix 12y ago
  Especially with the number of services that offer zero-cost plans at low usage levels! You can rarely even make a fiscal argument for keeping this kind of stuff in-house, much less a skills argument.
mason55 12y ago
This is the whole idea behind economic specialization & division of labor[1]. And even if you were to be better at sending email than Mailchimp it's likely that you're even more better at your core competency which means that you should farm out your email sending and focus on your specialization. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour
- joshuacc 12y ago
  I think the specific term you are looking for is comparative advantage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
  - mason55 12y ago
    Yup - that is indeed what I meant to put. That's what I get for posting while on the phone.
mbesto 12y ago
But clearly if an error in it is going to cause 40% of your business to drop off "overnight", you might want to outsource it to someone who can actually maintain it properly.

zrail 12y ago

If someone wants to do that then they've never tried to handle even a moderate volume of transactional mail themselves. Or they're starting a transactional mail service provider. Either way, my hat's off to them. It's a giant pain in the ass that can be resolved for less than $20 per month.

w0rd-driven 12y ago
I completely agree. I think unless your startup or core competency is something like that, why shard your core product's development/IT/whatever work to support an in-house product that's bound to have bugs(tm) right out of the gate? There very much should be a cost/risk analysis but there's an awful lot of NiH that honestly should be avoided if you can genuinely help it. You're still more than welcome to roll your own everything but you're just delaying your core competency to maintain something you could offload to someone that specializes in X, Y, or Z. I would also suggest if you do go that route, have accurate metrics on everything. How much time are you spending maintaining what essentially is a separate product? How much is it taking from your MVP or is it part of it? If you can translate that to cost then you can judge how much offloading that service would be to someone that specializes in it.
- clickbyclick 12y ago
  That's the straight dope. #truth Having worked on the IT and Biz side of tech companies (happily SaaS closing that gap daily) I can tell you the logic patterns are diametrically opposed. IT = born problem solvers, nothing is too big, small or complicated BIZ = friction solvers, nothing can be too efficient The struggle isn't that 'you' could do it (better, faster or even cheaper) in your mind... but that if isn't a core competency moving your business forward, write a check and let someone else handle the core. Break free from the burden of 'undifferentiated heavy lifting' and improve your core product. We sell a SaaS solution and in turn I write ~20 checks to other SaaS providers a month to keep me focused on improving our customer's experience.

rtpg 12y ago

Just because you don't want to doesn't mean you shouldn't. The major advantage to outsourcing it is that the people you're handing the job over to actually know what they're doing and are experts at it. Plus they can spend 24 hours a day checking this stuff instead of you. The arguments for being in-house on absolutely anything but your core competency when you're an early-stage startup are really hard to justify.

Cyranix 12y ago
Especially with the number of services that offer zero-cost plans at low usage levels! You can rarely even make a fiscal argument for keeping this kind of stuff in-house, much less a skills argument.

mason55 12y ago

This is the whole idea behind economic specialization & division of labor[1]. And even if you were to be better at sending email than Mailchimp it's likely that you're even more better at your core competency which means that you should farm out your email sending and focus on your specialization. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

joshuacc 12y ago
I think the specific term you are looking for is comparative advantage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
- mason55 12y ago
  Yup - that is indeed what I meant to put. That's what I get for posting while on the phone.

mbesto 12y ago

But clearly if an error in it is going to cause 40% of your business to drop off "overnight", you might want to outsource it to someone who can actually maintain it properly.