8 ms·

How to Send Email Like a Startup

254 points by bvanvugt 12y ago

Pephers 12y ago
What a great resource, bookmarked! Of course much of this has been written about in various blog posts, but having it all compiled in a single resource is very handy, especially when being in the startup phase of a SaaS business selling booking software (https://zapla.co https://zapla.co). I'll definitely be implementing a lot of this advice!
- veb 12y ago
  Seconded. This is my 5th bookmark of the year. Wonderful resource.
  - mrmch 12y ago
    Thanks veb! We're still adding to the guide so it'll be even more useful soon.
- mrmch 12y ago
  Thanks! We get many questions around this topic, and it made sense to us that you track your metrics against a funnel (AARRR usually) you can map your emails to that as well.
bevacqua 12y ago
Took the liberty of turning it into markdown so people can collaborate on the guide. https://github.com/sourceful/send-email-as-a-startup https://github.com/sourceful/send-email-as-a-startup
- mrmch 12y ago
  This is amazing, we never considered making the guide open source/community driven. Many of our other resources already are. We'll fork your markdown version this weekend and make the guide we host github powered.
  - bevacqua 12y ago
    `hget` is pretty awesome in that regard, being able to quickly convert an entire page into Markdown using a simple CLI is very powerful. Glad it's useful!
    - veb 12y ago
      Thank you so much for making this tool, it's seriously awesome. (and thank you for converting OPs page into Markdown!)
    - zo1 12y ago
      Link here: https://github.com/bevacqua/hget https://github.com/bevacqua/hget
    - kevnguy 12y ago
      That's genius! Can't wait to use this and experiment with other pages!
curiously 12y ago
I like that first 1000 customers you must touch them personally. My biggest hinderance is getting a phone number that won't cost a fortune to call people in US or abroad from Canada. some Canadian telecom companies absolutely adore ripping people off when it comes to dialing other countries as if we were in the 1980s. Basically I want to approach my customers with a call me number that won't cost them a lot and won't cost me a lot to talk on. I'm still reading through this wonderful guide it is ripe with useful information.
- dangrossman 12y ago
  Use the dialer in Hangouts (Android's default messaging app), and calls to US and Canada are free. VOIP is the answer to free or nearly free calls with all your customers. You can get an 800 number for ~$2/month to make it toll-free for them.
  - curiously 12y ago
    I have hangouts on my android phone but I don't know what my hangout number is. The $2/month, where can I find that? All in all, I want to talk with my customers and do a tech demo (would need a tool to share screen as well).
    - mrmch 12y ago
      Hangouts can still work for this, you can do a screenshare in a video hangout. Requires everyone to have google accounts though (personal or business). There are also numerous great conference/screen share tools out there, like speek.com
      - curiously 12y ago
        how do you find out your hangout number so that people can call you at that number?
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
stevebot 12y ago
percent of acquisition emails that I click through: zero
- chrisan 12y ago
  The Ministry of Statistics thanks you for your contribution. We have noted your click through rate and have added it to our population sample.
- bostik 12y ago
  You're getting downvotes for the unconstructive snark, but I feel there is a salient point in there. Unsolicited email = spam; simple as that. And by that association, anything and everything being sold by those emails is suspect. After all, if you had a product or service that people actually wanted to use, why would you resort to spamming?
thebiglebrewski 12y ago
Spam people until they unsubscribe?
- username223 12y ago
  Best tl;dr on the thread. I tolerate quite a bit of email pestering from companies with this approach; the majority of what hits my inbox is dealt with by pressing the "delete" key in less than a second, without reading anything beyond the subject line. For the ones who get too aggressive, I just filter their spam directly to the trash rather than dealing with their usually dishonest "unsubscribe" process. I'm not interested in being "onboarded" or shoved through a "sales funnel."
moe 12y ago
And then there's the tldr version that everyone seems to be actually using: 1. Send at least one mail per day to urge your user to try out a random feature that he doesn't care about. 2. Make sure every mail claims to be "not a bot", "not automatic", "I'm a real human!!1". 3. Close every mail with an offer to be available at any time for everything and anything. Make sure your user knows that he can call your CEO at 5 in the morning if he feels a sudden urge to have a personal product tour. 4. Mention at least two awesome webinars in every e-mail. Send regular reminders about webinars. 5. Also send invitations for every congress, meetup, bbq party, that you are however involved with.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  Yes all part of the cult of "do things that don't scale" [1]. 1. Yes I know why this is suggested and yes many times it is the right thing to do do, but finding sucessful approaches that do scale is really, really hard.
- reledi 12y ago
  6. Don't explain/remind in the email what your product does, because "Squinderly" is such an obvious name.
  - corobo 12y ago
    Oh man this is my biggest peeve from startups. As someone interested in other peoples' projects I sign up to a lot of mail lists like this. Please just hint as to what it is you do if your first email is over a couple of days after I've signed up
dreeves 12y ago
Really good advice here. One thing I particularly liked is the advice to email the first 1000 users manually and only set up automated drip campaigns as a way to automate what you find yourself sending over and over. I'd also like to add this PSA: Don't send automated emails that pretend to be from a human. http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot (Blog post, "Don't Be a Smarmbot", in which I argue with @patio11 about this.)
shalnoff 12y ago
This article actually explains how to make your client hate you and your business. Dear colelagues, please don't use HTML email notifications as far as some technically advanced people just turn HTML off to a) reduse valnurability (i.e. see all links and remove possible frames, img & JS) b) make email processing faster and less resource consumptive IMHO I see just one common and most important rule of email notifications. it must be simple as possible and not obstructive. And please never force client to register and leave email without real necessity. Minimize it and keep simpe. Then your audience (smart and most referenced group of it, at least) will love you.
cessor 12y ago
I believe I had mentioned this before - and received a lot of downvotes for it: I, as a user, wish not to be bothered with emails. I often just briefly want to see what the fuzz is all about. The app then "tricks me" into providing them with an email address, by pretending they need this as an identifier, most of the time in order to create an account. They then feel free to send me "Greg from blahblah app"-Emails. To me, this is spam. It is an email I do not want. To me there is no difference between a random spammer who wants to sell fake viagra and Greg from blahblah app, who wants me to use his cloud-driven javascript thingy. I believe there is a role missing, in the view on customer relationships. Just because I am looking at things in your store doesn't mean I want to be treated as a customer already. I believe there should be a differentiation between somebody who already bought something and somebody who is about to. Aggressively sending email at any chance isn't the way to make this transformation, imho.
- kaybe 12y ago
  I know this does not help your point for the companies side, but I usually use temporary email adresses (such as http://10minutemail.com/ http://10minutemail.com/) to avoid that problem.
- toumhi 12y ago
  This is a fine line to walk indeed: you don't want to spam the user, but you also want to stay "top of mind" in the prospect mind. I think most of app founders view this under the lens of "how can we get this user to use our app?" which I think is a wrong approach. To me the right approach as always is to start from the user, and not to see yourself (the app maker) as just this app provider. Instead, see yourself as a business coach and help the user solving the business problem (that your product solves). Brennan Dunn's app (planscope.io) does this quite well. He doesn't just tell you to use his app, by he actively tries to educate you on how to win proposals (and his app is project management app). Your end goals as a business app provider should be to solve for your customer success. By solving for customer success, you will solve for your product long term success. And this should drive every decision in the business. So when you think about that email that you send, ask yourself "is this contributing to our customer success? or is it just spamming this user who might need something else at this moment?"
oblio 12y ago
Minor nitpick: surely the title should actually be "How to Send Email as a Startup". The current phrasing seems a bit odd - especially considering the fact that it is a lecture on reaching out to potential future customers :)
jccalhoun 12y ago
Whoever is telling web companies that it is a good idea to suddenly start mailing "newsletters" to people that signed up for accounts is lying to them. Over the past year or so I've started getting emails from web sites I haven't visited in years - for example I signed into an old hotmail account and apparently fark is sending out newsletters now? The only thing these things do is make me click unsubscribe and make a mental note that the site sucks.
- csbrooks 12y ago
  Have they lost anything when you do that, though? You weren't really a customer or user anymore anyway, and now they can figure that out. If they send out that email to 100 people, and 95 inactive users unsubscribe but 5 become active users again, that's a huge net gain for them, right?
- elf25 12y ago
  Yes! I got not one but TWO phone calls from USA Today because I placed a single classified ad in the paper at least 15 years ago!!
tehabe 12y ago
I was disappointed. I hoped for a satirical view on what weird emails I get from sites but no. :-(

254 points by bvanvugt 12y ago

What a great resource, bookmarked! Of course much of this has been written about in various blog posts, but having it all compiled in a single resource is very handy, especially when being in the startup phase of a SaaS business selling booking software (https://zapla.co https://zapla.co). I'll definitely be implementing a lot of this advice!

veb 12y ago
Seconded. This is my 5th bookmark of the year. Wonderful resource.
- mrmch 12y ago
  Thanks veb! We're still adding to the guide so it'll be even more useful soon.
mrmch 12y ago
Thanks! We get many questions around this topic, and it made sense to us that you track your metrics against a funnel (AARRR usually) you can map your emails to that as well.

bevacqua 12y ago

Took the liberty of turning it into markdown so people can collaborate on the guide. https://github.com/sourceful/send-email-as-a-startup https://github.com/sourceful/send-email-as-a-startup

mrmch 12y ago
This is amazing, we never considered making the guide open source/community driven. Many of our other resources already are. We'll fork your markdown version this weekend and make the guide we host github powered.
- bevacqua 12y ago
  `hget` is pretty awesome in that regard, being able to quickly convert an entire page into Markdown using a simple CLI is very powerful. Glad it's useful!
  - veb 12y ago
    Thank you so much for making this tool, it's seriously awesome. (and thank you for converting OPs page into Markdown!)
  - zo1 12y ago
    Link here: https://github.com/bevacqua/hget https://github.com/bevacqua/hget
  - kevnguy 12y ago
    That's genius! Can't wait to use this and experiment with other pages!

curiously 12y ago

I like that first 1000 customers you must touch them personally. My biggest hinderance is getting a phone number that won't cost a fortune to call people in US or abroad from Canada. some Canadian telecom companies absolutely adore ripping people off when it comes to dialing other countries as if we were in the 1980s. Basically I want to approach my customers with a call me number that won't cost them a lot and won't cost me a lot to talk on. I'm still reading through this wonderful guide it is ripe with useful information.

dangrossman 12y ago
Use the dialer in Hangouts (Android's default messaging app), and calls to US and Canada are free. VOIP is the answer to free or nearly free calls with all your customers. You can get an 800 number for ~$2/month to make it toll-free for them.
- curiously 12y ago
  I have hangouts on my android phone but I don't know what my hangout number is. The $2/month, where can I find that? All in all, I want to talk with my customers and do a tech demo (would need a tool to share screen as well).
  - mrmch 12y ago
    Hangouts can still work for this, you can do a screenshare in a video hangout. Requires everyone to have google accounts though (personal or business). There are also numerous great conference/screen share tools out there, like speek.com
    - curiously 12y ago
      how do you find out your hangout number so that people can call you at that number?
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]

stevebot 12y ago

percent of acquisition emails that I click through: zero

chrisan 12y ago
The Ministry of Statistics thanks you for your contribution. We have noted your click through rate and have added it to our population sample.
bostik 12y ago
You're getting downvotes for the unconstructive snark, but I feel there is a salient point in there. Unsolicited email = spam; simple as that. And by that association, anything and everything being sold by those emails is suspect. After all, if you had a product or service that people actually wanted to use, why would you resort to spamming?

thebiglebrewski 12y ago

Spam people until they unsubscribe?

username223 12y ago
Best tl;dr on the thread. I tolerate quite a bit of email pestering from companies with this approach; the majority of what hits my inbox is dealt with by pressing the "delete" key in less than a second, without reading anything beyond the subject line. For the ones who get too aggressive, I just filter their spam directly to the trash rather than dealing with their usually dishonest "unsubscribe" process. I'm not interested in being "onboarded" or shoved through a "sales funnel."

moe 12y ago

And then there's the tldr version that everyone seems to be actually using: 1. Send at least one mail per day to urge your user to try out a random feature that he doesn't care about. 2. Make sure every mail claims to be "not a bot", "not automatic", "I'm a real human!!1". 3. Close every mail with an offer to be available at any time for everything and anything. Make sure your user knows that he can call your CEO at 5 in the morning if he feels a sudden urge to have a personal product tour. 4. Mention at least two awesome webinars in every e-mail. Send regular reminders about webinars. 5. Also send invitations for every congress, meetup, bbq party, that you are however involved with.

danieltillett 12y ago
Yes all part of the cult of "do things that don't scale" [1]. 1. Yes I know why this is suggested and yes many times it is the right thing to do do, but finding sucessful approaches that do scale is really, really hard.
reledi 12y ago
6. Don't explain/remind in the email what your product does, because "Squinderly" is such an obvious name.
- corobo 12y ago
  Oh man this is my biggest peeve from startups. As someone interested in other peoples' projects I sign up to a lot of mail lists like this. Please just hint as to what it is you do if your first email is over a couple of days after I've signed up

dreeves 12y ago

Really good advice here. One thing I particularly liked is the advice to email the first 1000 users manually and only set up automated drip campaigns as a way to automate what you find yourself sending over and over. I'd also like to add this PSA: Don't send automated emails that pretend to be from a human. http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot (Blog post, "Don't Be a Smarmbot", in which I argue with @patio11 about this.)

shalnoff 12y ago

This article actually explains how to make your client hate you and your business. Dear colelagues, please don't use HTML email notifications as far as some technically advanced people just turn HTML off to a) reduse valnurability (i.e. see all links and remove possible frames, img & JS) b) make email processing faster and less resource consumptive IMHO I see just one common and most important rule of email notifications. it must be simple as possible and not obstructive. And please never force client to register and leave email without real necessity. Minimize it and keep simpe. Then your audience (smart and most referenced group of it, at least) will love you.

cessor 12y ago

I believe I had mentioned this before - and received a lot of downvotes for it: I, as a user, wish not to be bothered with emails. I often just briefly want to see what the fuzz is all about. The app then "tricks me" into providing them with an email address, by pretending they need this as an identifier, most of the time in order to create an account. They then feel free to send me "Greg from blahblah app"-Emails. To me, this is spam. It is an email I do not want. To me there is no difference between a random spammer who wants to sell fake viagra and Greg from blahblah app, who wants me to use his cloud-driven javascript thingy. I believe there is a role missing, in the view on customer relationships. Just because I am looking at things in your store doesn't mean I want to be treated as a customer already. I believe there should be a differentiation between somebody who already bought something and somebody who is about to. Aggressively sending email at any chance isn't the way to make this transformation, imho.

kaybe 12y ago
I know this does not help your point for the companies side, but I usually use temporary email adresses (such as http://10minutemail.com/ http://10minutemail.com/) to avoid that problem.
toumhi 12y ago
This is a fine line to walk indeed: you don't want to spam the user, but you also want to stay "top of mind" in the prospect mind. I think most of app founders view this under the lens of "how can we get this user to use our app?" which I think is a wrong approach. To me the right approach as always is to start from the user, and not to see yourself (the app maker) as just this app provider. Instead, see yourself as a business coach and help the user solving the business problem (that your product solves). Brennan Dunn's app (planscope.io) does this quite well. He doesn't just tell you to use his app, by he actively tries to educate you on how to win proposals (and his app is project management app). Your end goals as a business app provider should be to solve for your customer success. By solving for customer success, you will solve for your product long term success. And this should drive every decision in the business. So when you think about that email that you send, ask yourself "is this contributing to our customer success? or is it just spamming this user who might need something else at this moment?"

oblio 12y ago

Minor nitpick: surely the title should actually be "How to Send Email as a Startup". The current phrasing seems a bit odd - especially considering the fact that it is a lecture on reaching out to potential future customers :)

jccalhoun 12y ago

Whoever is telling web companies that it is a good idea to suddenly start mailing "newsletters" to people that signed up for accounts is lying to them. Over the past year or so I've started getting emails from web sites I haven't visited in years - for example I signed into an old hotmail account and apparently fark is sending out newsletters now? The only thing these things do is make me click unsubscribe and make a mental note that the site sucks.

csbrooks 12y ago
Have they lost anything when you do that, though? You weren't really a customer or user anymore anyway, and now they can figure that out. If they send out that email to 100 people, and 95 inactive users unsubscribe but 5 become active users again, that's a huge net gain for them, right?
elf25 12y ago
Yes! I got not one but TWO phone calls from USA Today because I placed a single classified ad in the paper at least 15 years ago!!

tehabe 12y ago

I was disappointed. I hoped for a satirical view on what weird emails I get from sites but no. :-(