Show HN: Gaggle Mail – Simple group email | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Gaggle Mail – Simple group email

gaggle.email

33 pointsshutton22 comments

Hi, I've built this over the last few months and have seen a few people sign up and be quite happy with it (which is nice!).

I'd love to hear any feedback the HN community has and I'd really appreciate any tips people have about marketing this site since I've not done much of that and don't know where to start.

I welcome any service that promotes email (over more proprietary solutions, be that Facebook Pages or some hosted groupware). That said, for a more technical crowd, your page(s) are a bit light on detail:

1) Do you provide an archive? Can it be public?

And while I usually tell people (based entirely on my intuition rather than actual business experience) to charge more -- where does the 100 members limit come from? Certain types of groups, like alumni from a single subject/course/small business/hobby -- might organically grow past that point. Should they then migrate away from your service?

In general I wish you the best of luck - but for me (not really a target audience) -- I'd like to know how this compares to setting up a Mailman-list, D-lang forum or something along those lines for non-technical users? (Apart from the obvious, and undeniable value-add of you hosting the actual service).

Thanks for the feedback.

There is a searchable archive of all messages which is only available to the list administrators. Since members of a list aren't required to have any sort of credentials the message archive isn't available to be but I do intend of make options in this area.

The limit of 100 members is mostly an attempt, at this time, to only tragedy small group. I simply didn't want groups of 1000's from the start.

As to how we're different from a MailMan-list etc. Our aim is to make setting up and managing an email list as simple as it can be. Group email is a very effective tool for small groups and we want to make it available to as many as them as possible.

Is $2/mo or $10/year enough to make a viable business and living?

I love, love this idea and how you've done it. But I'd be really sad to see the service take off and you can't support it because the model doesn't work.

I just worry about you charging a flat rate for something that has a variable cost (email). That's assuming you're using a service like Mandrill or SendGrid and not rolling your own.

Anyway, kudos. I love the looks of this and will probably be a paying customer several times over.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

I have made spreadsheets working out how much lists will cost to run for various sizes and levels of activity and I think $10/year covers most reasonable cases.

Some competitors have more tiered pricing but I really wanted to keep things simple with a single headline price.

Just so you know, the social login buttons work even if they appear disabled. Not sure if this is intentional or not

This reminds me of Breeze[1] from Basecamp. That service no longer exists, but it always seemed like a great idea to me.

Your landing page design is really nice, too.

[1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3391-launch-basecamp-breeze-t...

I was aware of Breeze and looked at what they had done.

It felt strange using a project for inspiration which had been canned after a few months! I believe 37Signals didn't get the traction they were after, but enough traction for 37Signals and enough transaction for me are very different things.

It probably also claimed to be "permanent".

I totally get what you mean. It's really hard to prove that you're going to stick around and people are quite right to be scepicle about tech firms who seem to close stuff down as soon as the wind changes direction.

To be clear, this is $2/mo or $10/yr per group, right?

Yeah, that's right.

Is there a limit on disk space?

Can I ask how much disk is used (or how you much disk you project will be used) on average per email group?

I loved the simplicity of the UI and the short explanations.

Hi, there's no limit on disk space.

We use Google Cloud Datastore which is quite reasonably priced at $0.18 per GB per month.

Very nice. It seems identical in functionality to my own side project: https://grouplet.cc, however you have do have a nicer UI because I'm not the best designer in the world :-)

Grouplet is free, and has quite a number of groups using it. It's so cheap to run that I didn't feel it was worth charging for until I have an insane number of emails being sent every month.

Good luck, I hope it works for you!

Yeah, I recently needed something like this. We settled for google groups, but it's nice to see alternatives.

A few of the groups which have signed up were using Google Groups but got fed up with it/wanted something simpler. It's heartening that people are prepared to take a paid alternative over something which is free when it's a better fit.

There used to be another mail service I used in a class at school probably a decade ago called Gaggle.

This seems like a cool alternative to FB groups/Google groups/etc. though.

Those Material buttons look super nice

I've really enjoyed using Materialize (http://materializecss.com) with this project, I think those guys have created a really good framework.

"permanent"? Nothing is permanent if you have to pay monthly.

Fair point but free services get shutdown too.

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