Milled: A search engine for email newsletters
milled.com
milled.com
My hypothesis was that a site that could collect them would be useful, and that it could help extend the lifetime of an email's content effort.
Did you validate it, or just build it?
The thing keeping me sane was a lot of work on backend tools to streamline the process. A ranked queue of brands that I had sourced from various places, and automatically-generated email addresses.
This is actually something I could use with a project I'm working on now. Would you be against sharing what sources you used?
I use Skimlinks for monetization. I could rewrite the links, but for now I am just using their drop-in JS script that rewrites any monetizable links automatically. Very easy (though they take a decent cut).
The inspiration you mentioned in another comment is the exact impetus that would make for a lucrative offering, particularly on the agency side. Things such as email cadence, offerings, screenshots of the specific emails, etc. Either at an individual brand level, rolled up to a pre-defined category, or allowing individuals to choose their own basket of companies to create benchmarks from. Would be really useful when creating pitches, but also for ongoing digest reports for competitive monitoring.
And that's just based off of re-packaging what you're already showing. There are lots of additional useful opportunities that would only varying levels of effort to unlock.
Right now, I think the greatest growth is still from adding more brands and making them more accessible (improving search and navigation), to yield more traffic. Spinning up a new product and sales channel might be a distraction, but definitely worth thinking about as the site grows.
That way you have a draw for those types of needs, yielding more traffic from that niche. And could (but don't have to) leverage it as a passive sales channel and low-effort product by just throwing a blurb at the bottom of that to contact if they're looking for something more specific. Which would be a low-effort product of just tweaking the queries you created to get the data for that page, plus the one time upfront effort of making a splashy Excel/Powerpoint template to drop the bespoke query results into.
That'd end up with a solid, minimal effort traffic driver. A potential passive sales channel with minimal incremental effort. And since the targeting/messaging is open ended in nature and you don't want to focus heavily on a new sales channel and product offering, you can let it sit there and mellow while seeing which potential market segments (hedge funds, agencies, in-house, etc) shake out organically. Giving you some potential insights into which area to focus on if you do eventually want to go from passive to active.
She finds it super useful, so thanks for building it :)
You mentioned profitability. - What is the source of revenue? - Why do they pay (they being paid customers)?
My only thought is, I wonder how well these ecommerce emails perform. The majority of them are very image heavy, which affects deliverability and conversions. Some of them have most or all of their text and buttons directly on the images themselves.
Of course, if you're offering a discount, the email may convert better than average, but since the majority of stores only send this type of ecommerce style emails throughout the year, I'm curious how they perform in general.
Broadly speaking, ecommerce is still a very visual experience at every step. It's really rare for me to see emails without images.