(Re)defining Competition | Hacker News Reader

(Re)defining Competition

dangerouslyawesome.com

I've actually had this same experience with Postmark as a developer and user of the service. I told a couple of people I was using it instead of standing up my own server or whatever other solution and nobody has understood why. In terms of Postmark, having one less thing to have to worry about with my startup is great, especially when it's something as potentially hairy as sending email. But it's hard to get others to understand that, even when I'm not selling it.

Hey Matt,

It's one of my biggest priorities to figure out how to help our developer customers communicate our value to other people. Was there anything in particular that's worked really well for you so far?

The biggest thing is just listing off all the many things you have to do to send email in any real way on your own. All the DNS settings, various schemes to verify you are who say you are, potentially dealing with getting blacklisted due to spam complaints, etc. If I were you guys I'd have page that was a big list of hassles of running your own mail server and give people that. That, and the ease of using one of the libraries and plugins available (I'm using the grails plugin) make it an easy choice.

Rad feedback, thanks Matt.

Have you seen our HackerNews landing page? http://hacker.postmarkapp.com We just launched it this month, curious if this helps at all.

Defining a problem when it isn't always apparent is tough. In postmark's case, i bet a lot of their potential customers don't realize their emails are going to spam, or they aren't reaching the customer inbox, or that they could be OPTIMIZING and generating more revenue from those emails they are already sending.

Hell hath no indifference like the status quo. A problem or market doesn't exist until it can prove that it's painful enough to find a solution.

I'm really fascinated about competitiveness in emerging markets, wonder if other people have had similar experiences in their companies?

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