Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arthurcolle | Hacker News Reader

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> If the founders take the cash and build, I dunno, the world's biggest yacht, that's a waste. But I think that's incredibly unlikely.

it's an email service provider for campaigns and other email spam with a recognizable brand, let's not imagine that this is beneficial beyond helping companies market stuff to people. It's like a meta-business enhancement service. Happy for the founders, hope they do some good with the new payout - but I think you are giving them a bit too much credit. Sure, kick back 100M to your old school district, maybe another 250M to BLM or to Math for America to strike off all of your philanthropic efforts in one go, curate some plebeian sympathies and smile for the cameras but at the end of the day, making it easy to bombard people with endless email campaigns isn't exactly solving global problems

EDIT: I reject hero worship vigorously - Mailchimp did a thing, it made money, and another entity that did a thing and made money that makes MORE money decided to absorb it and the cash payout was so good that investors/founders of MC decided to say fuck it, I'm done. Take my chips, gimme the loot. 12 billion dollars is generational wealth, but I mean I just can't/won't/don't respect people that have enabled spam or a business model that encourages bombarding people with BS. Same thing with IAP - I don't respect people who work for Apple because there was a layered hierarchy of priorities that said "we want to generate revenue at the expense of the people that trust us with their consumer electronics"

I just intrinsically cannot respect people that decide to profit off of wasting people's time, the only commodity you can't generate more of. Instead of craftsmanship we have psychopathic operators that try to fine tune all the ways to extract money from others and even develop meta-endeavors where people pay others to execute activities to get end-user observers ('users' in modern web dev parlance, for the JS devs) to waste time/spend money, for net negative expected value to themselves and others. It's super sordid and I just can't endorse it. Whatever.

In 25 years these guys will probably pull a Paul Allen and then start funding brain research or something after realizing that all the money in the world can't buy time and more life.

Am I the only one who genuinely likes newsletters?

I don't use facebook or instagram or anything anymore, and just solely rely on subscribing to the newsletters of the stuff I like: bands, exhibition spaces, museums, even fashion brands.

Giving out my email tells the almost nothing about myself, except the only valuable thing: I am interested in their services. Most newsletter providers let me opt out with two clicks and I never get any more mails from them.

It really baffles me why there are not more people who enjoy emails, but would rather have another company decide which content they get to see.

I enjoy pretty much all mail that I opted into. That constitutes about 80% of everything arriving in my inbox now. There’s some newsletters I’m actually looking forward to.

I believe there's a difference between newsletters that you value (because they provide news and interesting updates, e.g. JetBrains' XYZ Annotated Monthly) and what is typically sent via mailchimp, i.e. drip feed sales emails and click bait offers with lots of small print.

A better description is: Mailchimp enables "marketing mails", since they have the IP addresses which will not be rejected no matter what they send.

This is power, and they market it: Send an email yourself and you may be shut down, send through us and worse case scenario you will have to create a new account to continue.

At the moment their IPs are more bulletproof then their competitors. But that is all they are selling - the ability to push through spam for others.

Not familiar with MailChimp, but we use Mailgun (could be any similar system for the sake of argument) and there is a heck of a lot more than just having clean IPs.

Every time I use one of their screens to look at some issue I think... There's a bunch of stuff we didn't have to build, all for $80 per month.

Oh sure, they have a lot of other stuff.

And all that other stuff would be a nice package that you would probably be able to buy for $99.

It's the market that https://sendy.co/ is in, but we would have plenty of competition there and better options.

The reason it is only Sendy and a few open source proj's are that SES delivery is not even in the same ballpark as Mailchimp's (I have used both).

And if you want the delivery, you need to pay for Mailchimp or Mailjet anyways. Its the reason you don't save much when sending via the Mailchimp API. The product is not the newsletter builder etc.

Any company who can afford to use Mailchimp already has an email channel that works extremely well; you have to, in order to do business. How does someone even sign up for Mailchimp if they can’t already email reliably?

Mailchimp is a SaaS, and the value is in the software, just like any SaaS. Specifically the value of email platforms comes from list management, compliance, integrations, branding, etc., all of which are hard to do with the basic-but-reliable email systems we use every day.

That is not correct. The magic is in IP maintenance. Source: I wrote the software.

Back when sending emails was about 1 cent per email, my company wrote our own campaign email software to save tons of money. Each large email provider has its own rules about sending rates, backing off, soft bounces and hard bounces. Not getting your IP address blocked for breaking a ruleset that you don't know about is the hardest thing. A few year later MailChimp was becoming more popular and their prices where dropping; we switched almost everything over immediately and life was much easier.

This would be true if Mailchimp had a competitive advantage in deliverability, which they don’t. Source: I have evaluated Mailchimp as an ESP several times and selected competitors.

None of the ESPs beat our corporate email system on deliverability BTW. They did make it a lot easier to manage email programs, though.

Edit to add, I’m sure IP reputation management is a challenge if your business model is to allow anyone to sign up for free and start sending. Paying clients don’t care about that, though. Deliverability is something you can buy from lots of people. And for small folks, you’re not going to beat the deliverability of Gmail. It’s table stakes IMO. There’s a reason Mailchimp sells itself as a marketing software platform and not “we deliver emails”.

Their competitive advantage in deliverability is their client list. You can't divine yourself a massive volume of legitimate and engaging traffic. MC had to answer to literally no one, and we got to fire any customer we wanted.

Holy shit, I couldn’t agree more.

> all the money in the world can't buy time and more life.

It can, it's just that biologists aren't the ones that are winning the equities and securities game most frequently.

Given their inexperience, they throw money at things blindly, not realizing there are lower hanging fruit than the brain.

A billionaire biologist could attack the problem from first principles. And probably make measurable headway.

It can't, full stop.

What do you think aging is from a mechanistic standpoint?

Define it and tell me how you can't make a measurable impact upon it.

Tell it to Norm MacDonald, or Chadwick Boseman.

What are you on about?

Yes, people die. But we can stop it by continuing to invest in biotech.

Alright, calm down Ray Kurzweil

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