Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign
wildbit.com
wildbit.com
On one hand, it's awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them.
On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Support is fantastic of course, but it was really the little things that made the experience great.
An example, they manually vetted each of their API consumers to ensure one bad apple doesn't spoil the bushel. It's probably not cost effective to gate customers like this, but in the end I don't have to worry about MY email not being delivered by one of the major providers because some other person used Postmark to send a spam campaign. Stuff like this happened all the time with Sendgrid and the only remediation I've ever seen was "upgrade to our $90/mo plan and manage it on your own."
Maybe ActiveCampaign will keep this level of quality and care (it is the same team after all), but I can't help but be a little cautious. I've been burned one too many times by an acquisition of a great product by a not-so-great company.
I don't think that a Marketing company is the right type of company to run Postmark.
Postmark care about deliverability not about "engagement". Everything is about being sure your mail get to your clients not about how to craft marketing campaign from their product.
How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some email editor and campaign management feature to Postmark ?
I truly hope they won't touch their acquisition and let it run how it always has instead of adding feature that doesn't make sense with the product just to compete with MailChimp and other big names.
Seems unlikely given AC is already incredibly cheap and a simple email sender won't be sophisticated enough to convince marketing teams to move over from a full featured ESP to something simpler.
By contrast, if you're a Marketing Company, well 'enemy' might be bit strong but these providers will definitely be far less cooperative, and your service might suffer from it.
* The entire Postmark team is joining ActiveCampaign, and we are going to continue to operate the way we have always operated for the foreseeable future. That includes the support team you love!
* We definitely don't plan to change any of the things we do to ensure the highest deliverability in the industry. We are not, for example, making any changes to the manual approval process—that will definitely continue.
Also keep an eye on the FAQ as we will be updating it throughout the day: https://postmarkapp.com/postmark-activecampaign-faq
While I appreciate you saying this, you have to have in mind that just some 6 months down the line it won't be you calling the shots. The business priorities will be determined by other people and they can and will command you to shift your policies as they see fit.
I want to believe but history has shown, time and again, that these pledges never materialize.
It's OK, you are feeling relief because you likely received a huge sum of money. Who wouldn't be happy!
There's a proverb: "Never promise anything when you are feeling happy".
Maybe let's talk again in 6 months.
Trying to maintain this is a major fight that generally gets you fired or you end up leaving out of frustration.
It's hard to see if when you come in with business like Postmark that is loved by its customers because you think "We're a great business and we know how to do things, why would you want to blow that up?" but you need to remember that the acquirer (ActiveCampaign) is looking out for themselves (ActiveCampaign) first.
Your no-frills, reliable service has been our go-to over the years. We dabbled in competing services when clients asked, but they paled in comparison.
Gosh, I hope what you've stated all holds up!
ActiveCampaign on the other hand was always a nightmare for me at my prior company. Their API had a 5 request / second rate limit. Which made it almost impossible to use for 50,000+ customers (syncing up emails / tags / campaigns).
There were operations that we'd have liked to be synchronous (in the browser), but the rate limit and no useful batching mechanism (AFAIK at that time) meant they took over a minute to complete.
I have the biggest respect for Postmark. Excellent product. Extremely well done APIs. Incredible performance and reliability. I've always chosen them for my projects and recommended it many times. And most of all, I wanted to support an independent product, made by awesome people.
I really, really hope they will remain like they are now.
Congratulations to the owners for staying true to their values all these years. Wilbit has always been a huge, huge source of inspiration for everything I've done. And congrats for the payout!
As in, I write a template in mailpace.com with {{foobar}} placeholders, and make an API hit with the vars to replace.
However we did create some Tailwind based templates here that you can use manually:
The delivery latency being published on their home page is another nice touch that shows they are dedicated to transparency.
Every acquisition announcement almost paint the acquirer as an amazing company, that care deeply about the mission of the acquired company and that is aligned with its vision. But 99% of the time it is false.
This is especially false when the founders don't even stay in the company. We should allow founders to say "We sold the company to get money and do something else, we hope the acquiring company will take great care of our customers"
As much as it sucks for consumers, the self-interested thing to do is sing the praises of your buyer -- because your reputation is at stake otherwise.
Another possibility: it's true far more than 1% of the time, yet that's not enough reason for the acquirer to make the same decisions as the previous owners would have.
The acquirer can be amazing, care deeply about the mission of the acquired company, and see it as aligned… and after a year or a few years, decide that it's not the best use of their resources. The difference doesn't need to be that the acquirer isn't amazing or doesn't care; often, it's simply that their decisions have different inputs.
SendGrid started off similarly, very early on it was named smtpapi.com. The focus was on the API, developers, UX, etc. I keep getting reach out emails from Twilio these days trying to upsell me on all the amazing "new" SendGrid features they have in 2022 (of which I need exactly none).
I don't have high hopes for Postmark's acquisition. ActiveCampaign will start "integrating", then comes the raft of new features, products, solutions. Today's Postmark does very little of what the competition tries to offer. At some point I'm already preparing myself for the inevitable price change ^^.
All in all, good pay day for the founders after 12 years of bootstrapping, not much to celebrate as a customer.
No blame and expected, but still sad.
> When you do something for this long, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. The team knows we’ve always joked about opening a hotel one day. But that, like any other wild ideas, always felt like a distant fantasy. Over the last year, we realized that we’re ready to explore a world outside of software. We’re ready to slow down a bit, be more present with our kids, and discover ourselves again.
(This is also why it's important to plan for a company eventually changing hands – even if it's bootstrapped, even if you love it and consider it your life's work. People change, as do companies, products, and teams. You're probably not going to be running it at age 80. Acknowledge that and don't be totally unprepared when it's time for a change.)
But then what? They have to accept a 5-day work week again in 6 months or find work somewhere else? Getting an extra day off a week is a huge benefit, and I bet losing it will have a pretty big impact on those that had grown accustomed to it.
I understand the reasons for the acquisition, and I hear the message that product continuity is the goal, but I can't think of an example of a product acquisition that hasn't resulted in a worse experience (at least with a product as good as this one). I'd love to hear examples if anyone has any.
I'm happy for Postmark overall though, and I want to express gratitude for creating a great product and company.
Their deliverability has always been absolutely stellar.
I wonder how/if this relates to the acquisition at all.
A bit of a backstory. Postmark was a delivery first company. Initially they were actually transaction email ONLY (not even product updates, release notes). They broadened eventually, but manually reviewed each new customer AND if you were doing marketing often pointed you elsewhere
"If your needs are less about supporting application-based sending and more around enabling marketing promotion, there are other tools that may be a better fit for you than Postmark."
ActiveCampaign is the opposite. Marketing first. Fingers crossed.
They only have ~40 employees so if the sale price is ~150m, that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee — much better than most people make out of the sale of their employer.
I met Natalie and Chris years ago when I interviewed for a position at Wildbit (one I really wasn't qualified for). I'm sure they don't remember me, but I was super impressed with them - their approach to business and respect they had for their employees. At a time when I was becoming disillusioned, they showed me that it was possible for a company to be successful without putting profits above all else, and actually showing compassion for their employees. They were one of the first companies I'd heard of who were actually experimenting with 4-day-work weeks.
I think this mindset is becoming a bit more common today, and will only become more common (maybe that's wishful thinking?) - but I think they were _way_ ahead of the curve.
I get it.
Working all those years brings a toll and at some point your heart is no longer in it. It’s like you realize… damn I want to do something else with my life. Anything else but this.
Hope Active Campaign keeps it running and hopefully it won’t end up like Mandrill.
As a postmark and dmarc digest customer I hope the services don’t see drastic changes to our detriment.
Who am I kidding, they will screw it up, they need to recoup their investment. Where to now?
Postmark has always been an high quality product and I think all their success is deserved.
As for their customers.. well we all know how that's going to play out overtime. Hopefully that takes a few years and not months.
What I need:
- Focus on transactional email.
- Support for inbound emails, sent to us via POST webhook.
- Good developer documentation and overall good product obviously.
- DKIM, SPF and DMARC support.
- Decent UI to troubleshoot delivery problems, i.e. easy to inspect the status for any one email.
- Happy to pay for it, price not a big factor.
I've looked at Mailgun, but happy to hear other suggestions.
I prefer SES for a number of reasons:
- The price is about the best you will get.
- You can DKIM sign messages yourself if you want (although IIRC they remove the ability to verify your domain with DKIM from the console recently. Hopefully they don't drop this support).
- Pay as you go Pricing means that you don't pay for unused quota.
- Regional service may be more complicated but in theory you should be able to tolerate localized issues. The main downside is that you need to verify in each region which is very annoying.
wouldn't you know it, we transferred them to postmark...
Employees had no ownership, products were often sold or put up for sale, and my understand is that compensation was middle of the road at best. It was 37Signals-lite.
They seem like good people, but if you sell your employees and customers on a moralized construction then you do have a moral obligation. The great irony is that there is no good way for something like this to end unless the owners are ready to hand off their business to new leadership on terms that set it up to remain independent. A power of the capital class is that it eats succession for lunch.
I wonder why there was no employee buyout. I suspect it wasn't the most attractive offer from the perspective of the current owners.
I didn't realize this was a pattern with them before now (selling out). I was using Postmark specifically because it was (I thought) a sort of mom and pop type business. There are cheaper and better options, but sending emails was always such a small expense for me that I didn't care.
I don't mean to sound anti-capitalist or anything. I just prefer spending my money on the small guys when possible.
Obviously I don’t assume I’m making a difference :) but it’s kind of like voting. If a good small alternative exists and I can afford it, then that’s what I’ll use.
Even assuming that employees wanted to own this business… how do you envision that employees would have funded an offer?
I guess you could propose that they raise outside debt to be serviced by the business (like any other LBO), plus contribute their own funds as a 10-40% equity cushion, but that seems unlikely regardless of how such an offer would be evaluated.
Wanting to work for a business does not necessarily mean someone wants to own it, let alone wants to have their capital at risk for it. (Not specific to this business.)
.. is every product supposed to be a perfect fit and wild success?
> Employees had no ownership
To what end? To be paid in the event of an acquisition? That happened.
> products were often sold or put up for sale
In 21 years there was one product sold, including one you described as great. I'm not sure where you're getting this from.
> and my understand is that compensation was middle of the road at best
That understanding is incorrect.
> I wonder why there was no employee buyout.
There has been and likely will be more, just not Postmark.