Show HN: I built an email marketing tool made for indie hackers and solopreneurs
useplunk.com
useplunk.com
Some Feedback:
- The biggest words on the landing page are "Behavioural Email Tool" but I don't know what this means. Maybe I'm not in your market.
- As I read through what Plunk does, it sounds more like "email automation". However, Plunk is not like other email automation because... (insert your wildest dreams)
- Your pricing is too low. In the wise words of patio11, "Charge more!" For a detailed guide to pricing SaaS and how to think about your pricing, check out patio11's writing on the Stripe blog[1]
- There's a typo in your free plan: it should be "1 seat", not "1 seats".
- Don't offer "Amazing Support" on your free plan. Reason (1) is that users on the free plan tend to squeeze the most support out of you, and they're not even paying you. You can reach out to help them if you want, but don't promise support to free users. Reason (2) is that adding support is a good incentive for a serious business to upgrade to the pro plan. If I'm a business who's success/revenue relies on Plunk for my success, I surely would upgrade from a plan without support to one with support.
I have already made some minor changes (fixed the typo and moved dedicated support).
Tomorrow I will be looking into altering the copy because I do understand what you are saying and have heard the same feedback about the term "behavioural email tool"from a couple of people!
Thank you very much for linking Stripe Atlas' guide, seems really helpful and in-depth!
I'd love to see a clearer breakdown of the features: - how come I trigger an event instead of sending an email directly? It seems like a neat abstraction with a lot of potential, but I haven't found the reasoning behind it in the site. - what can I do with workflow automation? Can I do complex logic based on multiple events? Can I do branching logic? Etc. - why wouldn't a larger company choose you? What's missing that's present in a more established product, and what advantages do you give over that product? I'm assuming cheaper and simpler, but I'd love to get a better idea about the now specific tradeoffs.
Overall, it seems like a really cool idea . I have a project in mind that I may use it for
For your free tier which claims to offer unlimited emails, how are you stopping people from signing up and using it to blast out spam until you find it and kill their account (after which they will just sign up for another free account)? Services like these need to be very careful they're not sending out spam lest spam daemons start dropping all messages from their servers, causing emails from legitimate users to never hit their destination. If you don't have some extreme limits on this (like maybe one outgoing message per five minutes) I would suggest you do away with the free tier. Given the enormity of the problem of email spam and the disastrous effects being seen as a spam collaborator will have on your legit users, there's really no shame in getting a card on file and maybe even doing other identity validation before letting users send email with a tool like this.
That first text has one job: convince the person who clicked on the link to learn more (or, if they aren't a prospect, send them away so they don't waste your, and their, time). It's an elevator pitch, though not to an investor but to a customer.
So: Make it easy to send mail from inside your app.
Or: Mail should be an easy part of your marketing. Plunk makes it easy.
Also, I like the indy hacker solopreneur part, even though my currrent startup is neither. That's why I clicked. But are you using those terms to pull in people who are discouraged by how clumsy the incumbents are (that would be me)? Or are you accidentally excluding people who could use this too (when apple launched the "airport" wifi access point around 2000 it was designed as a consumer product, but lots of people bought them and stuck them in the drop ceiling to get work done by getting around IT). There's no good answer to this, and perhaps the right thing is to start where you are and expand (like, say, Dropbox did). The reason other mail sending things are so hard to use is because big companies want lots of knobs to twiddle, and one of your benefits is not having those knobs. You don't want customers who want extra control knobs.
Is this for the back end or for mobile?
Random question, I noticed you are using Next for your site as well as your blog. What headless CMS are you using if any or is it just some markdown in a file?
Edit: the only downside I just remembered is that I would have to fire off separate events just for Plunk, since right now everything runs through Segment. Would be dope if you could integrate with them!
I could do the free version to find out, but it'd be nice to have a 2-3 min video or page that goes more in depth on the features that are there.
"User clicks a button - fire an event to Plunk - sends email" makes total sense to me.
I use sendgrid because it just works, but I'm always curious when a new thing comes around and I'd love to save some money.
How does this work at scale?
I am also looking at the pricing for that because right now I offer unlimited emails but I need a good way to compensate for power users like yourself without going completely overboard.
* Sees that I can't email from my own domain unless I pay. (I'm all for paying, but don't say completely free, no strings attached)
That is my meaning behind no strings attached. Of course I put some features behind a subscription because they demand significant work from my side (managing the domains is one of those).
The biggest headache in this business is dealing with spammers. Trust me, you will get more signups from spammers than actual users. So you need to have a process in place to handle them. Personally I've tried many automated methods and rules to validate spammers but nothing works as well as manual verification.
Something to be aware of though. You might want to switch that to use your own domain.
I'm worried because if it gets tougher to reach people via email (you sure as hell not going to do it via cold calls), you are really left at the mercy of giant ad networks. Also if people are spending less now, its going to become even more costly as the number of people waiting to put their ads in front of you is always going to be there.
Just overall concerned about the state of the economy
For sure, if your goal is to find some famous person and contact them directly, Twitter might be the better tool. But if you want to convert a one-off purchase into a repeat customer I think email will stay the best channel for that (at least for many, many businesses) for a long time
I am currently using it to check up on my users after they have either skipped or completed the onboarding so it is definitely doable!
I'd suggest rethinking "5 automated flows with unlimited emails" on the free plan. Sending a few emails is very cheap, but sending a lot of email is not. Inevitably somebody will sign up for the free plan and send far more email than you expect. It will either end up costing you money, impacting the experience for your other users, or both.
You can always offer higher limits on paid plans.
Does that make sense?
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/monitor-sending-ac...
If you get more than a tiny handful of these, shut the account down. Whatever the reason, users don't want the messages and it'll destroy your deliverability quickly. Assuming the sender is legit, they need to figure out why users don't like the messages.
However, the much more common case is that a recipient's mail provider categorizes a message as spam on its own, without any user involvement. That's what parent commenters are referring to.
That can be for any reason. Maybe the user has reported similar past messages as spam. OTOH, maybe other users at the recipient service have had low engagement with messages from the same sender. Or maybe there was a sudden increase in sending volume from a given netblock or domain.
Emails that the receiving system categorizes as spam do not trigger any notification to the sender. Other than by trying to deliver messages to canary accounts or waiting for customer complaints, you won't know this is happening.
Source: been there, done that ... there is no benefit to it and only pain.
Have a separate plunk-emails.com domain that is used for all emails. Or even have a bunch set up and rotate through them. This will mitigate spam impact too -- you will get spam issues even with 100% legit users
1. Make sure you've done DKIM and SPF verification via your SMTP provider.
2. Use an SMTP provider with a solid sender reputation (e.g., Postmark).
3. Help users keep lists clean. Aggressively handle bounces and make sure unsubscribe is easy to avoid spam complaints.
P.S. Dig the design/feel of everything. No immediate use but I've bookmarked to come back and give it a try when I do.
I think you could get a lot of us who are completely new to this concept — teach us what it is, how it's useful for us, and make it 1-click to set up using your tool.
+ I also had this problem myself so I knew it was a big point of frustration.
I had pretty much validated the idea before creating the MVP!