Show HN: Tabular – Email design tool that generates bulletproof email HTML | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tabular – Email design tool that generates bulletproof email HTML

tabular.email

88 pointsmaxnando33 comments

Hi HN,

I’ve developed http://tabular.email (Tabular), a new email design tool that generates hybrid mobile-first email HTML. Think of emails for your app, such as user verification or welcome, newsletters, or marketing emails.

My goal was to make designing emails as quick and intuitive as possible. To make a tool where everything is done visually (adjusting margins, paddings, gaps, dimensions etc.), without the user having to worry about writing email HTML code.

Cool thing is that you get full control over how your email looks on mobile devices. When designing, you can switch to mobile mode, and any styling changes that you make will overwrite how it looks on desktop.

Tabular’s algorithm generates responsive HTML code that renders on all major email inboxes and devices, including older desktop Outlooks (e.g. Outlook 2010, 2013 etc.). At the moment, I’ve implemented 8 integrations so you can connect your email service provider (e.g. Sendgrid, Mailgun) to use it there directly, or download the HTML and upload it manually.

You can create any design structures using the row and column blocks. Nest the blocks however you like without constraints on how you use them to create structures. Combine the blocks to create complex designs or data tables for example.

I’d love to hear your feedback.

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This looks really exciting. I just did a major search looking for tools like this, specifically around making high grade transactional emails. At first glance Tabular looks like a much better fit than anything else I found.

One request - from a security perspective I'd much prefer using google to sign in than having to give you a password I then need to manage (particularly given that you're using Auth0 so it should be just clicking a checkbox on your end)

Really nice to hear that you think it's a much better fit. One of my goals is to make it even more transactional-email-friendly by adding more cool-looking templates and integrations (with Auth0 for example) in the future.

Totally forgot on enabling the social connections, I just flipped the switch in Auth0 for Google sign-in. Thanks for pointing it out!

Directly supporting transactional emails for Auth0 is a great idea. Given all the people that are using Auth0 for our login flows, it's amazing you're the first person (I've seen) that's come up with the idea of offering good looking transactional emails integrated directly into the Auth0 flows.

I confess I'm not sure whether that's a thing folks will pay for, but I can easily see it being a great "loss leader" to get folks using your product and then you upsell them for all the other emails they'll need to design.

Also haven't seen it done yet. Maybe because Auth0 is a developer product, most of the developers ended up just adding HTML manually. But still I can imagine having a direct integration is way more convenient.

I get what you mean, but it could definitely be a nice way to get users familiar with the tool.

Install Bitwarden and thank me in a year!

Looks very cool. I've been using PostmarkApp to send my transactional emails but considered switching as their prices are increasing and I'd be much better served by something that is completely "pay for usage" like SES (my usage is very bursty/spiky and over 50% of the time I send next to no emails in a month) but one big thing holding my back is email design. PostmarkApp has some decent tools/templates that I've enjoyed using and I'm lazy (and the higher prices haven't gone into effect for me yet)

That said, this is a bit of a hard sell for me because I have like 3-4 email templates per service I run (currently 3) and $12/mo is a hard sell for something I'll probably tweak 1-2 times a year at most. I guess I could just pay when I actively need to use it but that's a bit of a pain itself (subscribing/unsubscribing). If I was writing marketing-type emails regularly then I'd be very interested in this.

What I probably need to do is find an open source email templating library, take the time to build my emails using that, and call it a day.

Interesting, I can imagine that if you only edit your templates 1-2 times a year you wouldn't need a recurring subscriptions. With the always free plan you can download 3 HTML emails per month, so if you only need to tweak 3 of your templates per month you wouldn't have to resubscribe.

This looks nicely polished and I might pay for this since it provides some real value but it has the same problem many other front-end SaaS products have - it hijacks the end user.

What I mean is that I can't use it without sending my users to your site. For example, I use sendgrid for marketing and transactional mail. I think our bill fluctuates between $200-500/month. I would consider using Sendgrid's WYSIWYG editor (even though it's not very good) but I can't do it without:

- sending my users to their website,

- managing separate accounts/permission,

- breaking continuity with my product,

- storing potentially private attachments offsite,

- loosing any integrations I could provide

What I would like from a product like yours is to be able to use your frontend as a javascript embed without the other clutter. i.e. a hosted library rather than a full product.

Your embed would have to define some sort of plug-in API for uploading images/attachments and browsing existing ones and then your clients would have to provide end points for those APIs.

I would then request the completed HTML after editing and handle all the sending and related issues myself (through my vendor like sendgrid).

I know building hosted javascript embeds isn't as sexy as a full SaaS offering but there is definitely a market for it. Lots of people sell products that send email - you could sell to those people.

Not OP, but I think they allow you to download the html. From there, you can send however you want. No?

So basically you'd want an embeddable white-label version of Tabular that you can integrate in your app. I'd be interested to discuss this idea further with you. If you'd want to add me through our Linkedin or Twitter, I'd be interested to have a chat about this.

Hey i would be interested in this too - how can i contact you?

Small user flow issues: on mobile, after registering for an account I'm hitting the homepage and the only link I see is "sign up". When I clicked on sign up the site correctly detected me as a logged in user but the lack of a "login" button in the hamburger menu was confusing.

Also, if you click a second time on the "verify your email" link in the new user email, you get a scary/unhelpful warning "This email could not be verified" but right below the scary warning there is a button that says "continue to dashboard" that takes me right into my account. It seems like presenting either the scary message (when it's needed) or the friendly button (when it's available) but not both would be ideal.

Ah yeah at the moment the marketing pages do not detect if someone is logged in so it doesn't alter the buttons yet. I can understand it's confusing, so I'll add this soon.

That error page is hosted by Auth0 but definitely bad user experience. I'll research if I can work around their solution and improve the experience.

Thanks for all the feedback!

Nice! You do have some z-index issues here [0] and there [1].

[0] https://jasper.monster/sharex/firefox_9XSI6hce2E.png

[1] https://jasper.monster/sharex/firefox_lqQ4rx5JfD.png

But will definitely check this out, looks promising. Good luck.

Thanks for sharing the z-index issues! We're going to fix them asap.

I've spent quite a bit of time building basically this exact tool within a greater app, and have to say that this looks amazing. Well done!

Now I'm just curious what you have in mind in terms of next steps, as you've done the technically hard part, and there are so many market options available.

Cool to hear you've worked on something similar before, thank you for the compliments!

With steps in mind you mean product direction or growth strategies? You could send me a DM on our Twitter, if you want to chat a bit on these topics.

Have you thought about taking the angle of a sass license? Lots of sass apps need marketing email type functionality for their users. A non branded editor that they can embed is an attractive and underserviced market.

We also noticed that now, we got a few requests for it. So now we're considering to start offering this in the future.

Looks awesome. I wish a tool like photoshop to open email, edit and save on git, without copy/paste thing. Maybe even a plugin to VSCode.

But it is just wishes. Nice work!

Thanks! Do you mean an integration that would push the email HTML file to your git repo directly? That's a really cool idea, I'll look into it!

Really nice. What sets this apart from the template builders inside of software like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, or Hubspot?

Thanks! It's different from the other builders in that Tabular is more flexible and really focused on speeding up your email production. Designing is done more intuitively and visually (adjusting styling, margins, paddings, gaps, dimensions etc.) and you get to design complex design structures.

One of the biggest USPs is the ability in Tabular to switch to mobile mode and visually design a completely different look-and-feel for when your email is opened on mobile devices. For now, when almost 50% percent of email opens is done on mobile phones a good mobile email experience is equally as important as desktop.

I have already designed a prototype and I really like it! Well done.

You're quick! That's amazing to hear!

can it call webhooks, i.e. on save?

Shameless plug: OP, if you need help with webhooks, we make webhook sending super easy.

https://www.svix.com/

Webhooks are notoriously hard to engineer, I'm so glad a service like this exists. I hear IsOdd.dev uses your service.

Yup, exactly why we exist. :)

Interesting! I'll be sure to keep Svix in mind if we're going to add webhooks.

Currently not, how would you want to use the webhooks?

Well done.

Thanks!

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