Sendwithus (YC W14) Offers A/B Testing And Analytics Tools For Email Marketers | Hacker News Reader

Sendwithus (YC W14) Offers A/B Testing And Analytics Tools For Email Marketers

techcrunch.com

65 pointsbvanvugt18 comments

They are one of the strongest companies in this YC batch. Powerful team with a solid product riding lots of traction.

Brad (bvanvugt) and I are pretty excited to be announcing this; I think we're one of the first Canadian companies from BC to be part of YC.

The product looks nice. Well done.

To the founders: can you write a bit about how Sendwithus compares to Vero and Customer.io? Also, have you considered bundling an email service provider? I know other companies have some arrangement with SendGrid. It would be nice to not have to go get my own account.

Thanks!

Absolutely, and great questions.

Our focus is on content management and optimization for all your transactional email. We find that large successful companies always end up building this sort tool themselves - that's the pain we solve. Both Vero and Customer.io are great tools for triggering very specific emails early on in product development. We provide a full-featured service that solves the needs of larger companies as they grow and scale.

Bundling an email service provider is definitely something we've considered, and may do in the future. For now, integrating with existing ESP accounts has allowed us to completely side-step questions/concerns around deliverability and scale. ie: If a customer of ours already trusts SendGrid, we never spend time convincing them our bundled SendGrid is equally powerful.

That, and most major ESPs have very competitive and capable free tiers.

Great product. Definitely going to be using this. Keep up the great work!

Thanks bliggy, it's surprising (and ridiculous) how many developers end up building this themselves.

I've definitely built this sort of thing at least a few times. There comes a point where it definitely makes more sense to build this sort of functionality (or now use sendwithus!), i.e. when you get tired of hearing about changes to email templates from marketing! At the end of the day making it easier to test and optimize all the communications with your customers no matter how mundane the email is awesome. Just simple things like upsell messaging depending on the user is huge -- and not something a developer generally wants to or is capable of worrying about :)

Removing email templates from source code alone is a huge win - to your point, I don't know any devs who enjoy updating email templates :)

We wrote a quick blog post about this a few weeks back: http://blog.bvanvugt.com/great-b2b-saas-products-remove-tech...

Great idea, it's crazy how many good startup ideas one can come up with while building on their current startup. This is one of them, glad someone built it :)

Exactly! As developers ourselves, it's ridiculous how many times we've (begrudgingly) built this functionality into other products.

Giving marketing teams the ability to test and optimize transactional emails opens up a new customer referral and upgrade channel. Love what these guys are doing.

Not only is transactional email a great referral channel (just look at what Dropbox did), it's also ripe for optimization.

Engagement emails are used by almost every kind of app to facilitate user actions, but by being trapped in source code, the people who care about user experience and metrics can't take action to improve them.

Congrats on the launch. I have a question, do you do event based notification like customer.io?

Thanks knes! :) We allow companies to control their own triggers via API - more information here: https://www.sendwithus.com/developers

I found their email template editor to be amazingly powerful yet easy at the same time!

Love the idea - solving an important problem

Thanks Avlok, we feel sendwithus is an important building block in any modern web app.

Awesome product.

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