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02thoeva

253 karma · joined July 22, 2016

COO at EmailOctopus
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02thoeva··on Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
Thanks, we'll speak with Barclays then :)
02thoeva··on Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
We use Wise but their USD accounts are US-domiciled. So we have 3 options: - Continue paying out to Wise and incur an additional 1% fee (~$30k per year) - Use Stripe for currency conversion which is additional 2% fee (~$60k per year - Find a UK-domiciled USD account to pay out to. Might be possible - no idea really. Need to look into it.
02thoeva··on Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
Same here. This is a massive dent in any of our remaining profit. Realistically we'll need to look to leave
02thoeva··on Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April
"UK businesses who are paying out in USD to a US-domiciled bank account will now incur a 1% fee, with a minimum fee of US$2.50."

So if we get paid out a USD payment, into a USD account. We get charged just because we're registered in the UK? That's a huge impact on our business.

02thoeva··on AWS us-east-2 outage
Thanks for sharing. We've just spent the last hour debugging our website, thinking we had issues. This explains it.
02thoeva··on What's in email tracking links and pixels?
Convertkit is a front-end for Sendgrid, so possibly they use the same format as them?
02thoeva··on Booking.com fined €475k for reporting data breach too late
I'd expect that the name and address will still be stored in their payment processor.

Then the invoice itself (containing your name/address/payment method) will need to be stored by the company in some form for accounting regulations.

02thoeva··on UK to depart from GDPR
The very article we've commented under makes this point, but if you want to see the specific agreement: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...
02thoeva··on UK to depart from GDPR
There is a draft adequacy agreement between the two which should be signed before the end of June when the transition period ends: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...
02thoeva··on UK to depart from GDPR
Not quite, the EU and UK have a draft adequacy agreement in place. Should be signed by the time the transition period ends.
02thoeva··on Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel
Yep, although the phone call requirement is a new one and was introduced by a sneaky update to their terms: https://twitter.com/rtwlz/status/1341581686216245248
02thoeva··on Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel
Run a business here, oh and we use Baremetrics too. To be 100% clear we never want to call you or Brian.

Listen to your customers here.

If there are people that want a call, offer the option, but please don't force it. And don't do sneaky updates to your terms which make this a requirement.

02thoeva··on Baremetrics required a phone call to cancel
Long time customer of Baremetrics here. And this shady practice is really really offputting, to the extent where we are now looking into cancelling (without a phone call, of course)
02thoeva··on I sold Baremetrics
Congratulations on the sale and thanks for sharing. Very interesting for someone who's probably a few years behind you.
02thoeva··on Citymapper
The app certainly does take into account transfer times between lines. If you also require accessible transport it'll further take into account the transfer times by measuring the amount of lifts you need to take.
02thoeva··on USS Pueblo
Visited this last year, remarkably good condition. The Koreans were very keen to point out the size of the armoury and guns on board the ship.
02thoeva··on Apple's service program for butterfly keyboard MacBooks, even out of warranty
Dropped mine in earlier this week at a London Store. Currently a 7-10 day turnaround for repairs.
02thoeva··on Ofo Beats a Retreat From the Dockless Bikesharing Battle
The only people I see using these in the UK are drug dealers, who have smacked off the lock with a brick.
02thoeva··on Show HN: Revenue Forecasting for SaaS Apps
I believe ChartMogul are adding revenue forecasting to their product shortly.
02thoeva··on Former Uber employees have gone into debt to exercise options they can’t sell
Point being, lots of companies offer options on the 4 year vest, 1 year cliff in order to keep great employees. If the end result is that mediocre employees end up hanging around, not motivated, then it works for neither the employee, nor the business.
02thoeva··on Former Uber employees have gone into debt to exercise options they can’t sell
Have seen this far too often. I was at a successful UK based startup very early on, so my strike price was pennies. Those who joined a year or two later were looking at strike prices in excess of £30 with hundreds shares. Recent investment rounds put the share price at around £120, but as always current employees can't sell until a full sale or IPO.

The result? A swell of employees who want to leave/move on but can't afford to buy their shares and leave. It's lead to a number of people just hanging around, even when their enthusiasm and passion is waining.

Not what options are designed for!

02thoeva··on Ask HN: What service do you use for human translations of your website?
https://phraseapp.com/
02thoeva··on Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2017 – Show and tell
Went full time on our side project, https://emailoctopus.com, last year when we hit the $5k a month mark. We'd been working on it for 3 years and had some steady growth - contracted a few days a week alongside until I could afford to go full time.

In hindsight should have done it sooner, a year on we've grown so much more by taking it seriously as a business. We value our time more and as such charge more, yet growth has only accelerated.

02thoeva··on Ask HN: What is your biggest business expense besides salaries?
I think you misunderstood, I work for EmailOctopus. Sorry for the confusion.
02thoeva··on Ask HN: What is your biggest business expense besides salaries?
https://emailoctopus.com/
02thoeva··on Ask HN: What is your biggest business expense besides salaries?
Use it for both EC2 and SES. Our customers link their own SES account to send out campaigns, so the advantage of being on EC2 is that many of them don't pay a penny. Server costs is about 10% of our revenue, so will weigh up the pros/cons of moving in the near future, I'm sure.
02thoeva··on Ask HN: What is your biggest business expense besides salaries?
AWS fees. We're an email marketing platform, we send around 150m emails a month, all of which we need to store and process clicks/opens on.
02thoeva··on Ask HN: How to sell your app/side project while working full-time?
We ran our side-project, https://emailoctopus.com, for around 3 years before going full time. As a low-cost platform, our sales are quite low touch, so we'd be able to set up our marketing projects (Facebook ads, email campaigns) in the evenings and just let them run on a schedule.

Support was a little bit more tricky, however. The only solution we found here, other than outsourcing to an Upworker, was to try to minimise support. Make your help docs as useful as possible and spend time on improving error messages.

I would also advise you to switch to working on the project full-time as soon as you can afford to. Our growth went through the roof (we'd spent around 3 years getting to £1k MRR and tripled that in the first full-time month). Some reasons why? We could spend time with our customers and focus on improving our metrics, the stuff that you just can't automate away. We also began treating it more as a business and valued our own time spent on the project more, which resulted in increasing our prices and getting across our value proposition better.

02thoeva··on Ask HN: What is your CSS setup in 2017?
Still like using SCSS with Bootstrap. So easy to get into the habit of nesting things 10 selectors deep though - a style guide is a must.
02thoeva··on Ask HN: Best provider for sending transactional emails?
We've had quite a lot of experience using Amazon SES, as we run an email marketing platform on it. We run both our marketing and transactional emails using it for https://emailoctopus.com.

If you're already using AWS then I'd definitely look at SES. I appreciate the price may seem too cheap, but the service is now used by huge companies for their transactional emails, the likes of Netflix rely heavily on it. As long as you configure your set-up correctly with DKIM/SPF I'd be surprised if you ran into too many delivery problems. Also worth noting they now offer dedicated IPs, for a not too costly monthly fee.

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