I've seen small business owners struggle with getting to grips with full featured email tools such as mailchimp, campaign monitor etc and wanted to create an easier alternative.
It's my belief that there's a fair amount of complexity in these tools that can overwhelm those that just want to get started with some basic email marketing or those that want to get a message out quickly.
I love reducing friction and I wanted to explore the idea of using the inbox as the primary UI. No signups, subscriptions, templating tools or tracking etc. Just a tool you're already intimately familiar with.
I realise this approach has a few downsides and I have a few ideas on how to address those but it feels like what's built now is just about enough to run with as an MVP.
I'd be very grateful for any feedback, good or bad.
I've helped small businesses and startups deal with this before. I think there's value in this because most of the time they use mailchimp and end up in the newsletters inbox or spam filter. The roundabout way is doing mail merge using google spreadsheets + google script, using another tool like yetanothermailmerge or some overkill crm add on that does mail merge. This seems a lot simpler. I would love to try it but I don't have anything to mass mail right now. Looks promising though.
> It feels a bit clunky to attach a csv, and what if I want to send attachments?
This is a fair point and it's probably the source of the most friction with this solution. In the future there will probably be a way to maintain a subscriber list outside of the inbox so this step won't necessarily be a strict requirement.
Re. attaching other files. You can still include other attachments and they'll continue to be sent with your email. We only strip out the attachment with the recipient list.
> Who is this aimed at?
> Maybe this is for small non-techie business owners?
That's exactly it. The small business owner who doesn't have the time, technical know or enthusiasm to learn a full baked marketing suite like mailchimp.
Not just yet but it's almost ready to ship. The idea is that once we receive your email we'll reply to you with a preview which will also include the payment link.
It's my belief that there's a fair amount of complexity in these tools that can overwhelm those that just want to get started with some basic email marketing or those that want to get a message out quickly.
I love reducing friction and I wanted to explore the idea of using the inbox as the primary UI. No signups, subscriptions, templating tools or tracking etc. Just a tool you're already intimately familiar with.
I realise this approach has a few downsides and I have a few ideas on how to address those but it feels like what's built now is just about enough to run with as an MVP.
I'd be very grateful for any feedback, good or bad.