[gizmo]

I don't think the email made Philip feel bad. I think he saw the Quip email as an oppertunity to write a mean-ish post about Quip on his blog and advertise his consulting services in the process.

It looks like Quip links to their webpage in the first sentence of their email. So it only takes one second to figure out who they are if you care. Besides, new functionality emails are mostly aimed at active users anyway.

It's not optimal to send identical emails to every user, but everybody knows that already. There are million ways to segment your users. You can send different emails to power users and casual users. Different emails to disengaged users. Different emails to admins vs non-admins. There are always a million things to optimize and A/B test.

[colbyh]

I read it that way, too. Quip is still a young company focusing on product more than anything, going down the rabbit hole of long-tail user re-engagement optimizations would be a waste of time at this point.

I'd go as far as saying that at this point if a "New Features" email isn't enough to get you re-engaged then you aren't the type of user they need to be optimizing for at all. And that goes for basically any startup pre-P/M fit.

[gk1]

I didn't get any sense of meanness.

> It's not optimal to send identical emails to every user, but everybody knows that already.

Do they? I don't think so. The company being discussed doesn't know it (or knows it but doesn't do it), and they're not alone.

[philipmorg]

OP here and article author here.

Eh... might have come across as mean-ish, but it's nothing personal against Quip. They just did something I see a lot of companies do, which is gloss over some of the finer points of email engagement.