Ask HN: How do you send email in your early stage startup?
Say you are launching your startup idea, trying to get some early users. You have account-related emails (registration, forgot password), and marketing emails.
Do you run smtp off of your EC2/DO/GCP machine? Or do you use Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mailjet, MailChimp, SendGrid and blah so you get the benefits of DKIM and volume handling?
Budget: I am not sure what's a good budget, but I see $20 budget to start with. Obviously if there's spike, I hope a "free-tier" buffer would cover.
32 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 83.9 ms ] threadAt least all those I've ever used or looked into do.
Also if you're using route 53 configuring dkim, etc for your own domain is just 1 click away.
Say my startup is foo.com and I've registered it at namecheap. I'll get a corresponding gmail account (foodotcom@gmail.com) and use that for my outgoing correspondence.
Where you want to impress with your custom domain is incoming email, and in that case, you can set up mail redirects (catchalls in particular) for your new foo.com domain. So if I meet VC Mike at an event, I can direct him to sales@foo.com or info@foo.com. The "handoff" for when I email him back out of the blue from my foodotcom@gmail.com can be a little fraught, but it's good enough until I want to afford actual gmail services or similar.
It's a great way to segment off new areas of your business, so if you hire Vickie in customer service, you can autoforward support@ to vickie@personalmail.mail or vickiefoo@gmail.com, until you hit the big leagues.
As far as I remember GMail can send emails on behalf of another address you own:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en
This way VC Mike will have a seamless experience writing you to your @foo.com address.
They don't do it for free anymore, and their mail hosting for new accounts is surprisingly expensive (though I suppose most things are, when you're used to getting them for free).
Parent is not advocating for the use of Google’s G Suite. G Suite is indeed no longer free, but that’s irrelevant. Grandparent was using namecheap’s mail redirect. At no point were the parents suggesting the use of G Suite.
I've never had to pay them, ever. Even though they handle all my small startup's traffic.
We use MailChimp for our marketing mails purely because of habit. SendGrid can handle that too.
On the free plan for both for ages and ages so didn’t have to worry about the cost until we started ramping up.
I would advise against your own SMTP server. I maintain one for ‘fun’ for my personal emails and between SPF, DKIM etc. it’s more time and effort than it’s worth for an early stage project.
You also get cool analytics with MC and SG which shows who received their emails, who hit spam, who clicked, etc. very handy for diagnosing signup mail problems.
1) Interpersonal. This is your own email that you type and send from your own mail client. Internal discussions. Scheduling a meeting with an investor. Etc. Use a hosted IMAP+SMTP service for this (g suite, zoho, fastmail, whatever).
2) Transactional mail. This is mail that's related to specific interactions on your platform: "thanks for registering" or "you have a new private message" or "your order is in the mail". Legally, there's no obligation to allow users to unsubscribe. You'll be automating the sending of this with code, and once you write and design each message it will be changed infrequently and probably by developers. If you need to do automated processing of incoming mail, it also falls into this bucket. For this you want cheap SMTP and ideally a robust API with pre-parsing of incoming mail. For this you want a service like Mailgun or Sendgrid.
3) Marketing mail. This is newsletters, offers, etc. Broadcast-only (not a conversation). Your marketing team will be customizing these each time they go out, so you need a WYSIWYG interface. Ideally this is also hooked up to a CRM so that you can segment your messaging. You also need automated unsubscribe for compliance purposes. And this is the mail most likely to be actively marked spam, so you want to send from a different hostname and IP than your interpersonal and transactional mail so that your interpersonal/transactional mail won't be auto-filtered as spammy just because users mark your marketing mail as spam. This is what services like mailchimp or constant contact are for.
This way, you can allocate an entire domain (or subdomain) for each function, and if you run into problems with your marketing mail going down the tubes because someone decides to put your IP address ranges on a blacklist, that doesn't automatically nuke your main corporate mail and your transactional mail with your existing customers.
A check confirmation email, account renewal notice or other transactional email couple play a critical role in your funnel or with combating churn. If you don't have it married up with everything else, you'll lose a lot of that insight.
Any ESP friendly enough for a business user will likely have an API for sending programmatically. Rates might be a bit higher over something like SES, but that may be worth it depending on your scale. It also let's business users manage templates and such without needing to have an engineer touch code, and the reporting is all there.
If you're a B2B sending 10,000 emails per month with high potential value per interaction, integrating transactional and marketing mail and tracking email interactions with transactional mail on a granular level may be worth the additional cost.
And a large team may have use for more detailed data, or the capacity to build out reporting and integrations for themselves.
But super early stage, that's not the low hanging fruit you should be worried about.
And even if you end up using the same platform, for conceptual purposes, for compliance purposes, and for optimizing deliverability you'll want to consider marketing and transactional email separately.
Following that I use Amazon Ses because it has the best value. I use name cheap which has free email forwarding for an entire domain. I forward all emails on my domain to a Gmail account with a matching name, and use that for inbound emails. This method is rather limited, but very cheap.