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Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies

151 points by chrisfrantz ↗ HN
Hello HN! We're the team behind Loops (https://loops.so), a platform aimed at simplifying the email experience for SaaS companies. We support creating and sending marketing, product, and transactional email.

Email is important but painful to manage. If you've ever dealt with the frustration of coding emails by hand, testing them across multiple clients, or integrating them into various SaaS tools, you might find our approach interesting.

We make it simple to design and send email to your users either manually in the app, via API or triggered via an integration. We offer unlimited team seats, so your product team can help align copy, your marketing team can send newsletters, your revenue team can work on dunning and your engineers can have a solid API to help orchestrate the sends.

Most of our competitors use email editors that are licensed from a third party. Our editor is built from the ground up on the Lexical text editor from Meta, extended beyond just text nodes. It supports mobile editing and dark mode, and it autosaves your changes.

Our REST API is straightforward, and we have integrations with tools like Segment and Census. Documentation is available at https://loops.so/docs. On our homepage, right under the fold, we list endpoints and sample payloads.

One issue we've worked hard to address is email compatibility across devices and platforms. It's a problem full of edge cases that we've mitigated by extending MJML, a markup language designed for responsive email, to be even more compliant across different platforms. We don't think you should have to code and test your emails. Email copy shouldn't live in your codebase.

If you're concerned about spam, we are too. We educate our users on CAN-SPAM rules and automatically add compliant footers to emails. We actively monitor to ensure our platform isn't used for spam, and we do not allow cold sales emails.

Our pricing is upfront and available on our website. You can try the platform for free without a credit card. We launched publicly a week ago. We're really interested in any technical feedback you have, as we aim to make this tool as developer-friendly as possible.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

140 comments

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kareemm
How are you different from other tools? Why would I switch?
chrisfrantz
Depends on use case and which tools you’re using today but we try to make gains everywhere we can.

In pricing, we try to simplify by ditching the tables and anchoring around one metric.

For engineers, our documentation is decent and updated regularly. We try to have a performant API, support the integrations you’re most likely to use and include a versioning system with our transactional email.

For marketing, we built our editor around a text-based interface and make it highly customizable. We also take the pain out of having to test across multiple platforms.

For product teams, we offer templates that cater to specific touchpoints in the SaaS lifecycle.

Across all of that we offer unlimited team seats so you can actually have your entire team onboard and technical support for when things don’t work as expected or you have questions.

We create slack connect channels with any team that needs one (we have almost 1,000) and try to provide fast, technical support.

tikkun
I've used it (no affiliation to the company).

I like it because it's easy. I'm not sure what the alternatives are, but I have the sense they'd all be more complex and more annoying to use (even if they might be cheaper).

adamkaz
Thanks! We're aiming for an easy to use modern platform, so thats great to hear.
xmattx
Any plans of open sourcing your MJML extensions? We hand-code MJML for our mails and fairly frequently run into compliancy problems.

Runs kinda counter to your business-case I suppose, but might help someone (me) out :)

chrisfrantz
I would really like to eventually open source core parts of Loops.

I think parts of the editor makes sense, including the MJML. We spent an entire weekend extending MJML for Superhuman and it would be cool to release that work some way.

adamkaz
Its definitely come up! I think it would be cool to have a community working on the translations to MJML from Lexical. There are so many corner cases and email clients out there, it's definitely a challenge to get things working everywhere. What type of compliancy problems have you run into?
ponyous
Can you elaborate on compliancy problems? Really curious as I quite like MJML.
petecooper
Personally, I find the Product Hunt upvote stuff front & centre to be quite distracting (and verging on devaluing to the product offering, in a lot of cases).

I understand the reasoning for it being there, but perhaps kick it further down the page so the service / offering is the focus.

chrisfrantz
Totally fair, we just launched a week ago (and it went well) so we wanted to keep it up till the end of the month.

Will certainly place it in the footer and switch off the upvote portion in the future.

ilrwbwrkhv
Agreed. Product hunt climbers and what hackers like is mutually exclusive these days. As soon as I see product hunt badge I think oh it's for them...
j45
Producthunt seems more like feature hunt with the multiple launches (releases).
chrisfrantz
Yeah I noticed they moved to a “hub” model which I think encourages that. Not a bad thing imo, companies were already treating it this way and they just formalized it. Fwiw, this was our first product hunt post for our product.
acomms
This is good timing. Currently evaluating email send for a new app.
adamkaz
Cool, let us know how we stack up!
candiddevmike
Do you send emails directly or are you using a separate service like Mailgun? Do you provide dedicated IPs? How do you guarantee delivery and avoid being blacklisted?

FWIW, your service seems priced in a way that encourages spam (send unlimited emails to an address).

adamkaz
Right now we're using AWS SES for our MTA. We've had a pretty great experience with them to date. We don't currently offer dedicated IPs but we likely will in the future. When we do, we want to make sure that customers have the required send volume to actually see a benefit from using one. I think a lot of services offer dedicated IPs too early as a panacea for increasing delivery rates. What we've noticed is that these initial IPs are warmed up so perform well, but over time, if the send volume is too low, it's reputation can atrophy.

We monitor our delivery platform wide and proactively contact customers if there are issues with their account.

As far as spam, yes, we allow you to contact within your own audience as much as you like but we do monitor this for abuse.

mtmail
My Firefox browser consumes 600% CPU browsing the homepage. Maybe an endless loop somewhere? I use adblock.
chrisfrantz
Oof don’t love that! I’ll test with FF later today.
robflaherty
I see this with Framer sites all the time. Happens in Chrome too.
Multiplayer
How does this contrast with sendgrid? We use their api and do not upload contacts to them.....
nibab
this is a layer on top of sendgrid. common functionality that a lot of users have to implement before any sendgrid api endpoint is invoked.
tln
Have you thought about integrating with Sendgrid? Eg, if I'm set up on sendgrid NOW and could just plug that in and start using the service.

(I'm actually using Mailgun FWIW)

adamkaz
ah so bring your own MTA - that's an interesting idea and would definitely make it easier to switch over. How would you expect pricing to work at that point?
tln
The same? You price per contact not per send after all
kevsim
Congrats on the launch! For teams that are using something like customer.io, how does this fit into the picture? Is it a replacement or a companion?

And to nerd out a bit - how was working with Lexical? We chose Slate.js for our editor in Kitemaker.co but it's not as actively maintained as it once was.

chrisfrantz
Thanks! Yep, we often replace CIO for early and mid-stage teams.

Pricing, performance and UX are the primary drivers for switching that we have seen so far.

We were on Slate previously and actually rewrote our editor to support our switch to Lexical. It’s very early but it’s a cool platform. Wish they had a community outside Discord but that’s more personal preference.

pembrook
Wondering how this differs from something like Customer.io or Userlist?

Have some friends also working in a somewhat adjacent space (Audienceful) so will be watching you guys closely.

But in general it seems email is pretty crowded these days and a lot of the sub-niches are also pretty crowded (eg. Klayvio in ecomm, Customer.io in Saas, Substack/ghost in newsletters, Convertkit for wordpress bloggers, etc).

And for the most part all these apps are just sending on the big API-based senders under the hood (Eg. Amazon SES or Sendgrid). Even the newcomer API-based senders like Resend are just a wrapper around Amazon SES. Which makes any claims around differentiated deliverability on any email platform dubious at best.

Is the plan to build your own sending infra long term?

chrisfrantz
I would like to! It’s probably a bit further down the line for us.

You can do a lot to improved deliverability once you approach it at a platform level. We have access to various datapoints at scale that we can use to help individual users improve their deliverability vs working directly with the sending infra. Beyond that, we offer a platform that helps reduce pain and friction that might exist with more barebones, infrastructure focused services.

deofoo
They offer a free plan :)
chrisfrantz
Hah yeah that too! Free, no credit card required.
michaelbuckbee
Not sure if this is a good or bad signal. The others don't offer free no CC plans because as soon as you get even the smallest bit well known you get swamped with spammers signing up.
chrisfrantz
We do a lot to prevent it, part of the reason we waited to launch. There are also hard caps with the free plan.
deofoo
I'm a happy user! for sure there are some small basic things I'd love to get (better filtering, user editing, etc...) but overall they get the job done. Good luck!
chrisfrantz
Oh nice! Thanks, yep there’s lots to improve. If you haven’t already, drop us a line in slack or live chat and we’re happy to log feedback then we’ll ping you when it makes its way into the app.
smca
Congrats, Chris!
junwen
Hi smca,

I came across your comments on Stripe on Hacker News and am reaching out in hopes you can assist with an urgent issue.

Account ID: acct_1N6UyxJ097OmyUsG

site：lovilds.com

Product: Women's Beauty and Skincare Products

My Stripe account has been closed, and $90,000 has been forcibly refunded to customers. I've been in touch with Stripe support, and they've told me my account is under review. It's been nearly two weeks.

Could you please help me understand:

1. Is there a chance for the $90,000 to be returned to my account? 2. Is there any possibility of my account being reinstated?

Your immediate attention to this matter would be greatly appreciated.

MPiccinato
Congrats on the launch!

Any plans to support multiple channels? (SMS, push, etc) And are you in the long run looking to compete with Braze, Airship, etc?

chrisfrantz
We’ve moved companies off of Braze already, but we still need to add multi-channel support. We’ll likely add it in the future unless customer needs materially change.
marban
Isn't 98% of email about having a clean IP range these days?
chrisfrantz
There’s a surprising amount of classifying happening at the content level. If you have a clean ip but then send content that raises flags (includes hot words, adult content, etc) then you’re going to be categorized differently in the inbox regardless.

Even without the borderline content, if it seems promotional, it may end up in promotions regardless.

MHillyer
98% of email is keeping a clean IP range. Getting a clean IP is good for maybe a week if you don't know how to keep it that way.
amilner42
I’ll be needing email soon for what I’m building, I may try this. I’ve worked on emails at a past startup and would like to avoid the dread…

I will say I find the pricing quite concerning. Free until 1000, 50 / 5000, but then I have to contact you? Am I understanding correctly, 5000 subscribed users doesn’t seem like that much.

For what it’s worth I went to customer.io to compare pricing and found there’s so confusing I was lazy to figure it out…so I do appreciate the simplicity

chrisfrantz
Nope, hit “view pricing tiers” on the pricing page for a full list of pricing up to 100k contacts.

It needs to not be hidden behind a button, that’s on the list.

ralferoo
From the home page, clicking on Pricing does absolutely nothing. Clicking on other things in the menu goes to those pages, although by opening a new tab in a very user-unfriendly way. Maybe it's gated on having created an account first, but personally I wouldn't create an account without first having any information on pricing first, because there's a high likelihood that I might just be wasting my time.
adamkaz
Our intention is that it's clickable - I can't replicate this but others have mentioned it. What browser are you on?
risico
This looks like a really nice and polished product, I am in the same space, I've been working for a while on a similar project, pretty much feature parity but with one caveat, it's pay-once and use forever (1 year of free updates), self-hosted, no dependencies, one binary.

I'll be keeping a closed eye to you guys, it's pretty much what I wanted when I started my project.

hurlum
where can I see more?
MHillyer
What does it use on the back end for the mail delivery?
wallawe
This is great, congrats on the launch. I can't wait to get away from customer.io but unfortunately the Make.com integration is a necessity for us. As soon as you have that, we'll be customers!
adamkaz
Thanks! We actually have an integration with Make launching soon. I can invite you to the private version, shoot me an email -> adam@loops.so
satvikpendem
Any thoughts on the differences with Resend [0] (also a YC company coincidentally enough)?

I like them because they integrate quite nicely with their other product, React Email [1], where our devs can just write emails in React and it'll render to email-compliant HTML and CSS. I suppose you guys have a GUI as well but I believe they're looking to add that too.

[0] https://resend.com

[1] https://react.email/

chrisfrantz
Sure! Generally, we don’t think email copy belongs in your code base.

You can upload MJML if you’d really like to, along with designing in Figma via an integration, but really your best bet is our editor.

If we can save a few engineering hours just by having the product person that needs to update the emails with new copy actually update the copy instead of pinging engineering, we think we’ve improved things.

If a competitor ends up building a GUI, glad to see they agree too :)

akayaian
We've been trying Loops for a while and love it. Using it currently on our web design curation site (seesaw.website) and it was the easiest tool we could find to integrate.
chrisfrantz
Thanks! We're very focused on ease of use so glad it worked out :)
obeavs
Congrats on the launch! Its been a far better experience than Mailchimp for us, even during the very early beta days.

How has your experience been using Lexical? Would love to get a sense of where you've run into limitations/etc as we're exploring it (albeit, for a very different use case).

adamkaz
Lexical has been great. I think the biggest drawback is that its an earlier project (compared to alternatives) so there are not always best practices for what we want to do. That said, the community is pretty active (in discord) and generally responsive to bug reports.
colesantiago
Chris, congrats on the launch!

Just a few questions, how does this compare to Substack, Beehiiv, Mailchimp, etc, looking to create an automated newsletter, will Loops work for this usecase?

chrisfrantz
Sure, what we've found is that many companies (including our own) publish a changelog, product update or newsletter at a monthly/weekly cadence. We can help solve for that.

There are also quite a few strictly newsletters using us as well which we're happy to support! We own workspaces.xyz and publish that as well via Loops.

adaml_623
We starting using your API for light volume transcriptional emails a few weeks ago and honestly the integration process was so smooth it was anticlimactic. It just all worked.
chrisfrantz
that's what we're hoping happens! it should just work so you can get back to work

thanks for giving us a try :)

danr4
Looks really good! but with 200K subscribers I'm a bit hesitant to move from mailjet, who do I talk to to be able to try it with our upcoming campaigns?
chrisfrantz
Talk to us! We're happy to take a call, email, etc. :)

Shoot me an email (chris@loops.so) and happy to walk you through any questions you may have.

[deleted]
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aresant
Random endorsement - the founder Chris' twitter maintains a remarkably high signal to noise ratio in the marketing/startup/growth content niche - worth a follow - https://twitter.com/frantzfries