Back-end for collecting form submissions?
http://websiteworkbook.online/updates
Hi, I'm wondering what solution people are using to collect people's emails when launching an MVP. Right now I've got a web form powered by Sinatra, that sends submissions to my private email via Sendgrid. It's a home-cooked solution but it works:
http://websiteworkbook.online/updates
Should I be using something like Mailchimp's free plan instead and why? Thanx! You all rock.
Derek Reimer is working on Static Kit (https://statickit.com) which seems to address this, but haven't personally used it.
Even for a MVP, I would look into using a signup form provided by an email marketing platform. A more affordable one right now is Mailerlite.
An email platform platform provides unsubscribe options (which your current solution may not) and some platforms also offer landing page builders so you can use these pages to capture emails (they're well-designed, even faster to set up than coding yourself). You can also track open rates, opt-in dates and other important metrics.
Something I have discovered:
Even if you can do something (in your case development), it may not always be the fastest or easiest solution to do it yourself.
That's a good point. You could say there are benefits to both dog-fooding your own solution and to using a preexisting one. It's a case-by-case judgement that needs a cost-benefit analysis depending on one's context.
I use https://formspark.io/ consistently
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Hey, if you want you can check my service. https://smartforms.dev
We launched last month and so far we have 38 free users and 3 paying users. Our selling point is that we allow easy integration with Slack and Telegram, so you can receive your submissions there also besides e-mail. We support integrations through Zapier and Webhooks and have an API if you want to programmatically access your data.
I currently use https://sheetdb.io/ to send emails there and then add them to mailerlite as I use React and couldn't get it working. Works well for newsletters.
Cool, are you using it for collecting folks' emails as well?
Yes I use it for https://saaspages.xyz/ works great. But the free limits are low for what I need it for and the paid tiers are expensive for what it is.
OK. Check out Basin (I posted a link in this thread) — could be just your thing.
I'm looking to code the forms myself and I already get 500 free submissions a month with sheetdb
Got it. Like I wrote earlier, Sinatra works for me — I have 100% control over the code that way. Sendgrid is awesome, too — but then I have no idea what your current stack is.
I use Gatsby so the website is static, that's why I needed something like that.
If you're just collecting, you don't need anything external at all. Typical web apps require an email upon signup, including my site, IH and probably your site. Those are stored in your db, presumably.
Once I was ready to email people I just extracted the emails to a csv and imported them to Mailchimp. If you only use Mailchimp (or similar) when sending marketing emails, unsubscribes are handled for you and your transactional emails (such as password resets, etc) will still get through to everyone.
Actually, mine go to an email address instead of a DB (which is why I'm worried a bit). But it's a great point — I could probably create a single DB table just for storing the emails and export them at a later point.
I wrote (aka copy-paste-edited) a small PHP script that just collates the form info into an email and shoots it to our email.
I use mailchimp, but I'm not crazy about their API tbh... seems kind of expensive as well, but it does the job. I heard emailoctopus is pretty good, but didn't check it out yet :)
Why not collect emails in Sendgrid since you're already using the service?
Good point. I find Sendgrid's documentation on receiving submissions a bit lacking, as they're mainly positioning themselves as a solution for sending email. I'll have to take it up with their support, I guess.
Their documentation isn't the best, but once you have things up and running the service is great. There's a lot of info about integration on Stackoverflow.
Yeah Sendgrid is super-stable — it's the only email add-on that runs out-of-the-box when using Sinatra on Heroku. All others have only given me headaches. I'll check Stackoverflow for more info — thanks for the tip!
Thanks for the many great replies guys — this will keep me busy for a while!
PS. Here's another one I'm wondering about: http://usebasin.com/
Sorry I missed this, but I actually think you posted your question before I was part of the IH community. I'm one of the cofounders of Basin :)
Not sure if you ever ended up using it for one of your projects, but we've made some big improvements over the past 2 years. If you have any questions, I'm happy to be a resource.
Cheers,
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same
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Also mailthis.to & formspree.io
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