Hi,
So there are two problems I have been seeing time over time again and no good solution exists for them. Feel free to steal these ideas.
Mail for Custom Domains:
Not sure why but it is still so hard to get an email for a custom domain. The solutions that exist including Zoho & gmail. They both are a bit expensive and hard to manage.
API management platform
This was a bit strange that nothing for this exists. There is RapidAPI but if I want to do the management myself there wasn't a good alternative. Looking for features like Analytics, Payment, Rate limiting etc.
What do you guys think of these ideas?
Can't agree more with #1 - even for someone that has the technical know how and access to the various areas - it's still a pain.
How do you go about building this without having direct access to the domain? Would this have to be a partnership with domain holders so that you can directly integrate by adding a CNAME or MX record or whatever else is needed to build a mailbox
So yeah, the domain owner needs to add some TXT & MX records. This is also required by google for business & zoho.
I actually tried open-source "Mail-in-a-box" and the setup is quite annoying and requires a lot of domain settings much more than required by google/Zoho.
I set up a 5USD per month DO box and installed mail-in-a-box. It was okay but the setup was really annoying.
so seems simple enough
Integrate with the domain provider
Map appropriate fields for the records
Find a simple verification method
Then integrate with gmail or other to quickly have the email setup and running
Then why are there no startups doing this? Strange
The value of Google for business is that it comes with Google Docs, Sheets, etc. No startup can replace that.
Also gmail has excellent search capability.
Absolutely agree with that but 5 USD per user per domain is expensive. I have over 15 domains now and the cost adds up really fast especially if I want to have accounts for other people as well.
It still is very hard & expensive to have a simple mail box for a domain.
For #2, have you looked at https://konghq.com?
Yeah, kong is great but it doesn't have stripe integration so I can't directly offer my APIs and have to use a marketplace like RapidAPI etc.