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8 Comments

You can steal this idea for your next startup!

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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?

on December 21, 2020
  1. 2

    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

    1. 1

      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.

      1. 1

        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

        1. 1

          Then why are there no startups doing this? Strange

          1. 1

            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.

            1. 1

              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.

  2. 1

    For #2, have you looked at https://konghq.com?

    1. 1

      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.