EmailOctopus
Email marketing made easy
After six years of iterations, improvements and a complete rebrand, we finally launched EmailOctopus on Product Hunt today.
It wasn't intentional waiting this long to go live on the world's favourite product discovery platform. Instead, it was a case of never-feeling-quite-ready.
But with a growing team, a fab new website and lots more great new features on the horizon, now felt like the right time to do it.
So if you're an EmailOctopus user or fan, come and join the conversation!
Six years after EmailOctopus was founded, we've now sent over 10 billion emails through the platform. Along the way we've learned the importance of speaking directly with your customers. And adapting to the feedback you receive.
For us, that meant switching from a service powered by Amazon SES to become a full service email marketing platform that made email marketing easier for non-technical marketers.
We also learned how best to optimise our pricing so that with each upgrade users continued to feel that they were receiving excellent value for money. Rather than jumping up in too high an increment. That also meant having the confidence to lead with a higher price than what we first started with. And it paid off.
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Crazy milestone. Congrats
Just calculated about 600,000 from me. (Average 13,500 readers times 48 editions)
Damn that is actually scary. WOW.
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Amazing impact. I've not used a marketing platform in a while but we are considering what non-technical tool we can use in the meantime.
Really love your focus to help non-technical marketers. EmailOctopus is going in a slide I am pitching tomorrow :)
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That's lovely to hear! Hope you smash it with your pitch :-)
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Great achievement! What was reason to move from Amazon SES? Do you guys now have your own SMTP server?
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Thanks! We still offer a plan that connects with Amazon SES. We call it EmailOctopus Connect (funnily enough!). But we moved to offering a full service as many of our users preferred the ease of not having to set up Amazon SES. We don't have our own SMTP – we use a few different providers for our emails.
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Keep it up! Congrats!
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Thank you!
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Thanks! That's great to hear.
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We've made a conscious effort over the past few months to increase the number of integrations. Integrations are a solid source of backlinks and more importantly traffic, Zapier, for example, is our 3rd largest attributable acquisition source.
Following that effort, the first app to integrate with us is https://carrd.co – which most Indie Hackers will be familiar with. It's an amazing simple-to-use drag/drop landing page builder. It's super affordable too which is massively important to our users, many of whom use us for that same reason.
Just under 3 years ago, in December 2016, Jonathan and I went full-time on EmailOctopus. We’d reached ‘ramen profitability’, the point where we could just about cover our living expenses (in London, which is not cheap!) and the cost of running EmailOctopus. Now, 3 years on, we’ve reached another big milestone — £1 million in revenue.
I've written a long blog post here on Medium which you may find interesting, talking about how we got there and what we think has worked for us.
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Great piece, well done 🙂
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Congrats. I enjoyed reading about your journey. It is very clever that you minimized your risks, I feel like many bootstrap founders jump into it too fast And end up Failing. I’m three years in and going through a similar journey as yours.
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What a story! Super well done and wish you the best for the future!!
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Congratulations and interesting write up Tom! Lots of lessons in there.
The 20% revenue increase due to the £ crashing made me chuckle.
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Awesome stuff, congratulations. I didn't know your story and the humble beginnings, thanks for sharing, it's inspiring. I'll need to integrate with EmailOctopus sooner rather than later now :)
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Congrats!
EmailOctopus is my SEO inspariton website :) -
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Here's the meta portion 😂
There’s also a lot of plain bad advice out there, much of it given as gospel on Twitter or Indie Hackers. How many times have we read that it’s bad to create a software business and compete on price? Why does everyone advise that you do sales before marketing? Naturally there’s some survivorship bias when I say ignore that advice. But us surviving, while doing the complete opposite, tells you that the advice shouldn’t be taken as essential.
Congrats on finding your own way to 1M!
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Nice! I tried Emailoctopus, does it have an api for sending? I could add that to the email design tool I've been making, called Letter :D - most updates on that are here-> https://www.indiehackers.com/product/email-otter
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Congrats! Best of luck with you next milestone.
Ploughing through, writing code that might not become a product for months takes incredible patience and motivation.
So true.
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I used your services before & I was really impressed!
Keep it up..
I really liked how quick your team responded to my Customer support query!
Well done!
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Congrats guys! 🙂
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This is awesome, congrats to you and @jonathanbull ! Well done! \o/
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Big Congratulation!
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This is HUGE!! Congratulations on all of your hard work @td_evans
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Congratulations ! What an inspiring moment
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wow!!! Congrats. keep growing in revenue numbers
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Wow I love you guys! Congrats :)
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Gread read !
may i ask you why did you add "not Amazon SNS " option ?
and what do use instead ?-
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We used to rely solely on Amazon SES, but saw a huge drop off from people who didn’t know or want to integrate. Signing up to 2 services was painful.
We have the option still of doing this for advanced users, though the simple set-up using our own accounts is the default now
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Congratulations
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Great work!
A link to EmailOctopus on your Medium post will drive more visitors to your website :) -
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Good work guys, seen and heard about you in a few circles - keep it up! :)
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Fantastic article, thanks for sharing.
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Congratulations!
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great, thanks for sharing
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The requirement of an Amazon SES to use EmailOctopus was a huge blocker for many who signed up. Over 60% of users who signed up not completing this step. Being an SES only solution helped us in the beginning, it meant we could hand off things such as reputation management to Amazon and it allowed us to focus on the front-end of the product where emails as built.
But the wider problem we are solving is that email marketing is too expensive and complex for many . To better solve that problem, we really need full ownership over our users and the sign-up process. We’re now at a stage where we can manage that process having grown in people expertise.
So as of today, there is no need to create a separate Amazon SES account when signing up for EmailOctopus. You now simply sign up to the platform and can be sending within minutes.
The hypothesis is that it will improve our metrics of registered users > active users.
Note: We’ll continue to offer the ability to integrate with Amazon SES (at the same old price) for those who prefer that solution. That is offered under the 'EmailOctopus Connect' product.
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Nice !
I was waiting for this feature -
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Congrats Tom
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That's great. Was definitely a headache getting all the setting right for AWS and having to wait for Amazon to do it's thing to raise our limit.
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That's me. I was about to jump into Sendgrid because they have automation now, but this brings back EmailOctopus onto the table. Your prices are way better.
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This is awesome! Can't wait to try it out
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Amazon SES is generally much cheaper than anything else, so it being a blocker seems odd to me, but I guess it takes a bit of work to set up so paying more is worth the convenience to some.
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Most of our users are non-technical, so for them AWS is pretty scary.
Also signing up to a single service and immediately being asked to sign up to another 3rd party is a little odd.
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That's an excellent point. Can you set up SES through amazons APIs? Just wondering if it would be possible to automate it all somehow, like the user signs in with their amazon account and you set it all up for them in the backend. Might lower the barrier to entry, though, now you have moved away from it there's probably little point exploring that now.
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We did use their API to set-up the account as much as possible. But they still need to give us API keys in order to do so, which for non-technical people is scary and confusing. There isn't a 'log-in with AWS option'.
We did investigate all avenues, as abstracting our code away from AWS to support other providers was not simple. But ultimately, needed to be done as we had a very leaky acquisition bucket.
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Yeah, totally agree that would sound scary for non technical people. Thanks for taking the time to respond to me, it's been an interesting conversation.
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Awesome! That’s super exciting you guys.
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Thanks as always for the support, Josh!
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Congrats! Did you end up implementing multi-tenant SES setup?
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Nope, we considered it but ended up partnering with a few different ESPs to handle the backend sending. With the volume forecast we were able to negotiate down to lower rates than Amazon SES.
Oh also worth mentioning, those who are already set-up and using SES will continue to do so.
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It's interesting how the general perception is that Amazon SES is the cheapest, but that's only true on publicly posted pricing. Most high volume senders are able to get better pricing at transactional providers with significant volume discounts.
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That's a great deal if it's cheaper than SES and removes any multi-tenant headaches with reputation.
I've personally looked into multi-tenant SES setup (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrR-iC7UTic), while it is do-able, as far as I remember there's a 10k limit on SES configuration sets (not sure if it's a hard limit), which limits what and how much you can do if you're building your own SaaS (e.g. tagging emails with tenant template ids, etc, to be able to report back on them)
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I wonder if Amazon SES just doesn't allow you to operate on behalf of your users?
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It does, I think Zendesk use SES for lots of their customers emails
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If so, why do you require (or required) users to set up their own account with SES?
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We required users to bring their own account because, simply put, when we first started out we didn't have the knowledge or team size to run our own servers and reputation management system.
So we focussed on our product, outsourced that, then as the team has grown and product reached a point where we're happy we've brought it back under our own umbrella.
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Oh, this is so interesting, thanks for sharing your experience!
But I would like to add something.
You said in your post "The requirement of an Amazon SES to use EmailOctopus was a huge blocker for many who signed up."
But probably not the requirement was a blocker but your UI/UX.
Let me explain.
I tried your service and it required me to enter my SES credentials in the middle of process of setting account up. But I didn't have it at the moment and didn't want to even create it before I wanted to check your service. I wanted to make sure that your service allows me to create email messages on my own (without using templates). But I couldn't move forward because your service persistently required to enter SES credentials. I think this is exactly the moment when most users give up.
I didn't and tried another tactic. I just reload the page and tried to sign in and - voila! - the service allowed me to enter and play with the email editor and other settings and it didn't require to enter credentials at that moment what meant it was not necessarily at all.
So, probably most users, like me, wanted first to play with your service and they couldn't...-
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Hi Zencentric,
Appreciate your insights but please don't think we simply make such a dramatic change on a whim. We do try to do a little bit a of research before pivoting our business completely — it's worthwhile before embarking on a 6-month long project like this was.
So what research did we do?
We ran 2 user surveys sent to about 10k users who didn't set-up AWS in the past x months.
We asked the main reason for not completing the set-up:
- 15% of those surveyed attempted the set-up, but found it to difficult.
- 30% were concerned about signing up to two services.
- 24% wanted to just have a look at EmailOctopus. (So your point does have some validity, based on this)
- 6% refused to do business with Amazon!
Following that survey we created some hypotheses and ran some tests. We tested a two approaches as well as introduced a new savings calculator to make it more clear what the final cost would be and also a new on-boarding flow. The two tests were ran were were: allowing users to skip through the SES Credentials set-up and then also offering to set-up the service for them. The former saw SES set-up drop down even lower, users simply never got round to it. The latter didn't make a sufficient dent in that drop-off.
So we ran the 2nd survey including some further questions. Most interesting result from that was "Would you use EmailOctopus if you didn't have to complete this AWS set-up at all?" and the overwhelming answer from 86% was Yes.
Now ultimately, the problem we're solving is that email marketing is too expensive for some business. You're right, we could tweak the SES solution continually and perhaps eek out a small improvement in our metrics. But we'd always have been restricted by the local maxima. There will always be a drop-off if you ask users to sign-up to two services. So we took a leap, following hours of research to (hopefully) find the global maxima.
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Thanks for sharing your approach and research steps Thomas, very interesting. For what it's worth, we had the "Skip this step" for SES connect at BigMailer.io early on and it didn't help the conversion rate much. So I am in agreement with you that the blocker for most users was setting up the SES account.
Congrats on the revenue milestone, happy for you guys.
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Appreciate your insights but please don't think we simply make such a dramatic change on a whim.
Not sure what you meant.
I just wanted to note that blocker maybe not the requirement itself but the way how it was implemented.-
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Did you read the part where we tried your suggested implementation?
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Our 4th iteration on our pricing, in as many years, with the aim of making it fairer for our users.
Why is it fairer? The new pricing model now automatically scales (both up and down) as your account does and removes the huge jumps in tier that proved frustrating for many. For example: previously the next tier after 250,000 was 500,000 which was almost double the price.
The biggest pushback we expect on this change is the removal of a free trial, however we've improved the free tier to now allow them to use our automation functionality.
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are you considering expanding to LATAM, Mexico?
Not specifically, though we do have a number of users and customers based in LATAM. What did you have in mind?
I could either build a local team that focuses on the LATAM market customer penetration. Also, if you got to the point where you need to formally incorporate your business with the government to pay taxes from those revenues generated from LATAM countries. As you know, in many countries the government now requires that all types ofbusinesses that generate any income from clients residing there, will ask for paying taxes, even if the business is all through the internet. For instance, in Mexico under domestic tax law, non-residents (including legal entities and individuals) without a permanent establishment in Mexico, or with a permanent establishment in Mexico to which Mexican-sourced income is not attributable,and deriving certain types of income in cash, in goods, in services or incredit from Mexican sources, will be subject to tax. I am totally open to any other option well.--
That sort of market penetration is not something we'll consider anytime soon as there's still a lot of work to be done in our key territories. But I appreciate the offer :-)