EmailOctopus
Email marketing made easy
EmailOctopus sends billions of emails a year, helping our users contact their subscribers for a fraction of the usual cost. We're passionate about offering email marketing at a disruptive price point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
