Shootmail

I started working on my product Shootmail with an idea of providing ready-made email templates to developers, small business owners who code. I created around 20-25 templates initially for most common use cases for the SaaS businesses like user onboarding, welcome email, password reset, product launch announcements and updates etc. Users could modify each and every aspect of these templates by passing JSON config. Structure would be fixed, but to modify text, button color etc, there was a JSON config.

I started charging my users on the basis of the number of credits they use. For example a user would get 100 credits for $10 for a month, where 1 credit meant, one email using my template. I got 2 paying customers and a few more signups, but most users found it expensive especially since this was a monthly subscription where credits were either to be used or they would lapse. Plus, they were also paying to an email service provider like SendGrid or Resend to send emails. So, their overall cost to send emails increased.

Then I thought, what if, I become the email service provider and offer my users one subscription to send mails , use the templates and get analytics. I built this on top of AWS SES to keep the cost low. I was sure, this would make a really attractive deal for the users. But, to my surprise, I got a few more users, but most were not ready to switch to a new email service provider in the market leaving old and trusted platforms.

I wanted to understand this in detail, so I did a post on Reddit asking exactly this "As a developer, why would you not buy my product Shootmail". Post got around 165 comments and people rightly criticised my approach of building something that was already there in the market and established players like SendGrid, Resend, Postmark etc, were already providing emails at very low cost, which obviously, given my scale, I couldn't achieve.

At this point, I decided to cut down all the features and stick to my original idea of "Providing beautiful email templates to busy founders and designers". I removed all the new features I built and just focussed on building more templates. I simplified the process by building a notion-like email builder, so that even the people with no design/coding experience can quickly build their own good looking emails in contrast to my earlier approach where developers needed to pass JSON to customise already built email templates, which was time taking even for developers and was impossible to work with for people who don't code.

I also simplified my pricing with only one, lifetime-access plan to get all the current and upcoming email templates along with notion-like email builder. I launched on Product Hunt and became product of the day. Got 20 sales and round 120 new signups. Most importantly, a ton of feedback to improve my product.

My learnings from this entire experience:
1. Don't build new features before talking to your ICP.
2. One time payments attract more customers because every solo entrepreneur is working with a limited budget.
3. My product idea is not new, but, it is saving my customer's time.
4. Keep trying, keep pivoting and working on one idea before abandoning it and starting to work on a new shiny idea.

Happy to answer any questions.