Sidemail.io
Painless email sending for SaaS
Sending branded transactional emails from your app is now more straightforward than ever before. Thanks to our newly introduced markdown API.
How does it work?
The best way is to put the markdown email content into a separate file. Sidemail automatically transforms the markdown content into a professional-looking email branded with your logo and customized email design. This is all possible due to a new markdown parameter available in our email API.
Code example
Here is a code example showcasing how to create a button with $btn syntax, include dynamic variables by using the {variable} syntax, and put the variable data into templateProps:
(we use trim function to remove the access new lines which we intentionally created to make the code more readable)
Markdown feature highlights:
- Pixel-perfect design optimized for transactional emails
- YAML-formatted metadata support (subject and from address directly in .md file)
- Dark mode is supported
- Open tracking is supported (can be disabled)
- Dynamic data supported
- Button style is supported by prefixing a markdown link label with $btn
- Code block is syntax highlighted (js, php, ruby, python, bash)
- Responsive (optimized for the best user experience on all devices)
- Won't break in Outlook and similar
Want to learn more?
Visit our docs: https://sidemail.io/docs/markdown-emails/
Suuuuuuuper nervous to see Sidemail on Product Hunt after two years of pouring my heart, all my focus & energy into building it together with my better half @krvrbova.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sidemail-io
If you like the product, any support is appreciated! 😊
Other PH launches to get inspired by:
- @yongfook launching Bannerbear
- @levelsio launching NomadList, IdeasAI
- @csallen launching Indie Hackers
- @dinkydani & @jivings launching Leave Me Alone
- @AndreyAzimov launching Sheet2Site
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Congratulations.. Upvoted. :)
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Thank youuu!
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Nice work, Patrik! Upvoted. I stole some ideas from your video for my own PH launch next month. 😊 How has the traffic and sign up impact been like?
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Appreciate it! What are you launching? Will repay the favor. Around 30 sign ups. No conversions yet.
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That's great to know. We just launched https://www.airboxr.com publicly recently (no real announcements yet, just reaching out to people who had already signed up). It's a no code analysis tool for spreadsheets—I'm not sure what to expect from PH cos it isn't really a builder product, but doesn't hurt to try!
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Looks polished! I think it might do really well, the community like all kinds of no-code tools & spreadsheets powered tools. You got both.
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Upvoted.
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Thanks!
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Hi Patrik,
Congrats! It looks very promising.
Quick question.
I don’t use Outlook or any of the other email systems; however, I could/would like to use gmail. How easy is it to connect to gmail (and are there instructions on how to set this up) do I need a Gsuit account?
I’m definitely looking to purchase.🤓
Thanks in advance for you help/feedback.
Eric
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Hey Eric. Thanks! You don't need outlook nor Gmail to set up Sidemail.io.
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Thanks sir!
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You should not be anxious. People are releasing weekend projects on ProductHunt. Congrats on your commitment and launch!
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I launched a weekend project before, wasn't nervous at all and it's my most successful Product Hunt launch so far. Launching Sidemail was different, because we spent sooo much time on it. Just wanted everything to go smoothly.
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Looks good and congrats on the launch. Upvoted
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Appreciated it. Thanks!
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Congratulations on Launch. Upvoted on PH.
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Much appreciated! Thank you
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Congratulations on the launch!
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Thank you, Marie!
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Congratulations @pkrupar and @krvrbova!
Im sorry if this is an entitled question, since it can very easily be read as 'give me free stuff'. But I'm currently also working on a startup, and the big appeal of MailChimp for me, is the pay as you go pricing. I want to use Sidemail because it just looks less complicated for what I need. I hate Mailchimp's audiences and such.
But the price point of $41/month is quite the deterrent for when I just need a simple system for now to run on the backend. I'm building my own templates in MJML/HTML, so I certainly recognise I'm not your target audience haha
Is there any plans to integrate a pay as you go pricing model?
Again, sorry if that's a rough question, just trying to highlight my usecase. Very excited to see the launch and can't wait to see your next post about all the revenue!!
~ Lachlan
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No no, PAYG is too unpredictable for us at our size. Today, we added a new starter plan with 1k emails/mo. If you're willing to commit, we offer a 50% celebration discount.
But, I think you answered your own question. You don't get all the value from Sidemail as you're invested in building your own email templates.
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I think I could get behind that! How do I apply it though? I've registered already and can't see a way to apply it at checkout. Thanks!
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Glad to hear it! Please, try again to click the discount link & refresh the dashboard if open. The link sets a cookie so that the discount in the in-app checkout is automatically applied.
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Congrats, Patrik! Looks like a great product and I hope it works out super well for you!
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Thank you!
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I see you've got full API access now to send emails, great! I was looking to add a native integration to https://automations.io few months back, but there wasn't a way to send emails via API. Time to get busy :)
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Subdomain sucks for SEO and that's why we switched our Sidemail docs to a subfolder. I highly recommend you do the same, so you're not leaving any SEO juice on the table.
"Moz moved our Beginner's Guide to SEO from guides.moz.com to moz.com itself. Rankings rose immediately, with no other changes. We ranked higher not only for "seo guide" (outranking Google themselves) but also for "beginners guide" a very broad phrase." — the co-founder of Moz (source).
To make the switch, we had to migrate our docs from 3rd party to self-hosted. If you're considering self-hosting your docs as well, I can't recommend enough Netlify — free & fast static hosting with built-in CDN.
Lastly, if you need to reliably deliver superb & bulletproof transactional emails from your application to your users' inboxes via simple HTTP API, check out the new Sidemail docs!
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Hey Patrik, your move makes a lot of sense.
By the way everything looks amazing. Your website, your app, your documentation – all looks fantastic! And I love how everything is lightning fast. You picked a very competitive space, but I hope you guys succeed!
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☝️Ditto! Great work @pkrupar your site and service looks awesome.
A few months back I was looking for a service like this but didn't come across yours. You may wanna go back to some of the old IH threads and comment - could be really valuable for many members looking for the right email tool!
And thanks for sharing the SEO tip - great suggestion!
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Thank you, @daverad! :) Brilliant advice, I'll make sure to spread the word in the comments.
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You're amazing! Thank you, Steven.
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Yes, I got here from https://www.indiehackers.com/product/music-meal/added-a-blog-section--M5aj5an6oUsY_lSdPWZ. Nice move. It will definitely improve your SEO results because people will definitely point links towards your documentation while writing about your product. A subdomain would have taken those credits with it.
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Plus the subfolder makes it look more like a part of the product, unlike subdomain which makes it feelslike a completely new, separate thing.
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Are you using a tool to generate your documentation?
I've looked at http://apidocjs.com/ but it's not convenient if I need to move the docs each time for a new version.
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Great advice, thanks! How did this affect Sidemail's ranking? And did you see an increase in traffic?
Hey! 🖐 It's been a while since I shared an update about Sidemail. To my excuse, it's because we've been busy smoothing the rough edges from the initial MVP and acting on the feedback we received from our early beta users. Our to-do list is almost empty now. The reason is that we wanted to launch Sidemail somewhere around this time. But, since the COVID-19 happened, we're postponing the official launch. In the meantime, we thought we'd offer Sidemail for free as a part of our early adopter program — no invitation required.
For those not familiar with Sidemail.io, it's an email service that helps deliver emails to your users, customers, and subscribers in the easiest way possible. @krvrbova and I spent our weekends building it for the past 2 years (it happened all so fast! here's my first IH milestone). We put a lot of effort into making Sidemail stand out with its UX — think Stripe or Zeit. If you feel Mailchimp or ConvertKit is too complex, give Sidemail a try. If you're moving quickly and feel like Mailgun and Postmark require too much custom code to make it all work, try Sidemail, it'll surprise you.
We decided to include 1500 emails per month for free and access to all Sidemail features, to name a few: email API, unlimited subscribers, no-code email templates, and email automation. That should cover you whether you're newly turned Indie Hacker, starting a new project, or looking for an upgrade :).
To sign up for the free early adopter plan, create an account here. Just a heads up, it's a bit of a secret that we offer this plan, so that's why you won't see any mentions about it on our landing pages, and you'll see "start 7-day trial" instead.
I'm all ears when it comes to feedback, so please, do tell.
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Product looks great. I have a project that I want to start soon and I'm now planning on using Sidemail for it.
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Glad to hear that. Best of luck with your new project, Jared!
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Congrats on getting here! What process did you go through for the UI/UX? I always struggle with this part.
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Thanks. Nothing special to be honest. We're building Sidemail to solve our own problem, so we are always figuring stuff out along the way just by being the most involved users ourselfs.
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Completely new Sidemail.io site is up!
It's the 7th iteration. 🤯 Here's what we've done differently this time:
- To give visitors a better idea of what's Sidemail all about and how it looks, we replaced abstract illustrations with actual in-app screenshots.
- Organized major Sidemail features into subpages called solutions. We've done long-tail research and this should help with SEO.
- Kept things simple, for example, almost all sections on the new site use a simple two-column design which is easy for us to maintain.
What worked for us and we stuck to:
- Our top priority was writing a copy that clearly communicates the outcomes and benefits of using Sidemail. We spent the most time on this as we're non-native English speakers – Grammarly to the rescue!
- A long homepage where there is everything you need to know. I find short homepages a missed opportunity – the visitor just got here, why send him away, keep the conversation going.
- Mobile-friendly and fast (static HTML on CDN).
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Beautiful website, congratulations! I'm closely following your progress as I expect to start using Sidemail myself very soon!
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Thank you, Filipe.
You're more than welcome to jump on board any time you're ready! :)
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I love the look of your website as a whole. It's clean and simple, but still informational.
Currently struggling with how to do that ourselves. Playing around with different CMS's but would love to be able to just go with static HTML as well. Can I ask if you used a template or a service to build it out?
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Glad you like it! :)
It's done all in-house, nothing fancy: we designed it in Adobe XD first, then recreated it in code.
Here's my article about designing in Adobe XD if you're interested: https://medium.com/free-code-camp/a-developers-guide-to-web-design-for-non-designers-1f64ce28c38d
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Awesome, I'll check it out.
Also checking out the product and it seems well made as well. Submitted my email for beta.
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The website looks really clean!!
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Thank you, Steven! :)
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Congratulations on the new version, Patrik. One suggestion, there is only one screenshot on homepage, i suggest you shown a screenshot for every feature you are showcasing in the home page itself.
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That's a good point, Hari. Thank you!
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In love with the simplicity of the design :D
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Good stuff, Patrik. As a fellow email-focused SaaS guy (sendview.io), I think you've told the story really well. Especially with a product that can potential solve so many different problems for a user (good for them, obviously, but hard to sometimes keep their attention long enough to get all those points across. Nice work!
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Glad you like it. Thanks!
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Yesterday, I got a notification saying our Sidemail.io customer canceled his maxed-out $31 monthly plan. This is our first break up. Although I don't want to admit it, it hurt my feelings a bit, haha.
After doing a bit of investigation, I find out the churned customer hasn't really used Sidemail for a few months, looks almost like he forgot about it, and didn't need it anymore.
A takeaway: don't get too emotionally attached to your product, and more importantly, make it easy for customers to cancel. If a customer wants to cancel, let him cancel – in one simple step.
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I would say that rather than do email targeting for those about to drop their membership, I would say set up the email campaign for every customer right when they subscribe. I had a company do this with me and I really liked it. Once a month I would get emails that would talk about a specific feature that customers liked or a new tip on how to use the service. This did two things, 1 - remind me to login and use the service since I'm paying for it, 2 - generate goodwill b/c the company appeared to care about me and that I was receiving full benefits. Many companies work hard to get you as a customer and then forget about you once they get your credit card, when it should be that they work harder now to keep you as a customer.
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Really solid advice, thanks for your input! We'll probably do something similar to what you described. I'm thinking set up email automation that triggers when user is active, and uses some of our features (eg.: email sending api) but haven't tried Messenger or our subscribe forms, yet.
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It's the reality. The sooner we realise, the better and we end up making our products better. For one churn, i hope you get a lot more new customers!!!👍
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I always appreciate your support @1hakr! You're most definitely correct :)
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Welcome to running a real business :). Churn is a fact. What you have to do it to try and minimize it by ensuring customers are happily engaged as much as possible.
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I think another thing you should take away from it is: always take usage statistics and act on it on the go.
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Looks like a great product! How did you find your product market fit? How many paying customers are using your software?
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@alxcnwy yes! exactly! @pkrupar its a good idea to be measuring product market fit by capturing metrics on user retention (how often users resubscribe, as well as how often they use the product once signed up).
There is an inertia effect when people subscribe to a site. People might sign up because they think it might be useful, realize its not, but don't unsubscribe out of inconvenience for months - making you think your doing good, but your not. You can tell your going in the right direction if your retention is high, and people use your site often as intended (Advanced players monitor in seconds how long an average user spends on their site, and where they spent it and analyze how to improve their product or focus with that data).
You can tell your doing bad if their not using your product, or there is lots of churn - this shows bad product market fit. (This data could also help you pivot - people might not be using your product the way you initially intended, but in unexpected ways potentially presenting an opportunity to pivot).
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Well said, @alxcnwy.
I'm most definitely guilty of neglecting on churn prevention (among other things).
Coincidentally, we just released automated email sequences that will come in really handy for reaching out to customers that look like they are about to churn away, as you described.
Any tips on what to look out for?
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Click on the image above to see Mixpanel in action.
You could save time developing your own custom solution by using a SaaS tool like Mixpanel Predict.
They handle all of the ML-bs for you and tell you what you need to know based on certain parameters.-
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But wouldn't it be better if, you did the necessary computation to generate the basic parameters (as accurate as can be), to give Mixpanel to do the final heavy lifting for you? Saving up server resources?
Are you looking at it from the financial perspective that having to calculate the basic parameters yourself + paying Mixpanel to predict and visualize data will be more expensive when compared to building your own in-house solution from scratch everytime you're hit with a problem like predicting customer churn?
Facebook is a large corporation, and churn prediction is much more important to them because their goal is to keep users online for as long as they can so they can continue to generate revenue from ads and other initiatives.
Sidemail is a mailing app. Their services can be consumed over an API. Churn prevention is not as important to them.
And by the way, building such a solution from scratch is not child's play and building one that's efficient enough largely depends on who the "We" is in your statement: "We didn't try Mixpanel specifically but we did benchmark several vendors". If "We" is a large firm with a lot of resources at their disposal then it makes sense to deploy an in-house solution. But if "We" is a bootstrapped start-up, or a startup with some external funding that wants to benefit from churn prediction and prevention without greatly impacting burn rate, then outsourcing remains a better solution. So the question we should be asking is, which solution will Sidemail benefit from, considering it's an early-stage startup?
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Today, I woke up to this:
What an energizing start to the day! I'm feeling motivated to get back to work and keep making sidemail.io better day by day 🤩
A takeaway: when you like some product, tell the founders, it'll motivate them to make the product even better, and you'll get a better product to use as a result.
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I'm where i'm because of the community and i always try to give back to the community. I believe SideMail has potential to be successful and will be recommending it to everyone i know. Keep the amazing work going!
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Big shoutout to you! Thanks, @1hakr :)
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Nice product.
I will definitely give it a try. Just went through the docs and features and for sure seems like a good deal for people like us.-
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Thank you, thank you! :)
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I just want to say that the sidemail product page looks amazing, well done! 👏
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Thank you!! :) We redesigned it recently - I'll share a milestone here on IH with some tips on how we made it soon.
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I love the site design
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Thanks!! :)
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Looks awesome, Patrik. I think I'm going to give Sidemail a shot instead of Mailchimp on my next project!
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Looking forward to having you onboard! :)
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I can imagine that feels great! 😀
I bookmarked your project, by the way. Might consider a migration at some point haha
Keep it up! ✌
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Looking forward to it. :) And you as well.
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That sounds great - I will give it a try too!
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Awesome to hear!
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The landing page and logo are awesome... Although the logo reminds me of docker for some reason, any chance it inspired it?
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Thanks, Dan, glad you like it. Today it's almost impossible to create a logo that doesn't remind any other, aren't I right?
It was actually pretty simple with Sidemail, no inspiration in docked here. I wanted to have a friendly-looking animal as a mascot and Sidemails brand blue color in the logo. Viola! A sea lion is super cute (isn't it? 🙂), looks great in blue, and has a simple shape.
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Hey Patrick,
I don't know if you remember, but I asked you to try Sidemail a couple of months ago.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to, because I can't code and there is no possibility to embed an inline input to my website. I saw the hosted forms that you offer but they aren't the same.
I believe you should add this functionality. If you do, I suggest you to make the forms' design easy to customize (HTML instead of java script) because that's a big limitation that other email marketing companies have (forms that are ugly and very hard to modify).
Good luck!
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Hey hey! Sounds like adding an endpoint that handles form submits with
content-typeset toapplication/x-www-form-urlencodedwould solve your issue. You would use your HTML and CSS to create and style the form and set theactionattribute on the form itself to the new Sidemail endpoint. Would that work for you?
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Hi :) Sure! You can get an invite here: https://hosted.sidemail.io/5d03578b2620ea00fc28a728. All you need to do is fill in your email, then you'll receive an email confirming you're on the early access list and you'll be able to register. Does it make sense?
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This comment was deleted 6 years ago
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Always happy to promote great products!
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After 14 days of work and a purchase of brand new iPhone just for the blog post, it was finally ready. No obvious grammar errors, subscribe forms wired up, layout tested, site's live. Finally! Tired of this. Now, just share it, watch the views roll in, and I can go into my little code cave, again.
∗mouse clicks∗ and it's submitted to Reddit!
"Sorry. You seem to be a new user. Please participate around reddit before jumping straight to submitting!"
A rather disappointing start to our blog.
Any good recommendations where to share or repost dev-focused blog posts?
The blog post: https://sidemail.io/articles/dark-mode-in-html-email/
EDIT: I'm not a new Reddit user. The message says so, but I had my account for over 4 years and I even submitted to the same subreddit in the past. My guess is that I wasn't active enough recently, but Reddit being Reddit, tells me I'm a new user. One of the disappointments right there.
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Honestly, I am deeply annoyed people that don't contribute and straight away start asking for help or promote.
Your content can be the most helpful article in the world but it is still promotion. When people will see that you have zero messages and your first post is self promotional, they won't react as you want them to do, especially on Reddit.
Every time I see someone here on IH asking for help with zero messages, I ignore them. It is bad behavior and for a community to work well bad behavior has to be disincentivized.
What's even worst is that these people, once they have what they needed, disappear until they need something more.
So if you want to have any kind of success on the Internet and in particular on Reddit, give first.
If you want to have the reputation of the self-promotional guy with another self-promotional post that's another story.
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I guess there are always two sides to the coin. Funny thing is, I'm not a new Reddit user. The message is wrong in that regard. I think I wasn't simply active enough recently. I'm back at it now, but man oh man, it's addictive.
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I didn't know you weren't a new user. That it is addictive it is very true, and that's one of the reasons I avoid marketing my products on Reddit and social media. Both effective channel, but I ended up spending there too much time! Good luck on your promotion ;)
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Hey there,
Finally, something I can be helpful about on IH, vs all the help I get. I run a couple of blogs, and after a year of posting (~1 a week) I get around 1000 PVs/day on each of them, and I just write about things I like (languages, culture, and motorcycles, mostly). It's humble, and others have achieved far more, but sometimes those who recently learned can teach best!
Here are some things I've learned about getting traffic:
- In the early days, you have to promote your posts everywhere you think your audience is and where it's not "spammy". Answer questions on Quora, in FB groups, here on IH. If it's good, people will appreciate it. Tone is everything! Expect only a fraction of it to work.
- For new sites, it takes months to get search traffic. Your blog has a relatively low DA of 16. It'll take ages for you to rank for keywords. That's normal! Keep writing. (If you like writing...)
- For competitive posts, it takes ages to rise to the top for important search terms, and you may never reach the 1st page of the SERP.
- If nobody is searching for your specific answer, nobody will find it. Know what people want answers to, and write for them, in their language.
- Writing posts gets exponentially easier after the first ~20 or so extremely well-researched posts. Most people give up by then, anecdotally (or outsource it).
- It's hard to predict what will get searched for and what will go viral until you're a very big website. I know many who are surprised (and for whom 5% of their posts makeup 50% of their traffic) and they didn't see it coming for those posts, and often put much more work into others.
- Like building an app, putting yourself out there in written word (or video or audio) is extremely humbling, and nerve-wracking. It messes with your sense of self esteem. Today one of my posts started getting shared and I wanted to just run away.
Learning "copywriting" is a huge endeavour, akin to mastering any profession, like coding. There's dozens of books out there, but the best one I've read is Breakthrough Advertising.
Even as I consider hitting "post" on this I hesitate, despite the fact that I suspect someone will find it useful.
Good luck on your writing journey!
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This is a great response @dana. I have tried to build audiences by blogging but wasn't all that good at promoting the posts after they were written. It was always a question of finding good places to post.
Do you have any recommendations on how to find good places?
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The way I think about it is reverse... go to the places first, find out what people want but can't find out answers to, then decide if I can write them and then just drop the answer there.
For example, I'm trying to write an article right now about the Ghost blogging platform. So I am on the Ghost forum, looking at what people ask, and what they're not finding answers to. For example: what commenting systems are best, and how to do SEO in Ghost. Then I can write about that, and post links in those threads. Heck, occasionally someone ASKS me to write a post.
It's a lot like one way of starting a business that's gaining traction: going and interviewing a bunch of people on what they desperately need an answer to, and making something for them (works for some people, never worked for me).
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The article is super-interesting! Especially for me since I run https://unread.it/
You need to work harder on promoting it
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Thank you! I really appreciate it. I was slowly starting to think it's garbage, glad you find it useful :) This is why I love IndieHackers community, always super positive and encouraging!
I know Unreadit! I was admiring your site not that long ago and now it's different, isn't it? What a great idea, btw!
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We changed it a bit yeah, happy you like it. Your marketing site is super-polished as well I must say.
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Out of curiosity, I googled the title of the article and it's on the first results page, on the bottom, but on the first page! That's something. 🤩
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Haha! You're right! 😅 The disappointment came back, though. After a couple of hours, I checked it again and it was gone! How's that even possible I don't know. 😄
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I'd look into Google Search Console. Google sometimes ranks sites higher just to experiment if people are interested. Knowing which keywords bring visitors to your site you can adjust content, to fit them more precisely.
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This is excellent advice. You can also ask Google (in GSC) to revisit your page(s) when you make changes/updates. Speeds indexing up a bit.
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I have to agree with the other people here who've said this looks great. I wouldn't be too worried about not getting immediate traction. Content marketing, just like SEO (and they go together very well), takes time.
Another place you can cross-post to is Medium, but just like with Dev.to you want to make sure that your original is set as the canonical URL. You want that SEO juice. :)
You can probably also get some inspiration from how @harrydry promotes his Marketing Examples posts. (He's written about many aspects of it here on Indie Hackers.)
You may also consider doing a bit of personal outreach if you know people who write about this stuff and would find this useful. And if you don't know who this might be of interest to, maybe find out. :)
Regarding getting signups, maybe it's just me but I found your copy for the end-of-article email signup a bit vague:
Don't miss out on high-quality pieces like this one. Topics might range from technical stuff, business, and design. One-click unsubscribe any time.
Technical stuff, business, and design? Too vague. Also, the unsubscribe thing can be moved to microcopy under the signup, IMO. Focus on what benefit this email list will give.
I also find the mid-article email signup oddly super specific (the one about dark mode updates) but I'm not exactly in the target audience here so I might be totally off on this one.
Add to this the final part of the article which focuses on selling your services and you have three CTAs in connection with this article. If I were you I would just focus on one (presumably building that main email list, since it will be the most valuable to you from a content marketing standpoint over time).
Another consideration is that people are usually more reluctant to share articles and resources (even useful ones) if they appear too salesy. Something to keep in mind. It needs a light touch.
Once you have more content and traffic you can start testing how this applies to your audience, and how they react to different types of CTAs. Just bringing it up here as something you may want to think about. Food for thought, so to speak.
Best of luck!
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Love the blog post. Love the overall theme as well, very clean. You could re-post on dev.to as someone else has said. you could also post it as an ad there. And post it on Hackernews, I think it'd be a big hit on Hackernews. I recently posted a link to my landing page for Simple Board ✔️ to hackernews and it resulted in over 1000 unique visitors and over 400 emails collected. So it's definitely a good source.
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Thank you! Yeah, dev.to is on. I'm not 100% sure, but I think I recently read something about dev.to ads that you need some points that you gain somehow. Do you have any experience with it?
Look at you! What a great result from HN. Can you share the URL to your post? I always try to learn from what people use for title, etc.
I submitted the aritle to HN on Tuesday and it went unnoticed. No points, maybe 3 visitors in total, haha 😅. I've never had any luck with HN.
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Yeah so you gain credits for posting threads, commenting, etc. I have 15 credits there and an ad for a product costs 5 credits.
Yes the url is here I find it weird though as there's hardly any upvotes, but it's been on the frontpage of show HN for nearly a week now. It was at No.2 for 2 days when the traffic went mad.
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It's a great blog post, and it got me thinking about dark theme email. I didn't know about it before, and I don't know if Mailchimp can do it.
It also made me consider whether I should switch from my free trial on Sendgrid to Sidemail! Could Sidemail also be used for marketing, like Mailchimp?
Also, I love the Sidemail site. Did you design it yourself or buy a theme/template? If you don't mind sharing, could you reply or email ben@casterlevel.com? I'd love to buy something similar for casterlevel.com.
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Thank you! It's a new thing, another to worry about.
Surely, it could! :) You can read about here: https://sidemail.io/targeted-email-messages. Email me patrik@sidemail.io if you need help setting up.
Yes, we designed it ourselves.
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Yes! dev.to seems like a great fit.
Are you on there as well? If so, let's follow each other, what's you username?
I actually spent yesterday's evening migrating the article to markdown. I can tell you, tables in markdown are a pain. For anyone that wants to convert HTML table to markdown table, I used this tool: https://jmalarcon.github.io/markdowntables/.
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To be fair, it's the case of most communities, where you're asked to contribute/help around before promoting your own content. But there are platforms where this will be very well received I think, like Dev.to or Hacker News. Great work on the blog post, and good luck!
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I know, I know. It's just that I've been Reddit user for couple of years now, my account is not new and I even posted to the same subreddit in the past. My guess is that I haven't been active enough lately and they just used the generic "new user" sticker regardless.
Thank you! :)
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Are there any other communities where you were active in recently?
I see that you've posted here, maybe that's one of the answers 😃 -
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It will take time and be mindful that if subreddits just let anyone post then they will be overrun with spam and self promotions.
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You need to work more on promoting your blog post. Or you can use guest posting to grow your traffic. Try www.wuztr.com to find websites or blogs to submit your articles.
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Nice, thanks for sharing! I have zero experience with guest posting, do you mind explaining how it works? Can you repost or does the content need to be unique?
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I have experience with guest posting. It depends on the destination.
The main reason people guest post is to build backlinks to their website from well-respected websites in a niche, which is a strong indicator to Google to trust your website (go read about Domain Authority and backlinks from Moz, the best authority on the source).
(Note: even though they're an authority... there's disagreement about how much you need backlinks. It's correlated with SERP ranking, not a proven causative factor.)
The distant second reason is traffic. Unless you're posting to a VERY high traffic site where people click on links for more info, don't expect much traffic conversion from a guest post.
The general process for guest posting is
- Think of niche websites related to yours, but which aren't specifically competitive. E.g. you have an app that's for store management, and there's a blog about growing your flower store, you can go guest post there about ways to market a flower store. (about which you might not know, but which you'll learn... they don't know or care)
- Research their domain authority (Moz) and traffic (ahrefs, similarweb). Look for DA of 30+, ideally 50-60+ so it's a strong backlink.
- Write to them, saying you love their blog and showing you've obviously read it, and write a targeted pitch. No science here - just be nice, thoughtful, well-researched. Websites get many pitches a day, mostly just robo spam. (generic like "Hi! I love your site, can I guest post? Love, Randall McRandom from SmallBizMarketingExpertsForTruckManufacturers.biz")
- Be clear what you offer and want. "I have these three topic ideas. I'll write 1-2,000 words, original content, exclusive to your site, and just want a do-follow backlink to my own blog, which is on this topic. I can finish it by next Friday." (Yes, content should be original, otherwise there's limited value to them... the site with original content is the one that will always rank)
- You have to write a quality post, in the style of the blog where you guest post.
- Add contextual back-links to your website. Inline. Their post will likely be picked up by bots that copy it, so you want your links inline (not just in your bio).
- Deliver it!
Do not just content yourself with the minority of websites that say "accepting guest posts" or have a form for it. Anyone can publish guest posts. The only ones that you should exclude are the ones that say "we are not accepting guest posts" (which I do see, but rarely).
After they've published, you can publish on your own website, as long as your canonical link points to theirs.
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Hey guys!
I want to share with you new features, we've just released, and give you a little sneak peek on what's coming next.
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Newly baked:
🔌 Keep track with your users thanks to contact profiles API
From now it's possible to send data about users to Sidemail via our new simple create-update API end-point. Benefits of Contact profiles API:
- Makes easier to identify where each user is in their journey using your product. It's faster than database lookups and easier than a DIY solution.
- Allows sending targeted and personalized email messages to your users with always up-to-date data.
🎀 Send code snippets in style
New syntax-highlighted code element was added to Sidemail's no-code editor. Supports highlighting for JavaScript, PHP, Bash, Ruby, Python, and plain-text.
🔍 Get a better glance at sending data
Charts were improved to show even more detailed and relevant data. Including the number of emails opened at each day or calculated percentage rate for all key metrics.
--
What's coming:
🔜 Our most requested feature – email automation is going from todo to doing in Trello. This means it's going to happen very soon! We already have a rough idea for it and can't wait until we use it for Sidemail too.
🤫 We have one more exciting thing coming this week. Cannot say more right now, but I'll leave you a hint - it's gonna be dark. So stay tuned!
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Nice! I'm curious, why is Sidemail better than Gmail?
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Thanks, Joel. It's two completely different things - can't really compare these two. Gmail is an email client. Sidemail is a service for managing and delivering transactional and marketing emails (mainly designed for SaaS).
Feel free to check Sidemail's landing page where is in detail described what Sidemail is and how it works. :)
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I made my first promotional video for my SaaS! It's for Sidemail email marketing update we recently launched. A lot of new features were added, so making a video felt like the best way to show it all.
It's short (50 seconds), no fancy animations, but apart from that, I'd say it turned out pretty good. I loved the music at first, but now, I'm having nightmares from it, lol.
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkzxvxvFyIM
How I made it:
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For windows users, like me, the trickiest part is the screen recording. I tried almost everything I could find:
- ❌Windows Xbox capture (won't record browser built-in select inputs, alert windows, etc.)
- ❌OBS (black screen issues, too complicated)
- ❌whatever I could find on Github...
✔️ What I found out to be the best is Captura, an open-source, totally free, no watermarks, no sign-up, just a superb piece of software. The only issue I had was, I desperately wanted to record in 4k. However, my laptop couldn't handle it. Looking back, I should accept my defeat sooner because editing 4k footage would be a total nightmare, anyway.
I should also mention loom.com, I used it a few years back and didn't like it, but seems like it's getting popular and might be even a solid option if you get the $10/mo plan.
––
For video editing, I used Adobe Premiere Pro because I had some previous experience with it, but I would not recommend it if you never used it before. It's too complicated and overwhelming at first.
- If you're in a hurry, use whatever you know or have access to - iMovie or Win10 pre-installed video editor or for Linux here is a list on askubuntu
- If you're planning to make a lot of videos in the future, learning Premiere Pro might be your best bet - it won't go anywhere as it's industry standard and there's a tone of tutorials on YouTube. I recommend this 5-minute tutorial.
A big inspiration for my video was this Launchaco's video - I remember seeing it on ProductHunt and it just stuck with me. What I like about it is how simple and cleverly it's done (the way they move the logo at 35 seconds is the best part).
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The music and sound effects (mouse click, keyboard typing, "woosh") are from SoundCloud.
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Made a video for your product? Please share in the comments! :) About to make one? Good luck!
👉 And here's the Sidemail page with the video.
Join our mailing list if you'd like to receive up-to-date progress and occasional titbits as Sidemail grows. 🙌
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I worked in video production for a while, the music thing can happen to any track. I can’t listen to a few things without flashbacks ;-). Overall I’d say this turned out really well, for me the title screens could be half a second longer though.
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Thank you!! :) You're absolutely right, I wanted the video to be on the shorter side and I overdid it in some areas.
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I think your video is better than launchaco's video, it's simple and explain the idea as simple as it is... music + click sounds + zoom at some places... it's amazing <3.
I am just wondering how much time you spend on this video.-
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Thank you!! Glad you like it. :) I thought a week, but I just checked the file dates and it looks like 10 days to be exact.
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Thanks :) I can't make it for you (get someone on Fiverr for that), but will gladly make some recommendations, provide feedback, etc..
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Awesome product! What are the main use-cases you're currently seeing with this, does it support product-triggered emails as well?
Thank you for checking it out! I'm not sure if I understand correctly what you mean by product-triggered emails, but you can use this markdown API for sending any transactional emails such as password resets, account activation emails, receipts, trial expired notifications, etc.
That's awesome! Exactly what I meant, thank you :).
Amazing!