TinyCadence

At some point, you’ll probably want to send a bulk email from your Gmail. You can do this a few different ways. In this post, we’ll go over what those different ways are and you can use them, as well as their limitations.

NOTE: make sure you don’t go over your allowed sending limit. For existing individual accounts, this is 500 emails per day (1 email to 500 email addresses counts as 500 emails), according to an official Google Support page.

You may see some websites telling you that you can have up to 2,000 email recipients in a single day. Note that this is only for Google Workspace customers, and is not true for you if you are using an individual Gmail account.

Unfortunately, for individual accounts, there is no way past sending more than 500 emails in a single day. If you do this, you will receive an error message from Google saying that you have sent too many emails.

If you end up getting this error too many times, you risk your account being flagged and disabled.

Bulk send emails directly from Gmail

The easiest and most intuitive way to do this would be to make an email send. From the Gmail interface, you can add many email addresses to the BCC line in an email and send the email to many contacts from there.

Beware! A Google Community thread says that only up to 90 email addresses can be entered into the “bcc” box in the email composer. This means that if you have 400 people you want to send the email to, you will need to send the email 5 separate times.

You’ll also want to make sure that you use the BCC and not the CC or TO fields for the bulk send. If you use CC or TO, your recipients will see all of the other recipients email addresses and could end up flooding each others’ inboxes with the dreaded “reply all”.

Pros of sending directly from Gmail interface:

• No need for other tools
• Great for one-time sends

Cons of sending directly from Gmail interface:

• Limit of 90 recipients per email send
• Have to manually input all email addresses
• No ability for personalization

Bulk send emails using the mail merge feature

For paid Gmail accounts, you can use the “mail merge” feature. The way this feature works is that you tell Gmail which list of email addresses you want to bulk send to. You can either make the list in the same window you’re writing the email in, or you can create a Google Sheet and link that to your email.

Here is a link to a video explaining the feature: Mail merge in Gmail
For many, this seems like a great way to bulk send emails from Gmail. However, it does not allow individual users to send bulk emails.

Pros of mail merge:

• Easy to list all of the contacts to send to
• Allows personalization

Cons of mail merge:

• Requires a paid plan for Google Workspace
• Does not allow analytics like sends and open count
• Does not allow follow up emails to be sent easily

Bulk send emails from another tool

For many, the mail merge feature is not available. For this reason, your best bet would be to use a tool to do the bulk sends for you.

Many tools like this exist, but they typically limit the features you can use or the number of recipients if you don’t pay for a plan.

Here are some popular mail merge tools and their send limits:

• TinyCadence: trial period; no email send limit
• MailMeteor: free plan; 50 email sends per day
• Gmass: trial period; 50 email sends per day
• Yet Another Mail Merge: free plan; 50 email sends per day
• Mail Merge With Attachments: free plan; 50 email sends per day

Unfortunately, nobody does this for free. And only one of them allows you to send bulk emails without paying.

Feel free to sign up for a 30-day trial of TinyCadence! If you need a longer trial, simply ask us through our website chat support and we can extend it.

We just launched the first version of our product on ProductHunt. It's been a while since we started this journey, but are excited for what's to come!

If you have a free minute, we'd appreciate any upvotes or comments (or signups 😉) on our ProductHunt post!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tinycadence

For the last six or so months, I’ve worked on building a SaaS. It’s nothing big or groundbreaking: it’s an email sequence tool. Think Outreach, Salesloft, or HubSpot Sequences but for smaller businesses (and for 1/10th the price). It integrates with HubSpot’s CRM, so it’s a direct competitor to HubSpot Sequences. We’ve gotten the product to the point where it’s usable and solves a real problem that exists.

Now we just have to sell it.

For the past 10 years, I’ve worked at various tech startups in some form of a software engineering role. That may be tech lead, senior engineering manager, or just software engineer. I’ve joined security review calls, software demo calls, vendor calls (on the side of the buyer), and some prospective sales calls. I worked at a marketing technology company that was sales-oriented. I know the words, the terms, the tools in the space.

I have no idea how to sell.

Conventional startup wisdom says to:

• focus on a niche
• focus on a user’s pain point and solve for that
• validate that your solution solves the pain
• ask for money

However, we’ve validated that this is a pain that exists and our solution solves the problem (otherwise the established players wouldn’t exist).

So instead, we’ll start by focusing on specific people and users in a target segment. Let’s define them by their problems:

• budget constrained: they can’t afford HubSpot’s $500/mo price tag ($100/user/month with a 5 user minimum)
• time constrained: they have more contacts to reach out to than time or people to reach out to them. They deeply feel the pain of not automating their email outreach.
• routine, predictable script: they have an outbound process that works. It’s the same email(s) with some light customization to everybody that enters the funnel.

Based on these problems, we can get at some other attributes about potential customers that we could use as a proxy for a good customer fit:

• small business: once you have a large team, you likely have deep pockets. For this reason, you can probably afford Outreach or Salesloft and would not be interested in a cheaper solution.
• early stage business: once you’re established, you likely have a software vendor process that would eliminate us due to security requirements. We have built products with and understand SOC2 certification, but that doesn’t mean we have it (yet).
• somewhat technical: because we’re early, we’ll be iterating with our customers. We’ll benefit from customers who “get” software product development. They can look past some minor bugs and get excited when we launch features they’ve been asking for.

But I’ll say it again: we have no idea what we’re doing.

If you have any sales or prospecting advice (e.g. how do I get a warm intro? how do I get email addresses for prospects? etc.) I’d love to hear from you!