
How to Start an Email Newsletter Company - jasonlbaptiste
http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/08/03/how-start-email-newsletter-company-howto/
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derwiki
What's the upper limit of recipients for a 3rd party solution like MailChimp?
I manage the infrastructure of a newsletter that's sent to over 2 million
recipients in a 12 hour deliverability window, and it didn't look like 3rd
party solutions came anywhere close to hitting this. I looked around briefly
but no services seemed to come anywhere close.

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acangiano
They normally can accomodate for that, but they don't show you pricing on
their site. Basically, you'd have to contact them and talk about your specific
needs. But I don't believe companies like Mailchimp, Aweber, and SendGrid
would turn you down.

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Cmccann7
Yep if you contact them directly you can get direct pricing on any sized list.
If you contact me (emails in my HN profile) I can put you in touch with our
guy lance at Mailchimp

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DTrejo
(Make sure to put your email in the about box, otherwise it is hidden)

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Cmccann7
whoops, done!

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Cmccann7
I wrote this in response to a HN member who asked me how we got started with
our email newsletter. If your interested in starting an email newsletter
business or just curious about the industry check out the post.

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tomedme
Thanks for taking the time to write the article.

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sebg
Chris (Cmccann7) was fantastic on the phone. I really can't speak highly
enough of him. He responded to my email, took the phone call, explained
patiently what he did and then wrote up an entry about it. Thank you again
Chris for being so supportive.

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Cmccann7
Thanks Sebastian :) A lot of new entrepreneurs ask me this same question and I
figured instead of repeating myself each time, why not write a blog post about
it!

Goodluck with your newsletter business!

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jbrun
I just started a newsletter list for guys with girlfriends. Make your
Girlfriend Happy: <http://makeyourgirlfriendhappy.com> we give you useful
reminders about your anniversary and her birthday plus weekly ideas to help
make her happy.

Let me know what you think.

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TheSOB88
I think if you need an email reminder about anniversaries/birthdays your
relationship is pretty much shot. But maybe some of the other stuff could be
useful for me.

I think you need to make the past content much more visible on the site so
users get an idea of what they're signing up for. You really aren't creating
any interest for the user unless you do that.

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bmcmanus
Realizing that starting an email newsletter company is costless and doesn't
have to distribute only news is actually a big idea. There's a ton of
businesses to be made around distributing curating publicly available content,
and being able to serve members of a community you really love is a rare,
awesome opportunity.

~~~
Cmccann7
The HackerNews digest (I think that's what the HN newsletter is called) is a
great example of this. Curated and sent to my inbox to keep me up to date on
all of the HN discussions, I love recieving it.

~~~
duck
I think you are referring to the newsletter I started up a month ago - Hacker
Newsletter, <http://www.hackernewsletter.com>

(And thanks!)

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kljensen
How do these companies monetize their lists? (Please forgive me if this is
common knowledge.)

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Cmccann7
A post is coming on this topic soon.. But based on what I have seen the short
answer is direct advertising, ecommerce, or paid subscription.

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kljensen
Thanks Chris. (I'm running a brand new niche email newsletter for patent
attorneys and would enjoy chatting if you have the time. My email is in my
profile.)

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Cmccann7
Can't see your email, make sure to put it in your about section (can't see it
otherwise). Send me a note, mine is in my about section.

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jayro
We did a podcast interview with Chris McCann of StartupDigest just a couple
weeks ago. Lots of interesting topics were covered. It's well worth a listen.

<http://techzinglive.com/?p=243>

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Cmccann7
And if your looking for a new podcast to follow, TechZing is a great one

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jamesshamenski
if you use mailchimp to send emails, why would you also need ReturnPath for
deliverability?

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Cmccann7
Deliverability is seperate from just sending out the emails. Deliverability is
the business of making sure your email was actually sent and recieved to your
subscribers.

Deliverability itself is a big industry and return path is the leader in the
field. Mailchimp resells Return Path as it's "inbox checker" product which we
use to analyze our emails to make sure we aren't tripping off spam filters.

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jbail
In this case, deliverability is MailChimp's job...not ReturnPath's. MailChimp
says so on their site. They have feedback loops with ISPs to show you opens,
bounces, spam complains etc.

The "Inbox Inspector" add-on shows screenshots of what your email looks like
in a handful of email clients and runs what I'm guessing is a SpamAssassin
check that returns a spamminess number. If this add-on is from ReturnPath,
then the service they are providing isn't exactly "deliverability" once you've
sent --- it's really a toolkit to inspect and QA your messages BEFORE you send
them.

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_dan
ReturnPath's stuff is a bit more advanced than that. They give you a large
list of email addresses to send to (consisting of a number of webmail clients
and ISPs). They then pick these up and provide stats on which have and haven't
been delivered. They also ran your content through a number of spam filters
(including, but not limited to SpamAssassin).

They also provide a whitelisting service (previously the "Bonded Sender"
programme) which helps deliverability in a lot of cases, but the primary
benefit is that it's pretty much the only way to guarantee delivery of large
quantities of email to Hotmail.

So, they are closely involved with deliverability, but you're right in saying
that it's down to Mailchimp to keep their sending IPs reputation clean.

