

Sendwithus (YC W14) Offers A/B Testing And Analytics Tools For Email Marketers - bvanvugt
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/07/sendwithus-y-combinator/

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jkresner
They are one of the strongest companies in this YC batch. Powerful team with a
solid product riding lots of traction.

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mrmch
Brad (bvanvugt) and I are pretty excited to be announcing this; I think we're
one of the first Canadian companies from BC to be part of YC.

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abuehrle
The product looks nice. Well done.

To the founders: can you write a bit about how Sendwithus compares to Vero and
Customer.io? Also, have you considered bundling an email service provider? I
know other companies have some arrangement with SendGrid. It would be nice to
not have to go get my own account.

Thanks!

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bvanvugt
Absolutely, and great questions.

Our focus is on content management and optimization for _all_ your
transactional email. We find that large successful companies always end up
building this sort tool themselves - that's the pain we solve. Both Vero and
Customer.io are great tools for triggering very specific emails early on in
product development. We provide a full-featured service that solves the needs
of larger companies as they grow and scale.

Bundling an email service provider is definitely something we've considered,
and may do in the future. For now, integrating with existing ESP accounts has
allowed us to completely side-step questions/concerns around deliverability
and scale. ie: If a customer of ours already trusts SendGrid, we never spend
time convincing them our bundled SendGrid is equally powerful.

That, and most major ESPs have very competitive and capable free tiers.

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bliggy
Great product. Definitely going to be using this. Keep up the great work!

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bvanvugt
Thanks bliggy, it's surprising (and ridiculous) how many developers end up
building this themselves.

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bliggy
I've definitely built this sort of thing at least a few times. There comes a
point where it definitely makes more sense to build this sort of functionality
(or now use sendwithus!), i.e. when you get tired of hearing about changes to
email templates from marketing! At the end of the day making it easier to test
and optimize all the communications with your customers no matter how mundane
the email is awesome. Just simple things like upsell messaging depending on
the user is huge -- and not something a developer generally wants to or is
capable of worrying about :)

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bvanvugt
Removing email templates from source code alone is a huge win - to your point,
I don't know any devs who enjoy updating email templates :)

We wrote a quick blog post about this a few weeks back:
[http://blog.bvanvugt.com/great-b2b-saas-products-remove-
tech...](http://blog.bvanvugt.com/great-b2b-saas-products-remove-technical-
dependency/)

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Axsuul
Great idea, it's crazy how many good startup ideas one can come up with while
building on their current startup. This is one of them, glad someone built it
:)

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bvanvugt
Exactly! As developers ourselves, it's ridiculous how many times we've
(begrudgingly) built this functionality into other products.

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benjaminfox
Giving marketing teams the ability to test and optimize transactional emails
opens up a new customer referral and upgrade channel. Love what these guys are
doing.

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mrmch
Not only is transactional email a great referral channel (just look at what
Dropbox did), it's also ripe for optimization.

Engagement emails are used by almost every kind of app to facilitate user
actions, but by being trapped in source code, the people who care about user
experience and metrics can't take action to improve them.

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knes
Congrats on the launch. I have a question, do you do event based notification
like customer.io?

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bvanvugt
Thanks knes! :) We allow companies to control their own triggers via API -
more information here:
[https://www.sendwithus.com/developers](https://www.sendwithus.com/developers)

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welder
I found their email template editor to be amazingly powerful yet easy at the
same time!

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avlok
Love the idea - solving an important problem

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mrmch
Thanks Avlok, we feel sendwithus is an important building block in any modern
web app.

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vasco_
Awesome product.

