
Milled: A search engine for email newsletters - mrzool
https://milled.com/
======
chaz
Hey, I built this! Solo founder and profitable. Stack is primarily Amazon SES
+ Rails, and affiliate monetized. Happy to answer any questions.

~~~
cosmie
Have you ever thought about packaging up the analytics you can derive from
this into a product offering?

The inspiration you mentioned in another comment is the exact impetus that
would make for a lucrative offering, particularly on the agency side. Things
such as email cadence, offerings, screenshots of the specific emails, etc.
Either at an individual brand level, rolled up to a pre-defined category, or
allowing individuals to choose their own basket of companies to create
benchmarks from. Would be really useful when creating pitches, but also for
ongoing digest reports for competitive monitoring.

And that's just based off of re-packaging what you're already showing. There
are lots of additional useful opportunities that would only varying levels of
effort to unlock.

~~~
chaz
Great ideas -- thanks! A couple of people have suggested similar, though
selling to hedge funds.

Right now, I think the greatest growth is still from adding more brands and
making them more accessible (improving search and navigation), to yield more
traffic. Spinning up a new product and sales channel might be a distraction,
but definitely worth thinking about as the site grows.

~~~
cosmie
You could also repurpose the idea and leverage it as a traffic driver. Run a
few high-level queries to get the baseline stats, then post those up on a
benchmarks page.

That way you have a draw for those types of needs, yielding more traffic from
that niche. And could (but don't have to) leverage it as a passive sales
channel and low-effort product by just throwing a blurb at the bottom of that
to contact if they're looking for something more specific. Which would be a
low-effort product of just tweaking the queries you created to get the data
for that page, plus the one time upfront effort of making a splashy
Excel/Powerpoint template to drop the bespoke query results into.

That'd end up with a solid, minimal effort traffic driver. A potential passive
sales channel with minimal incremental effort. And since the
targeting/messaging is open ended in nature and you don't _want_ to focus
heavily on a new sales channel and product offering, you can let it sit there
and mellow while seeing which potential market segments (hedge funds,
agencies, in-house, etc) shake out organically. Giving you some potential
insights into which area to focus on if you _do_ eventually want to go from
passive to active.

~~~
chaz
Yup, good idea -- just a link + landing page to see what inbound queries come
in. Will explore it! Thanks.

------
Ayraa
Chaz, great work creating this.

My only thought is, I wonder how well these ecommerce emails perform. The
majority of them are very image heavy, which affects deliverability and
conversions. Some of them have most or all of their text and buttons directly
on the images themselves.

Of course, if you're offering a discount, the email may convert better than
average, but since the majority of stores only send this type of ecommerce
style emails throughout the year, I'm curious how they perform in general.

~~~
chaz
It really depends on the brand and the type of email that you're sending (new
product, content, abandoned cart, etc), and each email marketer needs to test
for themselves. I've seen more textual emails work well when it's a welcome
letter from the CEO or founder, but it's not a rule.

Broadly speaking, ecommerce is still a very visual experience at every step.
It's really rare for me to see emails without images.

------
gopi
Interesting idea. Maybe you should think of extracting text content from the
images for more SEO fodder.

------
throwaway13000
Cool project. What is the end goal? A Lifestyle business? Only search by
keywords?

------
aleks4nder
Neat site. What sort of money are you making with it?

------
redwall_hp
Needs more RSS.

