On one hand, it's awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them.
On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Support is fantastic of course, but it was really the little things that made the experience great.
An example, they manually vetted each of their API consumers to ensure one bad apple doesn't spoil the bushel. It's probably not cost effective to gate customers like this, but in the end I don't have to worry about MY email not being delivered by one of the major providers because some other person used Postmark to send a spam campaign. Stuff like this happened all the time with Sendgrid and the only remediation I've ever seen was "upgrade to our $90/mo plan and manage it on your own."
Maybe ActiveCampaign will keep this level of quality and care (it is the same team after all), but I can't help but be a little cautious. I've been burned one too many times by an acquisition of a great product by a not-so-great company.
Hey there, Rian here (Head of Product at Postmark). We definitely understand the "mixed feelings" response for an acquisition like this. A couple things I want to reiterate:
* The entire Postmark team is joining ActiveCampaign, and we are going to continue to operate the way we have always operated for the foreseeable future. That includes the support team you love!
* We definitely don't plan to change any of the things we do to ensure the highest deliverability in the industry. We are not, for example, making any changes to the manual approval process—that will definitely continue.
> The entire Postmark team is joining ActiveCampaign, and we are going to continue to operate the way we have always operated for the foreseeable future. That includes the support team you love!
While I appreciate you saying this, you have to have in mind that just some 6 months down the line it won't be you calling the shots. The business priorities will be determined by other people and they can and will command you to shift your policies as they see fit.
I want to believe but history has shown, time and again, that these pledges never materialize.
It's OK, you are feeling relief because you likely received a huge sum of money. Who wouldn't be happy!
There's a proverb: "Never promise anything when you are feeling happy".
Oh I am sure they 100% believe it. I wonder why people always forget about the power structures. I guess that's what happens when people work what they love and money is just a positive side effect... as opposed to this being exactly the opposite for 99% of the other population.
I think you often forget about this because promises are made that they won't touch anything. So you're being genuine when you say "nothing is going to change" because that's what leadership promised.
Trying to maintain this is a major fight that generally gets you fired or you end up leaving out of frustration.
It's hard to see if when you come in with business like Postmark that is loved by its customers because you think "We're a great business and we know how to do things, why would you want to blow that up?" but you need to remember that the acquirer (ActiveCampaign) is looking out for themselves (ActiveCampaign) first.
I agree with you, such a bittersweet taste in the mouth.
I don't think that a Marketing company is the right type of company to run Postmark.
Postmark care about deliverability not about "engagement". Everything is about being sure your mail get to your clients not about how to craft marketing campaign from their product.
How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some email editor and campaign management feature to Postmark ?
I truly hope they won't touch their acquisition and let it run how it always has instead of adding feature that doesn't make sense with the product just to compete with MailChimp and other big names.
> How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some email editor and campaign management feature to Postmark ?
Seems unlikely given AC is already incredibly cheap and a simple email sender won't be sophisticated enough to convince marketing teams to move over from a full featured ESP to something simpler.
I'm also not convince this is a good fit, but for another reason: if you're a pure Deliverability Company, it's far easier to maintain healthy relations with email hosting providers and get useful information or data from them.
By contrast, if you're a Marketing Company, well 'enemy' might be bit strong but these providers will definitely be far less cooperative, and your service might suffer from it.
Give MailPace a try [0]. The creator seems like a great guy, and the service does what it says without any bs. I've been using it for a while now for side projects, and can only recommmend it.
I can somewhat vouch for MailPace. I wrote the Rust library for it and talking with them was very straightforward (getting a free key to test, testing the library's functionality, etc) and he was very responsive and knowledgeable, even installing the Rust compiler to test. That said I haven't actually used it to deliver critical mail.
The delivery latency being published on their home page is another nice touch that shows they are dedicated to transparency.
I have the biggest respect for Postmark. Excellent product. Extremely well done APIs. Incredible performance and reliability. I've always chosen them for my projects and recommended it many times. And most of all, I wanted to support an independent product, made by awesome people.
I really, really hope they will remain like they are now.
Congratulations to the owners for staying true to their values all these years. Wilbit has always been a huge, huge source of inspiration for everything I've done. And congrats for the payout!
Same here. I saw the email this morning and my heart sunk. I know I'm not a big customer (I'm on the lower tier plan, $10/mo) but Postmark was a rock solid part of my setup and now I'm not sure how long that will last or when/if my plan will be seen as a waste of time/money. Postmark was so incredibly refreshing after having been exposed to a number of other products in the same space. I'm glad for the team but apprehensive about the future.
I'm hopeful that the product remains the same. I chose Postmark because it was the most simple transactional email provider I could find.
ActiveCampaign on the other hand was always a nightmare for me at my prior company. Their API had a 5 request / second rate limit. Which made it almost impossible to use for 50,000+ customers (syncing up emails / tags / campaigns).
I worked on a project that used the ActiveCampaign API. It had tens of thousands of users and an elaborate tagging system.
There were operations that we'd have liked to be synchronous (in the browser), but the rate limit and no useful batching mechanism (AFAIK at that time) meant they took over a minute to complete.
Exactly this. Postmark is my go to when the mail actually needs to show up. I don't do campaigns or other bullshit. When a service I've written sends an email, it's a password reset or similar.
> was a team with great empathy and values, and a true desire to make this an acquisition that served all the human constituents as best as possible.
Every acquisition announcement almost paint the acquirer as an amazing company, that care deeply about the mission of the acquired company and that is aligned with its vision. But 99% of the time it is false.
This is especially false when the founders don't even stay in the company. We should allow founders to say "We sold the company to get money and do something else, we hope the acquiring company will take great care of our customers"
Trouble is, you can do this once just fine. But it means the next time you want to get investors or sell a company, potential payers will also weigh your past performance. If you say "yeah we have no idea what's going to happen, good luck" and the company tanks after being sold, who would trust that it wasn't your actions at fault?
As much as it sucks for consumers, the self-interested thing to do is sing the praises of your buyer -- because your reputation is at stake otherwise.
This is the game right? Build something people need, and ideally situate such that a larger player with deep pockets goes "yes, this" and cashes you out. Much like the "Thank you for smoking" film trope, you can't take the money AND call the press for the expose on how dirty the whole thing is. I'm reminded of the South Park founders more or less laughing "yeah we sold out" because why wouldn't you? Everyone has a number (unless you're a martyr, bless you, or already fuck-you-money). That number turns out to be much lower than you might expect when the real deal knocks on your door.
Another possibility: it's true far more than 1% of the time, yet that's not enough reason for the acquirer to make the same decisions as the previous owners would have.
The acquirer can be amazing, care deeply about the mission of the acquired company, and see it as aligned… and after a year or a few years, decide that it's not the best use of their resources. The difference doesn't need to be that the acquirer isn't amazing or doesn't care; often, it's simply that their decisions have different inputs.
What can they really say, honestly? "Hey, we sold out to the highest bidder. No clue how this is going to go, but we felt the time was right to cash out. Bye!"
I've been through something very similar with Mailgun. Mailgun was acquired by Rackspace in 2012. «Rackspace will make Mailgun available to its Rackspace Hosting customers for integrating cloud-based email services into applications and websites» Up until the acquisition, Mailgun was a solid product with a core set of features, i.e., an «API for creating and managing online email inboxes for apps and websites». And then it grew, and grew and grew. In my own view it tried to do too much which inevitably meant pricing changes for its customers.
SendGrid started off similarly, very early on it was named smtpapi.com. The focus was on the API, developers, UX, etc. I keep getting reach out emails from Twilio these days trying to upsell me on all the amazing "new" SendGrid features they have in 2022 (of which I need exactly none).
I don't have high hopes for Postmark's acquisition. ActiveCampaign will start "integrating", then comes the raft of new features, products, solutions. Today's Postmark does very little of what the competition tries to offer. At some point I'm already preparing myself for the inevitable price change ^^.
All in all, good pay day for the founders after 12 years of bootstrapping, not much to celebrate as a customer.
SendGrid was great, but between the countless upsells and the fact they keep terminating my azure marketplace-based accounts for lack of use (not true) with no way to recover (create a new account!) is super annoying. I don't doubt the people at Postmark think nothing will change as they're still as dedicated as yesterday, but they no longer drive the ship and will do what they're told, then probably leave.
Kudos to Natalie and Chris for a clear, honest announcement and for stating this:
> When you do something for this long, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. The team knows we’ve always joked about opening a hotel one day. But that, like any other wild ideas, always felt like a distant fantasy. Over the last year, we realized that we’re ready to explore a world outside of software. We’re ready to slow down a bit, be more present with our kids, and discover ourselves again.
(This is also why it's important to plan for a company eventually changing hands – even if it's bootstrapped, even if you love it and consider it your life's work. People change, as do companies, products, and teams. You're probably not going to be running it at age 80. Acknowledge that and don't be totally unprepared when it's time for a change.)
> In the end, the team at ActiveCampaign really showed up. The majority of our team will continue 4-day work weeks through the end of the year.
But then what? They have to accept a 5-day work week again in 6 months or find work somewhere else? Getting an extra day off a week is a huge benefit, and I bet losing it will have a pretty big impact on those that had grown accustomed to it.
This makes me sad (even as I wish them the best). Postmark may be one of my favorite services 1) to actually use and 2) as a company. Their product is actually fun to use and powerful. As a company, Wildbit is one I've always had high respect for. Their "People-First" approach says it all, and they seem like a company that truly acted on that.
I understand the reasons for the acquisition, and I hear the message that product continuity is the goal, but I can't think of an example of a product acquisition that hasn't resulted in a worse experience (at least with a product as good as this one). I'd love to hear examples if anyone has any.
I'm happy for Postmark overall though, and I want to express gratitude for creating a great product and company.
Of the SaaS services my own SaaS service depends on, Postmark has given me the least (zero) problems, and I'm genuinely concerned about what will happen now.
Their deliverability has always been absolutely stellar.
Man, this feels like the chrome extension buyouts by marketing companies.
A bit of a backstory. Postmark was a delivery first company. Initially they were actually transaction email ONLY (not even product updates, release notes). They broadened eventually, but manually reviewed each new customer AND if you were doing marketing often pointed you elsewhere
"If your needs are less about supporting application-based sending and more around enabling marketing promotion, there are other tools that may be a better fit for you than Postmark."
ActiveCampaign is the opposite. Marketing first. Fingers crossed.
They are giving 10% of the sum to all employees, based on tenure. They didn’t have to do that as the article mentions as they never had employee stock options. So I guess a great bonus for employees? Not sure if this works out the same as having an option pool from the start?
options are so often unevenly distributed and eventually diluted to basically nothing that this is probably a better outcome for employees who’ve remained with the business.
They only have ~40 employees so if the sale price is ~150m, that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars per employee — much better than most people make out of the sale of their employer.
This sounds like great news for the founders and the team. Congratulations to them!
I met Natalie and Chris years ago when I interviewed for a position at Wildbit (one I really wasn't qualified for). I'm sure they don't remember me, but I was super impressed with them - their approach to business and respect they had for their employees. At a time when I was becoming disillusioned, they showed me that it was possible for a company to be successful without putting profits above all else, and actually showing compassion for their employees. They were one of the first companies I'd heard of who were actually experimenting with 4-day-work weeks.
I think this mindset is becoming a bit more common today, and will only become more common (maybe that's wishful thinking?) - but I think they were _way_ ahead of the curve.
Just when they announced it, their live statistics started to degrade noticeably on their dashboard. https://status.postmarkapp.com/ with a huge slow down of their emails.
This is absolutely crazy, almost an order of magnitude. What could've triggered this? All Postmark addresses suddenly under 'marketing content/spam' scrutiny?
Happy user of Postmark here for multiple projects.
I get it.
Working all those years brings a toll and at some point your heart is no longer in it. It’s like you realize… damn I want to do something else with my life. Anything else but this.
Hope Active Campaign keeps it running and hopefully it won’t end up like Mandrill.
This is excellent news for the wildbit team. They bootstrapped a super successful product, and sold it when it wasn't their passion anymore. They should be celebrated.
I run an email based service and while I send most email on my own I have been using the following providers for fall-back (for inbox providers that have very strict policies).
- You can DKIM sign messages yourself if you want (although IIRC they remove the ability to verify your domain with DKIM from the console recently. Hopefully they don't drop this support).
- Pay as you go Pricing means that you don't pay for unused quota.
- Regional service may be more complicated but in theory you should be able to tolerate localized issues. The main downside is that you need to verify in each region which is very annoying.
I now use Postal Server for all my SaaS, which is self-hosted via docker, and has all those those features. The good thing is your maintain the IP reputation yourself and your not paying exorbitant prices when sending large volumes of transactional emails (really it's just the cost of the server you install it on).
just transitioned a client off mailgun due to repeated deliverability issues caused by other mailgun customers on a shared IP. The client doesn't have enough email volume to justify a dedicated IP, so there didn't seem to be anything else we could do while sticking with mailgun.
wouldn't you know it, we transferred them to postmark...
Years ago I loved mandrill. After they got acquired by Mailchimp it became toast. The user experience went downhill and wasn't comparable to products like Postmark at all. I fear Postmark will go down the same road now. Many great products unfortunately become quite bad after acquisitions. I hope ActiveCampaign is a better new owner than most.
I love Postmark and wish them well with this (especially since I'm a customer) but as a Sendgrid customer (also) who experienced things after they were acquired, I'm bracing myself(!) But if I owned a company like this, would I be looking for a nice way to take some money off the table right now? Absolutely. So congratulations!
Great service and deliverability but pricey if you are in the 125k emails / month bracket. I found Amazon SES to be just as good (or good enough) for just 12% of what postmark asks.
Wow, that's a surprise! I love Postmark and I am using it for all my products. This kind of feels wrong though, hopefully it won't go downhill from here.
https://smtp2go.com maybe? Just discovered them the other day but yet to give it a whirl. Just when I was starting to double down on Postmark, they did this. Not blaming them, but we all know this is going to go badly (as a previous Active Campaign user).
Wildbit has sold the family business work-for-other-reasons-than-monetary-renumeration trope for a couple of decades. They've had some great products like Beanstalk and Deploybot and some total follies like Converyor.
Employees had no ownership, products were often sold or put up for sale, and my understand is that compensation was middle of the road at best. It was 37Signals-lite.
They seem like good people, but if you sell your employees and customers on a moralized construction then you do have a moral obligation. The great irony is that there is no good way for something like this to end unless the owners are ready to hand off their business to new leadership on terms that set it up to remain independent. A power of the capital class is that it eats succession for lunch.
I wonder why there was no employee buyout. I suspect it wasn't the most attractive offer from the perspective of the current owners.
> I wonder why there was no employee buyout. I suspect it wasn't the most attractive offer from the perspective of the current owners.
Even assuming that employees wanted to own this business… how do you envision that employees would have funded an offer?
I guess you could propose that they raise outside debt to be serviced by the business (like any other LBO), plus contribute their own funds as a 10-40% equity cushion, but that seems unlikely regardless of how such an offer would be evaluated.
Wanting to work for a business does not necessarily mean someone wants to own it, let alone wants to have their capital at risk for it. (Not specific to this business.)
> Wildbit has sold the family business work-for-other-reasons-than-monetary-renumeration trope for a couple of decades.
I didn't realize this was a pattern with them before now (selling out). I was using Postmark specifically because it was (I thought) a sort of mom and pop type business. There are cheaper and better options, but sending emails was always such a small expense for me that I didn't care.
I don't mean to sound anti-capitalist or anything. I just prefer spending my money on the small guys when possible.
Are you rethinking that perspective in light of how the valuable distinction might have less to do with big vs small capitalist and more something to do with the workers
More of a general approach I apply whenever I can. I prefer supporting smaller lifestyle businesses for market diversity. This may or may not be good for employees specifically, it’s more about having a healthy market (by my own narrow definition I suppose).
Obviously I don’t assume I’m making a difference :) but it’s kind of like voting. If a good small alternative exists and I can afford it, then that’s what I’ll use.
On one hand, it's awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them.
On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Support is fantastic of course, but it was really the little things that made the experience great.
An example, they manually vetted each of their API consumers to ensure one bad apple doesn't spoil the bushel. It's probably not cost effective to gate customers like this, but in the end I don't have to worry about MY email not being delivered by one of the major providers because some other person used Postmark to send a spam campaign. Stuff like this happened all the time with Sendgrid and the only remediation I've ever seen was "upgrade to our $90/mo plan and manage it on your own."
Maybe ActiveCampaign will keep this level of quality and care (it is the same team after all), but I can't help but be a little cautious. I've been burned one too many times by an acquisition of a great product by a not-so-great company.