In general, if you find yourself thinking that, consider that you may not be the target customer.
Many companies which had a need for customer.io previously a) hired out very expensive people to build it to them (I have a couple of five figure invoices attributed directly to it not existing as an off-the-rack option last year) and b) can trivially go through several hundred bucks just having a single meeting on what to say in the emails.
You can, of course, code it for yourself out of duct tape and bailing wire, and that will pretty much work if you never need the non-technical marketing team to touch it.
If customer.io succeeds , how much time will it take for other people to duplicate it and bring pricing down ?
If customer.io provide top notch copywriting with the automated emailing, then they may have something here.
Even higher pricing only based on conversion makes much more sense and i would pay for it.
If that were to happen, then it's great as all the business customers win.
But I think you are underestimating how much effort it is to build something which businesses want and for them, ROC is more important then what a particular software/service costs. A business will happily pay a million dollar for an extremely simple software if that software can either save them 2 million dollar OR increase their revenue by 2 million dollars.
Customer acquisition is a significant portion of starting a business. You have to make a new market and/or get customers from your competitor. If your competitor is charging more money for their product, they can afford to spend more on advertising to let people know they exist.
I don't have much karma on HN yet, but I don't see any reason for down voting my comment. Can someone explain to me why my comment is considered "not useful" or stupid ? am I doing something wrong by expressing my opinion in a genuine way I can ?
I could see your first comment getting downvoted, since it was short, negative, and incorrect.
Your next comment (and this one), no. You're absolutely right that you shouldn't have been downvoted. You're still arguing against a whole lot of existence disproof, but you make your point well and offer some constructive commentary and alternative ideas.
Stick around. You're providing more value here than whoever it was that went off on you with the downvote button.
