Hacker News Reader

Comment by nik736 | Hacker News Reader

Your competitors have been acquired but you are funded by YC… so there is a high chance this will happen to you as well.

There isn’t much innovation happening since email is stable. I don’t want to design my emails in React, but I am probably not the target group since I am still running my own mail servers.

Edit: What I meant by "email is stable" is basically the way email is being sent and not email itself and the experience around it.

View on HN

That's a valid point.

The web is also pretty stable, but when you look at the past 10-15 years, there's been so much evolution around it.

Doing things like rounded borders or dark mode is still very difficult, especially when you take into consideration all the different email clients like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Superhuman, and HEY.

The web evolved, and now we don't hear too many complaints about having to design your website to look the same across all browsers as before. Unfortunately with email, this is still an open problem.

The web is not stable at all. Everything about it except TCP/IP change rapidly.

Emails are still sent, received, and rendered similarly to the way they were 5-10 years ago.

Having worked with a few of them, currently with SendGrid I think the market is ripe for disruption. It’s a terrible, terrible, experience to work with these systems when you need e-mail visibility to play into a larger setup. We’re doing simple stuff, like giving our sales personal an information stream to track that links into their HubSpot and a few other systems, and it’s frankly so bad that one of our developers wrote as much of the business logic as was possible outside of SendGrid. I’m sure it works well for the IT services part of our operations, but for development and automation purposes when you need to put some gaffatape on all those 300 systems that your business bought. Then it’s not very good.

As far as being YC funded, well, that’s the purpose of HN isn’t it? I’m not personally convinced that you can’t maintain a good product after you getting acquired. I haven’t used these services enough to say, but maybe they fit into the market of their time, and has then failed to innovate or keep “great” in the decades that followed? If you ask our IT operations they will tell you that SendGrid is great.

Out of curiosity, if you are spending a lot of effort to track the data in HubSpot, why not try to send emails directly in HubSpot?

Because that would make sense.

Or the slightly longer version of how HubSpot is sort of our CRM system but also a front end for our on-prem Sharepoint and our Microsoft CRM and a couple of other things. It can send some emails, but not all emails, and when it does send emails someone wants them tracked not just by HubSpot but also by SendGrid because that’s how we track mails in parts of the business. Why do we have both HubSpot and Microsoft CRM you ask, well you are, one department really likes one of them and another department really likes the other.

Thanks for the insightful reply! :D

> There isn’t much innovation happening since email is stable

There are probably more Show HN launches involving email than any other product category.

I disagree. Those companies were all made long after email was stable, but having used SendGrid I can say it's definitely not the best DX, and it is indeed tailored to marketing.

I absolutely want to design my emails in React.

I loath building email templates. It brings me back to the old days of terrible HTML tables.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com