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chrisfrantz

725 karma · joined April 21, 2017

building loops.so (YC W22)

say hey here: chris@loops.so

or here: twitter.com/frantzfries

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chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Sure, what we've found is that many companies (including our own) publish a changelog, product update or newsletter at a monthly/weekly cadence. We can help solve for that.

There are also quite a few strictly newsletters using us as well which we're happy to support! We own workspaces.xyz and publish that as well via Loops.

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Thank you!
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
We do a lot to prevent it, part of the reason we waited to launch. There are also hard caps with the free plan.
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Thanks! We're very focused on ease of use so glad it worked out :)
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
There’s a surprising amount of classifying happening at the content level. If you have a clean ip but then send content that raises flags (includes hot words, adult content, etc) then you’re going to be categorized differently in the inbox regardless.

Even without the borderline content, if it seems promotional, it may end up in promotions regardless.

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Yeah I noticed they moved to a “hub” model which I think encourages that. Not a bad thing imo, companies were already treating it this way and they just formalized it. Fwiw, this was our first product hunt post for our product.
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Sure! Generally, we don’t think email copy belongs in your code base.

You can upload MJML if you’d really like to, along with designing in Figma via an integration, but really your best bet is our editor.

If we can save a few engineering hours just by having the product person that needs to update the emails with new copy actually update the copy instead of pinging engineering, we think we’ve improved things.

If a competitor ends up building a GUI, glad to see they agree too :)

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
We actually have a transactional API (https://loops.so/docs/transactional/guide#sending-your-first...) so similar in that way.

Beyond that, our goal is to offer the single platform for email for your SaaS. So we’re focused on bringing together product, marketing and engineering in a single, hopefully cohesive and delightful, experience.

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Thanks!
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Nope, hit “view pricing tiers” on the pricing page for a full list of pricing up to 100k contacts.

It needs to not be hidden behind a button, that’s on the list.

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
We’ve moved companies off of Braze already, but we still need to add multi-channel support. We’ll likely add it in the future unless customer needs materially change.
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Oh nice! Thanks, yep there’s lots to improve. If you haven’t already, drop us a line in slack or live chat and we’re happy to log feedback then we’ll ping you when it makes its way into the app.
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Hah yeah that too! Free, no credit card required.
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
I would like to! It’s probably a bit further down the line for us.

You can do a lot to improved deliverability once you approach it at a platform level. We have access to various datapoints at scale that we can use to help individual users improve their deliverability vs working directly with the sending infra. Beyond that, we offer a platform that helps reduce pain and friction that might exist with more barebones, infrastructure focused services.

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Thanks! Yep, we often replace CIO for early and mid-stage teams.

Pricing, performance and UX are the primary drivers for switching that we have seen so far.

We were on Slate previously and actually rewrote our editor to support our switch to Lexical. It’s very early but it’s a cool platform. Wish they had a community outside Discord but that’s more personal preference.

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Oof don’t love that! I’ll test with FF later today.
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Totally fair, we just launched a week ago (and it went well) so we wanted to keep it up till the end of the month.

Will certainly place it in the footer and switch off the upvote portion in the future.

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Depends on use case and which tools you’re using today but we try to make gains everywhere we can.

In pricing, we try to simplify by ditching the tables and anchoring around one metric.

For engineers, our documentation is decent and updated regularly. We try to have a performant API, support the integrations you’re most likely to use and include a versioning system with our transactional email.

For marketing, we built our editor around a text-based interface and make it highly customizable. We also take the pain out of having to test across multiple platforms.

For product teams, we offer templates that cater to specific touchpoints in the SaaS lifecycle.

Across all of that we offer unlimited team seats so you can actually have your entire team onboard and technical support for when things don’t work as expected or you have questions.

We create slack connect channels with any team that needs one (we have almost 1,000) and try to provide fast, technical support.

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
I would really like to eventually open source core parts of Loops.

I think parts of the editor makes sense, including the MJML. We spent an entire weekend extending MJML for Superhuman and it would be cool to release that work some way.

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies
Sorry about that. This link should work and happy to answer any questions here. https://loops.so/pricing
chrisfrantz··on Infisical – open-source HashiCorp Vault alternative
hey thanks, loops is going well!
chrisfrantz··on Infisical – open-source HashiCorp Vault alternative
Congrats to the Infisical team, it's been cool getting to watch them grow from the start.

What are some of the biggest challenges you've run into so far?

chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Highlight.io (YC W23) – Open-source, full stack web app monitoring
Highlight has been on my todo list forever. Great to see your launch, congrats!
chrisfrantz··on Claude 2
Check out this wikipedia page and the colors it chose :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:ChartColors
chrisfrantz··on Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts
Yeah, ironically the problem here isn't a lazy engineer, it's the management or poor systems.
chrisfrantz··on GPT-4
System message is available today (and has been) in the playground under the chat setting.
chrisfrantz··on GitHub staff are required to use Teams by Sep 1, 2023
Teams has never worked reliably for me when sent a link from orgs that use Teams. Half the time we end up in my Zoom call and the people on the call always gripe about having to use Teams for the first few minutes.
chrisfrantz··on Microsoft announces new Bing and Edge browser powered by upgraded ChatGPT AI
This is what I think will happen but not sure what that will look like. I think it gets much easier if it can detect a site is on Shopify and use the unified Shopify api for purchases. Interesting new world.
chrisfrantz··on Launch HN: Needl (YC S22) – Simple search across all your apps
Hey Max! Great seeing you launch here, congrats :)
chrisfrantz··on Ask HN: What are you looking forward to reading in 2023?
Loved Project Hail Mary. Read that just prior! Any other suggestions?
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