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mrmch

413 karma · joined June 29, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mrmch; my proof: https://keybase.io/mrmch/sigs/9-oHATmYJvdf2GBn6i9zz3dn24TC43MBwBDrWN6SL7Q ]

cofounder of sendwithus.com

avid rock climber and hacker

twitter.com/mrmch github.com/mrmch

submissionscomments
mrmch··on Guide to Sending Email Like a Startup
Thanks joeyspn! Means a lot to the team that their work is appreciated.

You're absolutely correct about our hacker plan; up to 1,000 unique email recipients per month (it resets each month).

mrmch··on Guide to Sending Email Like a Startup
Valid feedback pekk. One of the reasons we consulted with people who have run growth at a number of companies is because they could give the inside story; company X did Y because their metrics told them to.

That said, a huge caveat is that this all depends on your audience and what they're going to respond to.

I would posit that startups are more apt (than a larger company) to experiment with marketing, which is valuable.

mrmch··on Guide to Sending Email Like a Startup
Really appreciate your contribution Ivan, definitely learned a LOT about referrals from you.
mrmch··on Guide to Sending Email Like a Startup
Thanks -- we've tried to ensure there's basic information and more involved tips for experienced email folks. The guide also highlights some of the trends we've seen in the last year.
mrmch··on Guide to Sending Email Like a Startup
Excited to share this -- we just completed the guide (5 chapters in all).

Includes contributions from Ivan Kirigin (YesGraph), Noah Kagan (AppSumo), and more.

No matter how much you may/may not like receiving email, there are a lot of people out there who do. This guide should help you reach them, without annoying the others.

mrmch··on How Sendwithus Sent Their First Billion Emails
Gives a very fair view of the changes to our technical stack; I would add that Iron.IO really provides an amazing queue and worker service.

Eventually it wasn't the perfect solution for Sendwithus, but their offering is very compelling and let us focus on the core product. Their support and technical team is also rock solid.

mrmch··on BC Startups: The Government Is Not Your Friend
It's not a strict calculation of "how much is development time". For things like IRAP, the time spent has to be cataloged against a specific R&D project you've received the grant for. For SR&ED, you will be laughed at for claiming 100% of an engineers time.

There's a chasm between SR&ED being "easy" with less than 5 people and when you have enough "operations people" to make this "easy again"; I would bet that most companies don't have the operations resources until they are well over 50 people. At 50+ people, you're past the point where these grants can have the most impact.

mrmch··on BC Startups: The Government Is Not Your Friend
Great article by Ben -- see many comments that SR&ED isn't "that bad". The first time, it might not be. As you scale and add more engineers, the risk of audit starts to outweigh any benefit.
mrmch··on The Toddler at Y Combinator
Startups are challenging, but that's definitely an added challenge Julia. I wish I had known about the housing challenges during yc, maybe we could have helped somehow :(

Not to distract from this story, I've been impressed with my experience donating on Zidisha -- repayment has been incredibly quick, and it's rewarding to reinvest funds.

mrmch··on Show HN: ReelSurvey – Acquire customer insights from exiting visitors
The most basic level of exit survey (page is closing, pop up an alert) can be obnoxious, so tech to couple exit intent with lead scoring could be really cool (and less obnoxious).
mrmch··on GrowSumo (YC S15) Helps Businesses Grow Sales Through Partner Programs
Congrats on the launch ya'll! We're in the process of implementing GrowSumo right now :)
mrmch··on Transitioning Shyp couriers to W2 employees
Awesome, props to Kevin and the Shyp team for making this happen.
mrmch··on What do you do after an investor says yes?
One of the best parts of this, illustrated by the use of red squares, is that "sit and do nothing" isn't part of fundraising.

Common YC advice for fundraising is "optimize for speed" (with valuation, amount, brand names, etc, coming second). Don't get trapped in long diligence cycles, waiting for a lead, or other road blocks.

mrmch··on SlideMail (YC W15) Is an Intelligent Email App for the Rest of Us
Definitely looks like a killer feature of recommending emails to archive as soon as you open the app.

When you're looking for Android beta testers let me know :)

mrmch··on A not-so-obvious reason to apply to YC
Very cool of Yvonne to share about her pivot, not many founders (yc or not) are open about that.

The core message is so true. YC partners (and the founder community) is incredibly genuine, very eager to help out. This scales past being a "small company" as well -- the Collisons are some of the most approachable founders ever.

mrmch··on How to Send Email Like a Startup
Thanks veb! We're still adding to the guide so it'll be even more useful soon.
mrmch··on How to Send Email Like a Startup
Hangouts can still work for this, you can do a screenshare in a video hangout. Requires everyone to have google accounts though (personal or business).

There are also numerous great conference/screen share tools out there, like speek.com

mrmch··on How to Send Email Like a Startup
This is amazing, we never considered making the guide open source/community driven. Many of our other resources already are.

We'll fork your markdown version this weekend and make the guide we host github powered.

mrmch··on How to Send Email Like a Startup
Thanks! We get many questions around this topic, and it made sense to us that you track your metrics against a funnel (AARRR usually) you can map your emails to that as well.
mrmch··on Instacart Is Raising North of $100M at a $2B Valuation
Woah, as an instacart-lover and yc alum, big props to Apoorva and team. Joining the rare group of $1B+ YC companies!
mrmch··on Welcome Michael, Jon, and Ilya
Jon has been a strong advisor on key issues, psyched to have him as a full time partner!
mrmch··on Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M
Congrats to Teespring, this is huge :) Awesome to see a customer growing like this.
mrmch··on Poynt – Smart payment terminal
Should definitely highlight (at least to the HN crowd) that this is an Android device and you're exposing some APIs that can be built on. This is really cool.
mrmch··on Show HN: Airbnb to Craigslist (chrome extension)
Some screenshots on how it works would be swell
mrmch··on Firebase is Joining Google
Woot, congrats James and team. Google will make a good home :)
mrmch··on FormatJS – Internationalize your web apps on the client and server
Super shameless plug, but easy internationalization for email is something we've added to Sendwithus. We're working with multiple partners on it (sample at https://www.sendwithus.com/translations), but are still looking for more beta users of the feature.
mrmch··on Python REPL with syntax highlighting, autocomplete and multiline editing
This is freaking awesome. Vi-mode is huge.
mrmch··on Sendwithus (YC W14) Announces $2.3M to Humanize Transactional Email
Hello fellow BC startup! I've brought your tips up with the team, thanks for your feedback!

We use Jinja templates behind the scene, which doesn't autoescape by default -- so you're free to inject HTML through a variable. You can manually escape template variables with {{ my_var|e }}.

mrmch··on Sendwithus (YC W14) Announces $2.3M to Humanize Transactional Email
Exactly this; transactional or product based emails are baked into every web service or mobile app you use today. People depend on them for information they want, but the content shouldn't be owned by a developer. That's our goal :)
mrmch··on Sendwithus (YC W14) Announces $2.3M to Humanize Transactional Email
Cofounder of Sendwithus -- I just wanted to give an additional shout out to some of the amazing angel investors included in this round. Full details on AngelList (https://angel.co/sendwithus).

I think it shows how funding in the valley has changed when a company founded and based in a tiny Canadian city (Victoria, BC) can grow like this.

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