troygoode

I've been building Ballad – an inbound marketing engine that runs itself. I'm building it for other founders like myself who don't have a marketing person and aren't going to hire one.

https://www.balladlabs.com

My last company (Courier, YC S19) had great inbound but we never were able to scale it. Ballad plans what I should write, drafts in my voice, publishes to my accounts, and handles attribution so it can feed that into what it writes next.

I think we're talking past each other here.

I live in SF and it is not at all clear to me how expanding access to guns would either help or hurt the homelessness challenges in the city.

What I don't understand is how your comment connects to the comment you were replying to.

You want to solve "seeing a lot of, very obviously mentally ill, homeless people" by... giving more people guns?

This is true for options but not RSUs.

Courier | Full-Stack, Data, and Mobile Engineers | U.S. REMOTE / San Francisco Bay Area

• We power notification infrastructure for software companies like LaunchDarkly, UserVoice, and Lattice.

• We pay San Francisco salaries regardless of your location – $150k-$260k for engineering roles

• Serverless node.js/TypeScript backend

• React.js/next.js/TypeScript frontend

• Many languages for various libraries & SDKs we ship

• 35 person team

• Recently raised Series B

https://www.courier.com

https://jobs.lever.co/trycourier

Yes, especially if you have account-level usage that isn't just a rollup of user usage, e.g. API usage that isn't tied to a user, but to an account that multiple users are members of.

This is really clever. There are definitely huge gaps with existing product analytics tools once you veer away from their primary ICP – just ask any B2B PLG company about account-level analytics...

Looks like a great solution for IoT companies!

My startup (courier.com • YC S19) was idea-stage and I did not have meaningful pedigree nor had I previously started a successful startup.

Depending on your use case I'd definitely look at Sendbird (YC W16):

https://sendbird.com/

Great article. All of this complexity is the reason I started Courier (YC S19) [0], which we just launched on HN [1] a few days ago. :-)

We take the approach of essentially offering an abstraction layer that lets you route to one or more channels based on data related to the notification event instead of having to hardcode the integration at the callsite. This has the added benefit of also letting you pull the template abstraction into the same space (so you don't go crazy manually maintaining HTML templates for email, plain text for SMS, BlockKit for Slack, etc. etc.)

FYI we support integrations for nearly all of the channels mentioned here: email (via SMTP, SendGrid, SES, and others), Discord, SMS (via Twilio and others), web push, WhatsApp (via Twilio WhatsApp), Slack, & PagerDuty. And many others...

[0]: https://www.courier.com/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30527757

Ooooh yeah, got it. We have lower per-message prices for customers sending at scale. We have our own hard costs to account for, but we work hard to make sure Courier can fit into most teams' budgets.

I was surprised nobody else pointed this out! No, no pivot. Two main reasons:

1. It took a lot of time to build something robust enough that teams were willing to swap out their critical infrastructure for. There is a big different between your marketing automation system experiencing an issue vs. the system that sends out 2FA/magic link messages.

2. I really wanted to iterate on our API until it felt "HN worthy." That also took time. (For reference, Stripe did their HN launch a couple years post-YC for the same reason.)

Thanks Chris! Hope things are going well at Loops!

Customer.io is more focused on marketing automation (which your campaign use case sounds like) whereas we're focused on transactional notifications.

Next quarter we'll have some relevant new releases though, so stay tuned. :-)

https://updates.courier.com/board

10s of the thousands in the same month would indeed move you into our paid plan. If this was more like <10k per month for many months, you'd still be able to do that on our free plan.

I'd love to hear how it goes for you! troy@courier.com

George & the OneSignal team are great. We integrate with OneSignal (both their mobile push and email services). We integrate with more channels than using OneSignal directly (say you wanted to integrate with Slack or WhatsApp) and offer things like dynamic routing between channels & providers that OneSignal doesn't.

(And yes, YC definitely does bet on competitive companies in the same space!)

FWIW we find that most software teams end up significantly rebuilding/refactoring their notification infra every 2-3 years, so it isn't completely a one-time implementation. Not to mention ongoing maintenance, supporting the product/design/marketing teams' change requests, etc.

We do offer lower per-message prices for high-volume customers and are even able to help customers with cost optimization in certain scenarios, e.g. dynamically routing SMS messages to the lowest cost provider depending on the recipient's region (e.g. MessageBird is 15% cheaper than Twilio in Germany).

Oh hey, I know you! Congrats on your new role John!

Great to hear from you Jacinda! I hope you and Nick are doing well!

> ambiguous to me as to whether I would need to pay the fees

Sorry, forgot to answer this (but I answered in another comment): you "bring your own" providers so you'd indeed need to pay fees to that provider when applicable.

Thanks Eric – we're big Netlify fans, too!

Are there any providers we don't have that would be helpful? We're always adding more.

> Where is the line between something like MailChimp and Courier?

Mailchimp has two services: a marketing tool for e.g. newsletters and a transaction email service (previously called Mandrill). Most customers use Courier alongside marketing tools like Mailchimp's newsletter tools - we're more for your active users, not marketing to potential users.

We do integration with Mandrill / Mailchimp Transactional to add our orchestration, preference management, routing, templating, etc. tools so that you don't have to build those yourself on top of their pipes.

Hey I really appreciate it! I just saw the news about your Series A this morning btw – congratulations!

Appreciate it! In the future if you find your engineering team is spending a lot of time building & maintaining this kind of infrastructure keep us in mind.

Totally hear you! We offer substantial volume discounts for high-volume senders to make sure we can fit within most teams' budgets. Do you mind if I ask how many messages you're typically sending?

No, since we use your existing providers ("bring your own") you'd still have to pay for services that you plug in – just like Segment & analytics tools.

Yup! We support in-app notifications via real-time "toast" as well as an inbox where your users can see the last 20 (or more) notifications, mark them as read/unread, etc.

Demo example: https://reactinappnotification.com/ Docs: https://www.courier.com/docs/guides/providers/push/courier-p...