I wasnt the owner of the business but I worked for an "email infrastructure" company (think Sendgrid but not US based). When amazon launched its SES offer, things started to get pretty grim.
- Their infrastructure was better (stable)
- Their price was much, much lower (pricing)
- They are Amazon and they're global. (company image & trustworthiness)
Going to meetups and developer conferences people would always ask "why not use SES haha it's a no brainer"
Pricing yourself in between Mailchimp and SES was a good fight and ultimately it did help convert a lot of "Mailchimp" affectionados.
Luckily getting emails delivered in the inbox of your customers is a bit like dark-magic - there are a lot of factors that a regular joe wouldn't consider, and because email marketing is still one of the best channels with the highest ROI ever - companies really care about setting up their email campaigns with companies that know all of the tricks and rules to optimize campaigns and ensure maximum open and ctr rates.
Another thing: Data protection laws in US and EU are different, the company had the advantage of having datacenters exclusively for EU customers (where more rigid rules were applied) and then all the others...
The business focused on creating frictionless experience with stellar customer support (24/7) and also worked a lot on its dev-first marketing approach (im talking about developer experience, plugins, wrappers, integrations etc).
One of the advantages of owning your own infrastructure and whole stack is that you can build and configure your product to fit every client's need. Something that Amazon has never managed to deliver out of the box - especially because email is a tool used by developers and marketers at the same time. It's really hard to make marketers happy!
The business is still around today, I learned a lot but I ultimately moved on because like I told my friends "email isn't sexy"
Email is painful, email is great.
This is a great example of excellent product strategy, these are all points AWS are unlikely to compete on. Great to hear that they’re still in business
- Their infrastructure was better (stable)
- Their price was much, much lower (pricing)
- They are Amazon and they're global. (company image & trustworthiness)
Going to meetups and developer conferences people would always ask "why not use SES haha it's a no brainer" Pricing yourself in between Mailchimp and SES was a good fight and ultimately it did help convert a lot of "Mailchimp" affectionados.
Luckily getting emails delivered in the inbox of your customers is a bit like dark-magic - there are a lot of factors that a regular joe wouldn't consider, and because email marketing is still one of the best channels with the highest ROI ever - companies really care about setting up their email campaigns with companies that know all of the tricks and rules to optimize campaigns and ensure maximum open and ctr rates. Another thing: Data protection laws in US and EU are different, the company had the advantage of having datacenters exclusively for EU customers (where more rigid rules were applied) and then all the others...
The business focused on creating frictionless experience with stellar customer support (24/7) and also worked a lot on its dev-first marketing approach (im talking about developer experience, plugins, wrappers, integrations etc). One of the advantages of owning your own infrastructure and whole stack is that you can build and configure your product to fit every client's need. Something that Amazon has never managed to deliver out of the box - especially because email is a tool used by developers and marketers at the same time. It's really hard to make marketers happy!
The business is still around today, I learned a lot but I ultimately moved on because like I told my friends "email isn't sexy" Email is painful, email is great.