Can you tell us a little bit about your experience and the work you do?
My name is Sahil Parikh, and I am a husband, father, and the founder of Brightpod — a web-based project management and time tracking software for digital marketing teams. I am also the author of a book called The SaaS Edge, and an avid golfer (a round every Saturday is like meditation).
After graduating from UNC Chapel Hill I decided to move back home (Mumbai, India) and start a software business in 2005. Initially, we did web design and development projects. Once I realized that the future of software is SaaS, I pivoted the business to focus solely on SaaS and building web products.
We launched Brightpod in 2013. Most marketing agencies use a general purpose collaboration tool. Clients are spending more and more money on digital marketing. Agencies have more work that they can handle. This is where Brightpod comes in. We want to help marketing agencies grow their business by making it easy to plan, organize, and track all their digital marketing projects and communication in one place.
How are you using Postmark with Brightpod today?
We use Postmark for all transactional emails in Brightpod. New user registration emails, task assigned notifications, and daily digest summary emails are some examples of the type of emails we send out using Postmark.
Tracking email delivery and knowing if an email has bounced was always an issue before Postmark. Postmark helps us solve both these issues along with making sure our emails have a good reputation and don’t land in our users’ SPAM folders.
We also use Postmark’s inbound processing when our customers reply to task comment emails that are sent from Brightpod. Postmark nicely parses the email (we did't need to build a parser!) and sends us the JSON via a web hook. This JSON is then parsed in our app and stored as a reply to the task comment.
We also use templates in Postmark which makes it easy for us to modify design without having to dive into our codebase / database. Prior to using Postmark, we stored the emails in HTML format in the database. Eeek!
If you could add one feature to Postmark, what would it be?
We would love to get a daily summary of all email addresses that bounced so we can be proactive about solving customer issues rather than have them email us about why they haven’t received emails from the system in a few days.
If you could give fellow developers one piece of advice about how to implement and manage their transactional email, what would it be?
Do not build a custom transactional email service or spin out a mail server. As a developer, you should focus on designing your software rather than digging around mail logs. In our earlier product we ran a sendmail server and we would spend a few hours troubleshooting mail issues every week. These hours could have easily been used for something more productive!