I think having the shared knowledge out there in blog posts as well as free templates has worked well as a channel. A lot of our referrals come from these blog posts and GitHub. Many developers will read the articles, try the free templates, and have faith that buying the more “polished” pack of templates are worth it. If they’d rather not spend the money or don’t have a budget they can invest a bit of time in looking at the open source workflow and figuring out how to make the templates themselves.
What has the project taught you about email development? Anything surprising or particularly challenging that stands out?
Over the years I’ve learned that 99.99% of developers do not like dealing with email. Cross client support. Inlining CSS. Using tables. Not something a typical developer has desire to deal with.
Of course all companies, apps, services send emails. So at some point someone has to set them up. Usually that someone wants to get in and out as quickly as possible. Sure there are companies that see the full potential and ROI of email and invest in a team. But most teams, especially early on, have a long list of other priorities and for email they want a quick solution that works.
So they’re not going to set up their own email infrastructure. They’re going to use an easy to use plug and play API solution like Postmark. Similarly they don’t want to spend weeks trying to learn how each email client renders HTML, what works and what doesn’t work.
That’s where HTML Email comes in, 10 high quality email templates that will get you up and running very quickly. Most customers say they’ll have their email templates live in less that 24 hours. It saves their developers days or weeks of pain staking agony trying to get their emails working and tested across the major email clients.
For the rest of the interview, check out the blog post.
