I've taken two different approaches in the past.
I've used Intercom, which makes sending these types of emails super easy. It works really well for that. The downside is that it can become quite costly. I think they price based on number of users, so it really depends on how valuable each user is for you. If you've got a ton of non-paying users, then it might not be for you. On the other hand, if you're selling $99/mo SaaS subscriptions then it will be worth the money.
The other approach I've taken is adding the marketing emails as part of my Rails app and use the existing code to send emails. It's cheap, but it does require some coding anytime you want to send an email. I'm probably sending less email then I should as a result of this.
When writing your own script you also want to be really careful not to mess it up. It's easy to accidentally send the same email multiple times, etc. I speak from experience 😅
Haha great stories on the alpaca and llama. I do indeed still see the old photo. I'll have a look what happened to the other one.
Regarding GAN, I remember Sarv was working on GAN a few years ago. I don't know him very well, but met him at a Stripe talk a few years ago. I suggest reaching out to him.
Welcome! 👋
Great idea to have some AMAs on WIP. Actually, @rpish and I will be hosting a live audio chat on Telegram soon. Probably this Friday. Would love for you to join us if you got a chance. We'll announce the details shortly. The idea is to just have a chat amongst makers, but I can see us doing some AMAs in the future too.
To answer your questions:
How is your personal life affected by your work?
For me they are highly intertwined. I don't have a clear boundary between personal life and work. Many of my work peers are also friends and vice versa.
Would you suggest to indie make while staying anonymous? (I like the @ajlkn style)
I think doing things anonymously will make it harder to connect with people. Talking to a pseudonym or abstract avatar just isn't the same. But I guess depending on your personal situation it could be worth the trade-off.
P.S.
Is that an alpaca, llama, or something else? What's the story behind it? 👀
I just saw the audio chat announcement, I'm at work at that hour but I'll try to join the audio for at least some minutes.
Thanks for the answers. I read this last year tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-t… and I've been wondering what is the point where mixed work and personal life can go wrong. I guess, in the future, there'll be some products to solve that issue by creating online personas, I have seen some like rosebud.ai/ and pinscreen.com/facereplacement/. The thought of building something like that has crossed my mind a couple of times (because it's still early for that), but the learning curve is really high, for the moment I'm learning about GAN's just for fun. Do you know some makers working with computer vision tech? It is an interesting space.
I tried to edit the photo today. It has not changed yet, I'm not sure if it's going to change, maybe there is some approval to be done 😅. The original image was a Peruvian alpaca (the one with cold green background colors), the new one is an Argentinian llama (the one that has warmer colors). Well, I did a sort of short nomading mvp back in 2019 (2 months between Cusco Peru and Salta Argentina).
The alpaca: One day I was walking down the street in Cusco city and then somehow and end up in the middle of Sacsayhuamán ruins, I was a bit tired so I chill out with the alpacas (because they looked so relaxed (aspirational grade level relaxed)) for a couple of hours just contemplating life, the one in the photo is called Juan Pedro.
The llama: I was on the road to Cafayate (Argentina) but the bus took some stops. One of them was at some winery place and after some wine tasting I saw llamas outside and I was a bit surprised, anyways I took some food for llamas and went to know them, I did not find out their names tho.
Haha great stories on the alpaca and llama. I do indeed still see the old photo. I'll have a look what happened to the other one.
Regarding GAN, I remember Sarv was working on GAN a few years ago. I don't know him very well, but met him at a Stripe talk a few years ago. I suggest reaching out to him.
Hey Karl. Welcome to WIP!
I think one of the common mistakes makers make is to focus on their ideas rather than the problem they are trying to solve. If you've found a real problem, you can take different stabs at solving it. And as you do this, you learn more and more about the problem space and your solutions are more likely to succeed. The reverse doesn't really work. You can't start with a product, and then try to apply it to different problems until you find one that matches.
So I'd rephrase your question to "which problem should I solve?" – and to answer that I'd look at 1) how real is the problem (are people already spending money trying to solve it?), and 2) how passionate and knowledgable are you about this problem?
Gina is hella cute btw! 😍
100% agree with Florian. Focus on solving a need.
Pick a problem that you think is 1) a real problem people are willing to spend money on to solve, 2) you believe you can create a better solution for than what's out there today, and 3) make sure it's something where you can actually reach your target customer.
Here's what I found so far myself:
Advanced users might still prefer the good old password-based login. As it lets them use a password manager and log in with just a few clicks. Without needing to switch to their email inbox and waiting for an email to arrive.
In some cases people might open the magic link in the wrong browser session. For example some email apps on iOS open links in their in-app browser. But that logs the user in, in that specific in-app browser. Not the regular browser. And if you use one-off magic links that immediately expire after use, then "open this page in the main browser" functionality won't do the user any good. I think this is typically solved by not immediately expiring the link.
A similar problem is with email scanning software. They might pre-fetch the link and thereby expiring it. The solution here is to have the link go to to a page which then uses Javascript or meta-refresh to redirect to the page that does the expiring.
From a security perspective you probably do want to expire the link at some point. You don't want it to sit around in an email inbox or browser history and still work a long time after.