Open-source is good for solo and small projects, but there are commercial solutions with continuous support, etc. and other features (e.g. SMS) like Mailosaur too
Somewhat related anecdote. Whilst we didn't get cut off, we found a huge drop-off in time to receive, and the quality of, support from our live chat/support messaging provider.
Having been a customer since our launch [1], and very early after theirs, it has been really sad and frustrating to see that friendly distrupter energy zap out of the service.
I get why businesses go through that changes like this during growth, but it feels like all the things to let slide, your persona is not one of them!
[1] https://mailosaur.com (somewhat related to the thread we let you test SMS messages)
I co-founded a business, specifically around email testing, largely for the reason you mentioned. When developing we often skipped things like plain text, and usually only did a cursory glance over other aspects, very much less did we automate anything. It came back to bite us so many times (presumably countless times that we weren't alerted too also).
Obviously I'm entirely biased, but to your point on business-minds pushing for edge I'm even more convinced that manual testing alone is never going to cut it going forward.
Shameless plug at the bottom as it's rare that email testing gets limelight on HN :) https://mailosaur.com
We added both the SMTP option and wildcard email address suffix for this reason -
Some people want to use SMTP to catch all, others prefer specific email addresses (e.g. One per test run)
Has anyone here gathered a bunch of resources similar to this, especially around early-days bootstrap Marketing for SaaS?
We created our product as a group with engineering backgrounds and now trying to switch some to full on Marketing mode and trying to grab anything I can get my hands on.
You should checkout http://saasemailmarketing.net/ - It's nicely hyper focused on SAAS+Email which I found nice as there's so much out there that's consumer focused and frustratingly hard to apply my own projects.
I completely agree. One of the main things I like about HN's simplistic style, is that within a few seconds I can scan a dozen or so entries and filter out what I'm going to look through.
On HackerNews main page, I can see the top 24 links without scrolling. On MakerNews I see 8.
The drawings on the side are nice, but it's the first thing I see when coming on the page. I need to self consciously blind the side of the page to focus on the content.
- Color. Make it dark. Light blue on a white background is very hard to read.
- Font size: Too big. Look at HN.
Layout:
- Reduce the padding in between entries. HN is easy to scan because everything is neatly packed. You only need to scroll a little to see the rest.
- The header is too big. Kept it simple with a little logo. The focus here is the content, not branding. The tweet button should go in the bottom of the page.
- The footer is nice, but a bit too big.
- The subscription form is in the way of the "More News" link. Also, a lot of people in your target market refrain from giving their name along with their email.
[0] https://mailosaur.com