Connecting the dots

When you look forward to 'what next' you also inevitably start to look back at your journey so far, the good and the bad. As Steve Jobs once said “you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

When I wrote this post back in September 2019 right before the world went into meltdown (covid, war, recession, the UK government being crap), we were a service-based business, that said, we had already started to evolve and move into software; our flagship offering was email campaign management, and we’d built this custom platform which was half ecommerce platform (for customers to buy services) and half project management tool (for my team to work together). It was ace, Nick (our lead dev) did an awesome job and it served us for a good 2+ years between 2019 and 2021.

When covid hit, we all went home from the office with our iMacs, and I had some headspace to think (or rethink).

To be honest with you, I felt we’d done okay, we’d climbed to the top of the Mailchimp experts directory and had worked with some huge brands, but we hadn’t set the world on fire. I kinda felt we’d hit a glass ceiling and I wasn’t sure what we should do next. The answer, of course, was staring me in the face. Software.

For years (I mean the best part of a decade), we’d toyed with the idea of building our own email marketing platform, but I resisted. Not cos of complacency or procrastination, but cos I just didn’t want to build an also-ran product. There are a million ‘we’re cheaper than Mailchimp’ tools out there, and I didn’t want to build one of those. If we’re gonna do it, we need to have a unique angle.

I began to scribble ideas down, starting by listing all of the problems I knew existed in the platforms I was most familiar with. After 15+ years in the email marketing space, I knew the frustrations, I kinda knew what customers wanted, and I also kinda knew what we could do differently in order to fix these problems.

Turns out, there are a LOT of things that could be improved upon, which I consensed down into 3 main areas:

1. Data is hard to manage in the platform

In most email platforms, contact data is displayed as an HTML table, it’s not editable, you can't play with it. To do anything with your data, you need to export it, import it somewhere else (like MS Excel or Google Sheets), find, sort, filter, merge, edit, and then import it back into your chosen email platform after.

2. Subscribers have no control over their data

The next thing I found in most platforms, is that the ‘update preferences’ section is fairly limited. Your subscribers trust you with their data (yes it’s their data not yours), so I believe they should have access and control over what you hold and how it's used.

3. Customer support is limited

I got frustrated by the lack of team training and strategic support on offer across the main platforms. People don’t want to be greeted with a chatbot or be sent a link to a support article, they want a real human to give them advice on the how (strategy) not just the what (features).

Over the past 18 months, we’ve been building an email marketing platform aimed at fixing some of these issues, and a LOT more too.

We’re launching in private release in Q1 23, and across 2023 we will be adding tonnes of cool features and listening to our customer base to build the best platform on planet earth, if not the known universe, so that when we come out of private release in 2024 we will be primed for world domination.

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https://mailninja.co

Thanks, Doug, Dec 22