Why I’m getting out of “retirement” to help companies improve their emails deliverability.

Since selling my company last year and entering "retirement”, I've had the time to explore numerous interesting ideas. I've had the opportunity to travel the world and engage in brainstorming sessions with incredible entrepreneurs and friends.

The Fire Starter ?? - Google & Apple making some major changes to email deliverability

Last May, something at Google I/O caught my attention and took me down the rabbit hole that led to my new venture: major email clients like Google and Apple are adopting new email protocols that would allow for a verified checkmark in the inbox, significantly improving deliverability and allowing you to display your logo in the inbox. Similar to Twitter, Instagram, and now, even Strava Verified Profiles (how cool to be a verified athlete!).

Here’s what the early data is looking like:

• Email DNS Configuration: Open Rates: up 27% to 200%

• Logo in the Inbox: Open rates Up 21% to 39%
• Increase in purchase: 34%

(source: Entrust, Case Studies, Redsift)

Hint: The problem with getting verified checkmark compliance is that you need to be 100% compliant on DNS email protocols

The Pain ?? - What are these damn DNS records?

My previous company CareerUp had over 50% of its revenue generated from email. As the CTO and Co-Founder, I was responsible for managing the email infrastructure.

When we started, I kinda understood the significance of optimizing your DNS to improve deliverability. However, as a self-taught developer, I initially had no knowledge about DNS. Have you ever come across terms like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, TXT, and TTL? It was complete gibberish.

We would use dozens of domains/tools to send out our different campaigns and ensure our deliverability was stable and had redundancy. We had to set up and monitor each DNS record one by one, everyday and make sure to get that weird code exactly right.

There was no easy and comprehensible tool to help you with all of this. I just thought that's how the world worked and went back to building our product.

The Plan ???- Let’s make email deliverability easy for non-technical people

Everyone is spending a ton of time and money optimizing their email content but is skipping the basics of optimizing email infrastructure for deliverability. Let's make that easy.

We're launching Palisade to help companies land more emails in the inbox and not in spam. We will create software that makes it easy for non-technical people to set up and monitor best practices in email deliverability.

We found out, talking to dozens of companies, that email deliverability and email DNS configuration fall into a weird no man's land between the marketing and tech departments.

Our roadmap is to work manually with users first to really understand their pain points and the kinks of this process to build our software piece by piece focusing on one niche at a time.

Our vision is to use our 15 years of software experience to build a one-stop shop, easy-to-understand, set-and-forget tool to help companies land their emails in the inbox.

Do things that don’t scale

Before writing a single line of code, we started doing this manually. By talking with more than 40 companies and working with clients worth more than a billion dollars, we have already learned so much.

Here are some of our early clients we are very proud to be working with:

• Gaiia - formerly Oxio - sold to Cogeco - YC W2021
• Alpha Signal - the #1 newsletter in Ai Research (as seen on the MFM podcast)
• QScale - Leading Sustainable Digital Infrastructure
• Marketing Examined - A 9-figure Media Company
• ASmartBear - Personal Project of Jason Cohen - Founder of 2 Bootstrapped Unicorns

The results have been mind blowing. Our customers have reported seeing open rates increase from 27% to 200%. Here’s the type of feedback that makes us happy:

• “Our email deliverability score went from 46 to 97 and all our emails started landing in the inbox” - Marc Campagna , Co-Founder & CEO - Gaiia
• “You guys helped us improve our open rate up more than 40% - Lior Sinclair - Founder - Alpha Signal
• “The value you have provided is incredible figuring all this stuff out, our open rates keep going up” - @John Kauf - CTO & Co-Founder - Marketing Examined

What’s next?

We have multiple paths ahead of us and we are really excited to be building Palisade.

If you are a business leveraging email and are interested in improving your open rates, we’re pretty solid at email deliverability by now and we owe you one since you made it this far in the article. We’d love to do an audit of your delivery setup (pro-bono of course!)

Request your deliverability score right here: www.palisade.email

Peace and success,

Sam