rosie37861
New member
Product: AhaSend
I've been running a project management startup since 2014 that sends loads of transactional emails (notifications, reports, etc), and about 3 or 4 years ago, the cost of sending emails got to a point where it started making sense to do it myself. I built the infrastructure for sending a few million emails a month, and since then, I've launched 2 other startups and used the same system for sending emails.
Given all the work I've done on this over the years, almost exactly 3 months I decided to to do a bit more to add a user-facing dashboard and Stripe integration and launch it as a separate product, and AhaSend was born.
The product is ready for use, there might be a few bugs here and there in the dashboard, but the backend is robust and is already sending millions of emails per month for my other startups and a couple of friends who have started using it.
AhaSend is a Pay-as-You-Go Transactional Email Provider.
One of my frustrations with most other Email Service Providers (ESPs) has always been their bracket pricing: Sending 250k emails a month and happily paying $160 a month, you see a bit of growth and need to send 255k emails next month? Nope, sorry, you'll need to jump to the next bracket which allows sending 400k emails per month and costs $250.
With AhaSend, the first 1,000 emails are always free, then you pay $5/month to send up to 10,000 emails per month, and then you pay $0.0005 per email (that's $0.5 per 1,000 emails) for any additional emails you send. No brackets and no hidden fees: you pay exactly for what you send.
Focusing on transactional emails has let AhaSend optimize for delivery speed instead of the throughput needed for sending millions of marketing emails in a short period of time (e.g. sending millions of emails in 2 hours to deliver a marketing campaign).
Almost all other ESPs send both transactional and marketing emails, usually using the same IP address for multiple users, or at best using dedicated IP addresses for large customers (but still lumping the marketing and transactional emails together). This means that inbox providers (like GMail, Yahoo, Outlook and others), see a huge jump in incoming email from those IPs when a campaign is sent, and then the incoming volume goes down and remains steady for a while until the next campaign. These inbox providers look at the sending patterns (like these large jumps in incoming emails from IPs), the content of the emails and and other indicators to decide whether an IP is being used for sending marketing emails - and marketing emails have low priority for delivery to the inbox. This means that your transactional Account Confirmation emails that need to get to the inbox in 5 seconds or you'll start losing customers gets bundled up with all those marketing emails and their delivery gets delayed - sometimes taking minutes to arrive in the inbox.
AhaSend has been consistently delivering transactional emails to GMail in 1 to 2 seconds, to Yahoo in 2.5 to 4 seconds, and to Outlook in 4 to 6 seconds. The best case for delivery time with our competitors is double to triple of ours, but usually much higher than that (in the 20-30 seconds range), and if you're unlucky and they're sending a marketing campaign using the IP assigned to your account at the same time as you're sending a transactional email, there's no saying how much it might take for the email to get delivered to the inbox.
Email is boring. It's been with us since 1971, has been commercially available since the early 80's, and became widespread in the 90's. It has a established market and it's not going away.
Sending emails has a very large market size: pretty much every online business and some (if not most) offline businesses needs to send transactional emails for things like account confirmation, OTPs, password reset links, security alerts, 2FA emails, order confirmations, and a hundred other things.
Numbers: The email industry market size was about $9.2 billion in 2022, expected to grow to $26.7 billion by 2028, so there's a lot of room to grow: a lot of new customers and players are joining the market.
There are of course many competitors in this space. What differentiates AhaSend is its pricing model and focus on transactional emails (see above).
Given the amount of competition in this space, I don't think I can get organic traffic from the search engines anytime soon and Google Ads is out of the picture at least at the beginning (too expensive for keywords related to email).
To get things rolling, I'm going through my own network of startup founders (I took my first startup to an accelerator about 11 years ago, and I've been mentoring a few founders here and there) and partnering with accelerators/incubators to offer discounts for their startups (again, I have a good network in this area).
After that, I'm planning to run affiliate programs with development agencies, and when the revenue allows start experimenting with running ads on Google.
I've been running startups for the past 11 years, and before that I had a software development agency, so I have a bit of experience launching products and running businesses.
I've been sending emails for my other businesses for a few years and know the technology and challenges (of course there will be new challenges that I don't know of yet when scaling to 100 million and 1 billion emails per month, but I'm confident I can handle any technical challenge that comes my way).
And, I have a good network of people (founders, accelerators, etc) who can either be the initial customers or help me kickstart the business and get initial traction.
I've been running a project management startup since 2014 that sends loads of transactional emails (notifications, reports, etc), and about 3 or 4 years ago, the cost of sending emails got to a point where it started making sense to do it myself. I built the infrastructure for sending a few million emails a month, and since then, I've launched 2 other startups and used the same system for sending emails.
Given all the work I've done on this over the years, almost exactly 3 months I decided to to do a bit more to add a user-facing dashboard and Stripe integration and launch it as a separate product, and AhaSend was born.
The product is ready for use, there might be a few bugs here and there in the dashboard, but the backend is robust and is already sending millions of emails per month for my other startups and a couple of friends who have started using it.
The Product
AhaSend is a Pay-as-You-Go Transactional Email Provider.
One of my frustrations with most other Email Service Providers (ESPs) has always been their bracket pricing: Sending 250k emails a month and happily paying $160 a month, you see a bit of growth and need to send 255k emails next month? Nope, sorry, you'll need to jump to the next bracket which allows sending 400k emails per month and costs $250.
With AhaSend, the first 1,000 emails are always free, then you pay $5/month to send up to 10,000 emails per month, and then you pay $0.0005 per email (that's $0.5 per 1,000 emails) for any additional emails you send. No brackets and no hidden fees: you pay exactly for what you send.
Focusing on transactional emails has let AhaSend optimize for delivery speed instead of the throughput needed for sending millions of marketing emails in a short period of time (e.g. sending millions of emails in 2 hours to deliver a marketing campaign).
Almost all other ESPs send both transactional and marketing emails, usually using the same IP address for multiple users, or at best using dedicated IP addresses for large customers (but still lumping the marketing and transactional emails together). This means that inbox providers (like GMail, Yahoo, Outlook and others), see a huge jump in incoming email from those IPs when a campaign is sent, and then the incoming volume goes down and remains steady for a while until the next campaign. These inbox providers look at the sending patterns (like these large jumps in incoming emails from IPs), the content of the emails and and other indicators to decide whether an IP is being used for sending marketing emails - and marketing emails have low priority for delivery to the inbox. This means that your transactional Account Confirmation emails that need to get to the inbox in 5 seconds or you'll start losing customers gets bundled up with all those marketing emails and their delivery gets delayed - sometimes taking minutes to arrive in the inbox.
AhaSend has been consistently delivering transactional emails to GMail in 1 to 2 seconds, to Yahoo in 2.5 to 4 seconds, and to Outlook in 4 to 6 seconds. The best case for delivery time with our competitors is double to triple of ours, but usually much higher than that (in the 20-30 seconds range), and if you're unlucky and they're sending a marketing campaign using the IP assigned to your account at the same time as you're sending a transactional email, there's no saying how much it might take for the email to get delivered to the inbox.
The Market and Competition
Email is boring. It's been with us since 1971, has been commercially available since the early 80's, and became widespread in the 90's. It has a established market and it's not going away.
Sending emails has a very large market size: pretty much every online business and some (if not most) offline businesses needs to send transactional emails for things like account confirmation, OTPs, password reset links, security alerts, 2FA emails, order confirmations, and a hundred other things.
Numbers: The email industry market size was about $9.2 billion in 2022, expected to grow to $26.7 billion by 2028, so there's a lot of room to grow: a lot of new customers and players are joining the market.
There are of course many competitors in this space. What differentiates AhaSend is its pricing model and focus on transactional emails (see above).
Customer Acquisition Strategy
Given the amount of competition in this space, I don't think I can get organic traffic from the search engines anytime soon and Google Ads is out of the picture at least at the beginning (too expensive for keywords related to email).
To get things rolling, I'm going through my own network of startup founders (I took my first startup to an accelerator about 11 years ago, and I've been mentoring a few founders here and there) and partnering with accelerators/incubators to offer discounts for their startups (again, I have a good network in this area).
After that, I'm planning to run affiliate programs with development agencies, and when the revenue allows start experimenting with running ads on Google.
Why me?
I've been running startups for the past 11 years, and before that I had a software development agency, so I have a bit of experience launching products and running businesses.
I've been sending emails for my other businesses for a few years and know the technology and challenges (of course there will be new challenges that I don't know of yet when scaling to 100 million and 1 billion emails per month, but I'm confident I can handle any technical challenge that comes my way).
And, I have a good network of people (founders, accelerators, etc) who can either be the initial customers or help me kickstart the business and get initial traction.