SimianLogic2

Cool, email [email protected] from your account email and I'll delete you. (Which is the same offer I made to everyone else in lieu of an unsubscribe button.)

I did weigh whether to send a notice or not, and for me it came down to emotion more than economics. My thinking:

It'll end up costing a few hundred dollars to send it out. A lot of users have probably forgotten what IntroCave is or don't need it any more, and hopefully they'll request account deletion (hundreds of people did). I expected to generate approximately $0 in sales from the email, but if I can save even a handful of users from typing in the old domain, getting redirected to the new domain, wondering WTF, and bouncing -- that seemed worth it.

Average ~$3500/mo, but that can go up and down depending on organic traffic, competition (who's running ads), and world events (2-3x'd for a month or two during peak Covid lockdown). It was running ~$1-1.5k for a good chunk of the time when I was building out my own newsletter system, and I wasn't super eager to throw 30-50% of my revenue at something off-the-shelf.

If we're getting technical:

CANSPAM doesn't cover account/privacy/ToS notices -- it's not a marketing message (falls into "other content").

I didn't "upload a mailing list manually" -- the emails are all attached to user records in my wholly-owned database. I send them from a queue on my own server, not through Mailgun's mailing list product (which queues a message to every email on the list instantly and doesn't allow you to ramp it up over time).

"Newsletter" is easier to type than "new content and product updates," but again -- these go out to existing customers and account holders. There's implied permission there from the fact that they signed up for an account. Opt-out is easy, and I don't feel guilty about emailing people who signed up for an account.

I would send this to the whole list if deliverability didn't go to hell after about 50k users (or maybe I just need to write better emails to keep people engaged/opening).

I would love to use MailChimp, but it was price prohibitive when I first got started. The site was using Mailgun when I acquired it, and I stuck with it after evaluating a BUNCH of options when I got up to around 30-50k users.

I don't recall what MailChimp's pricing was back then, but 50k users would be $640/mo today (vs ~$80 on Mailgun). I'm currently north of 300k users, which is up into the "contact us for pricing" range. It just doesn't make sense for a site with revenue sub-$10k (like, well sub-$10k).

I could've dropped that price by spending a shitload of time deactivating contacts and trying to keep my active users count lower, but email just isn't that profitable for me. I wouldn't say I'm great at email or attribution, but I estimate I drive ~$250-500/mo in sales through email (up from $0 when I started).

The other points are good ones -- even on Mailgun, I should've had different subdomains set up for IntroCave for transactional/campaign/newsletter blasts. I got "good enough" results doing it the lazy way, though. I still wouldn't have remembered to migrate the bounces, and this might have actually increased my bounce rate. Since bounce lists are per-domain and not per-account, a signup bounce wouldn't necessarily have prevented me from sending transactional stuff later (I've since added a bounced flag to my user model which would catch this).

(edit: actually the first point is pretty good. i disagree with the rest. list was mine, domain was warmed with a week of email before the ToS blast, and I manually ramped up volume on the ToS blast for the first 30 hours or so while keeping an eye on deliverability. This was entirely my fault, so I'm not sure what you mean by blame... I'm not happy with the customer support response, but the title of the post should make it pretty clear where the blame lies--me!)

Follow-up thought: they just got acquired, so maybe there's some consolidation happening in terms of support or business processes that I'm not privy to. This was definitely more of a "straw that broke the camel's back" kind of response than abject outrage after the initial WTF response to the "clean your list before we re-enable you" message.

I started migrating while the service was down and they had given no indication that it would be turned back on any time soon. By the time my emails were reinstated, I was around 80-90% migrated. At that point, it's worth kicking the tires on the new service to see how deliverability compares.

I'm less mad about the cleaning service and more mad about the pace of responses and the fact that I got 3 different responses from 3 different customer support reps who apparently didn't read any of the prior history in the thread.

I think the shutdown is totally valid and a good practice, but my initial ticket started with (paraphrasing): "ooooops, my bad for forgetting to migrate my bounces to the new domain. I've paused that campaign until I can clean it up." It still took almost 2 days to get reinstated after jumping through a bunch of unrelated questions.

Sure, it was on a weekend. I'm also slower at responding on weekends. But I also choose not to operate a mission-critical business specifically because I don't want to be on call on weekends. Maybe don't autoban people if you can't respond in a timely manner?

Not exactly.

These emails all go to users who have signed up for an account. Traffic is weird right now (domain migration in progress), but I was getting ~250-350 user signups a day.

I send a monthly newsletter to users who have been recently active, a welcome sequence of 2 or 3 emails depending on where you sign up, and have an abandoned cart sequence of 3 emails (here's the link to your video / your preview will expire soon / your preview has expired).

Both of those channels (newsletter / automated sequences) have opt-outs, but the automated ones see pretty good engagement. The max number of automated emails is in the 5/6 range before unsubscribes, so it only takes ~3-4 emails per user to get up to 1k/day -- especially when you toss in another 100 or so for normal password resets, receipts, order emails, etc.

Agreed!

I don't know why they don't just keep a master list of every bounced email across every domain (or maybe that's what their paid verification product is and I just haven't looked at it closely enough?) and let me set a flag when sending an email to reject anything they know is going to bounce.

Are you a game developer?

(brb writing a new engine)

Haha, cash isn't the limiting factor -- it's the hours of disappearing into the workshop to leave her with childcare duties. I just need to wait for the kids to get a bit older and I can make it a team activity.

I tried to carve one of these in styrofoam just to show it to the kids after reading about it a year or so ago, but the material was too soft/porous. It's on my project TODO list if I can ever talk the wife into letting me buy a 3d printer or glowforge.

I learned most of what I know about the Three Kingdoms era from playing hundreds (thousands?) of hours of Dynasty Warriors. I later read Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the game was pretty close!

(Holy shit I had a lot of free time before I had kids.)

We usually quote 50-100% increase for agency web dev stuff (mostly marketing sites) and I'd say we've underestimated a few times. For basic html layouts it's not too bad but the minute you move away from something that looks like Craigslist or Wikipedia stuff starts to get hard. We've used 3rd party consultants to do reviews and every reviewer picks out different problems on the same exact site. I've implemented consultant recommendations line for line only to have that code flagged by a different reviewer at the same company as non-compliant.

I learn by taking notes. I have notebooks full of notes... but I don't ever actually refer back to them. Just the act of writing things down helps me remember things.