1. is tech-savvy and runs an app/service with a bunch of users
2. has tried existing emailing platforms and feel that they're too expensive
3. wants full freedom of who they target their emails to
A tech-savvy person could make their own solution, and that's what I wanted to do with my site CubeDesk, but it's surprisingly difficult and time-consuming, which gave me the idea for this service.
The English -> SQL thing is just a fun feature I added since I'm excited about LLMs. Comes in handy for folks who aren't SQL experts (like me).
Totally agree on the security concerns. That seems to be the main feedback in this thread and will be my main focus going forward!
I, for the record, find this pretty interesting and am exactly in the target audience for this (down to the cubing part. Maybe I'll see you at a WCA comp sometime). I might check it out sometime. I do wish there was some kind of self hosted option though. Or a way to do this without linking any AWS credentials or database passwords.
Been wanting something like this for years over at Exponent. We do a lot of targeted and dynamic emails to our users based on their role and progress through our courses, and it’s a pain to not only synchronize the database with the mail provider, but to agree on a system for capturing the state of the user that works with the platform - we’ve ended up creating a complex system of tags that has to be maintained across both systems.
Re: non technical users, one idea would be an ability to save “audiences” using smaller SQL queries, that way non-technical collaborators could easily send a campaign to a well-defined group of users, and update the group definition once instead of across all your emails.
If you could infer the structure of the connected database automatically and control which tables are visible in the product, people might find that really helpful too (check out Metabase as an example product that does a great job at querying data sources with UI and raw SQL)
My first thought when I read this post was “did you try someone besides MailChimp?” My understanding is that they’re not really a market leader and that there are competing solutions that are either better, cheaper, or both.
That said I think this is an interesting niche to be in, because I think there are some customers out there who don’t need the technical hand-holding of other marketing platforms.
How do you define market leader? In 2021 they had 14 million paying customers and a market share of 72 percent. If that’s not a market leading position, I don’t know what is. I don’t favor them, it’s a real pain sometimes, but they operate a tanker, not a speed boat.
I defined that poorly. What I mean is that they're a declining incumbent who doesn't have the best product or pricing.
While they are the market leader in marketshare, they're losing marketshare rapidly. [1]
Now that they're owned by Intuit, I only expect the product to get worse.
OP's product seems to allow you to get more specific about segmentation, which is something that a rapidly growing MailChimp competitor Klaviyo seems to excel at, as an example. [2]
I know this is probably no more than a side project for OP, but if I was in their shoes I probably wouldn't have started building this kind of thing myself if I hadn't tried at least 3 other alternatives. Email marketing/marketing automation is a very deep specialty, so I think you have to really be sure that there's nothing suitable off the shelf before you wade into building your own solution. I feel like it's not much different than building your own database for your application. I would want to be really sure that there isn't one already out there that fits my needs before building my own.
1. is tech-savvy and runs an app/service with a bunch of users
2. has tried existing emailing platforms and feel that they're too expensive
3. wants full freedom of who they target their emails to
A tech-savvy person could make their own solution, and that's what I wanted to do with my site CubeDesk, but it's surprisingly difficult and time-consuming, which gave me the idea for this service.
The English -> SQL thing is just a fun feature I added since I'm excited about LLMs. Comes in handy for folks who aren't SQL experts (like me).
Totally agree on the security concerns. That seems to be the main feedback in this thread and will be my main focus going forward!