Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
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Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q So let me counter that real quick with what pricing experts might come at you with, which is Justin, I totally agree with you, but you never want to disincentivize usage of your product since it's tied directly to pricing. How would you respond to that?
A I think that's fair. I think one of the things I still need to resolve is the fact that my unit costs are very similarly disincentivized, right? Of I pay a certain like fraction of a cent per email I send To AWS. So in a way, like, I'm almost a little bit disincentivized for my customers to use the platform extensively. A, a account that sends out one email a day is costing me 30 times more than an account that's sending out one email a month, even if I'm taking away a pretty similar margin from each one. So that's something I, I still think I need to work on a little bit with the business model, but it's why I've found a bit of success with sort of the hybrid approach of you get that metered billing, but then you also get that flat margin on top of it.
AI assessment note: “it's why I've found a bit of success with sort of the hybrid approach”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q And so when you're Googling on a 2016 for this product and you decide to build it because you can't find what you want. I mean, why wasn't MailChimp good enough? Why wasn't Substack good enough? Why, why weren't some of these, you know, active campaign? Why weren't they good enough?
A For sure. I was using a tool called tiny letter, which is owned by MailChimp. And it was one of those things of, it did a lot of stuff fine, but I'm an engineer at heart. And one of the worst things an engineer can say to themselves is I bet I could build a better version of this in a weekend. Right. Um, because it was just like dumb stuff. Like it didn't support Markdown. Sometimes emails were getting dropped, like all of these little paper cut things that I was just like, I'm a user of this and I'm getting frustrated. Like, can I build something that just solves my own problem a little bit better? Um, And especially for some of the very marketing-heavy tools like ActiveCampaign, like MailChimp, these are designed for folks who are sending out, you know, e-commerce blasts to potentially tens of thousands of users, and that's a very important vertical to handle. There's also this entirely underserved market of people like me in 2016 who have a newsletter with maybe a couple thousand subscribers, like they're blogging, they don't have this grand strategy, they're not trying to track all, all of these things. They just want a really seamless Pleasant user experience.
AI assessment note: “Like it didn't support Markdown. Sometimes emails were getting dropped”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Interesting. Okay. So 2016, you launch it's you're eating your own dog food. How'd you get your first, you know, five customers?
A For sure. Um, after a certain point, I started getting inbound emails where it was like, oh, this isn't just friends asking to use the tool. It's people who saw it on Twitter, who saw it on Hacker News that want to use it, who have volume more than I was expecting. Let's hack some sort of pricing strategy together so I have a cohesive thing to, uh, offer them. And it was entirely inbound, which was really nice. I think one of the advantages of all of these soft launching tools, whether it's like Product Hunt or Betalist or all of those is Is you get a lot of inbound interest pretty quickly, even if it is very spiky. Um, so I was able to get, I think it was my first like dozen or so customers entirely inbound people just emailing me saying, Hey, I want to use this tool. How do I sign up? What do I have to pay?
AI assessment note: “my first like dozen or so customers entirely inbound people just emailing me”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q Okay, let's break down sort of both of those, right? So do you feel like Hacker News can sort of be, can you be strategic around it if someone wants to copy your strategy, or is it really lightning in a bottle?
A I think it's more lightning in a bottle. It's, there's been a plethora of people writing about, like, how to launch on all of these news platforms, and I do think a lot of it is very hit or miss. Like, sometimes you win the lottery. One of the things that I've found continuously helpful, though, is just searching for comments and folks discussing the broad genre and sort of, like, dropping your name in a little bit. Obviously, you don't want to be spammy with it, but even after the initial launch, sort of the show HN post, if that doesn't work out so well, you can Still be present in the community and have conversations and slowly offer folks. And I still see a large proportion of my traffic coming from, you know, comments that I've made months ago on Hacker News, as long as the content is relevant and the tool itself is put into the discussion.
AI assessment note: “I think it's more lightning in a bottle.”
