On one hand, it's awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them.
On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Support is fantastic of course, but it was really the little things that made the experience great.
An example, they manually vetted each of their API consumers to ensure one bad apple doesn't spoil the bushel. It's probably not cost effective to gate customers like this, but in the end I don't have to worry about MY email not being delivered by one of the major providers because some other person used Postmark to send a spam campaign. Stuff like this happened all the time with Sendgrid and the only remediation I've ever seen was "upgrade to our $90/mo plan and manage it on your own."
Maybe ActiveCampaign will keep this level of quality and care (it is the same team after all), but I can't help but be a little cautious. I've been burned one too many times by an acquisition of a great product by a not-so-great company.
Hey there, Rian here (Head of Product at Postmark). We definitely understand the "mixed feelings" response for an acquisition like this. A couple things I want to reiterate:
* The entire Postmark team is joining ActiveCampaign, and we are going to continue to operate the way we have always operated for the foreseeable future. That includes the support team you love!
* We definitely don't plan to change any of the things we do to ensure the highest deliverability in the industry. We are not, for example, making any changes to the manual approval process—that will definitely continue.
> The entire Postmark team is joining ActiveCampaign, and we are going to continue to operate the way we have always operated for the foreseeable future. That includes the support team you love!
While I appreciate you saying this, you have to have in mind that just some 6 months down the line it won't be you calling the shots. The business priorities will be determined by other people and they can and will command you to shift your policies as they see fit.
I want to believe but history has shown, time and again, that these pledges never materialize.
It's OK, you are feeling relief because you likely received a huge sum of money. Who wouldn't be happy!
There's a proverb: "Never promise anything when you are feeling happy".
Oh I am sure they 100% believe it. I wonder why people always forget about the power structures. I guess that's what happens when people work what they love and money is just a positive side effect... as opposed to this being exactly the opposite for 99% of the other population.
I think you often forget about this because promises are made that they won't touch anything. So you're being genuine when you say "nothing is going to change" because that's what leadership promised.
Trying to maintain this is a major fight that generally gets you fired or you end up leaving out of frustration.
It's hard to see if when you come in with business like Postmark that is loved by its customers because you think "We're a great business and we know how to do things, why would you want to blow that up?" but you need to remember that the acquirer (ActiveCampaign) is looking out for themselves (ActiveCampaign) first.
I agree with you, such a bittersweet taste in the mouth.
I don't think that a Marketing company is the right type of company to run Postmark.
Postmark care about deliverability not about "engagement". Everything is about being sure your mail get to your clients not about how to craft marketing campaign from their product.
How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some email editor and campaign management feature to Postmark ?
I truly hope they won't touch their acquisition and let it run how it always has instead of adding feature that doesn't make sense with the product just to compete with MailChimp and other big names.
> How much do you bet ActiveCampaign is going to add some email editor and campaign management feature to Postmark ?
Seems unlikely given AC is already incredibly cheap and a simple email sender won't be sophisticated enough to convince marketing teams to move over from a full featured ESP to something simpler.
I'm also not convince this is a good fit, but for another reason: if you're a pure Deliverability Company, it's far easier to maintain healthy relations with email hosting providers and get useful information or data from them.
By contrast, if you're a Marketing Company, well 'enemy' might be bit strong but these providers will definitely be far less cooperative, and your service might suffer from it.
Give MailPace a try [0]. The creator seems like a great guy, and the service does what it says without any bs. I've been using it for a while now for side projects, and can only recommmend it.
I can somewhat vouch for MailPace. I wrote the Rust library for it and talking with them was very straightforward (getting a free key to test, testing the library's functionality, etc) and he was very responsive and knowledgeable, even installing the Rust compiler to test. That said I haven't actually used it to deliver critical mail.
The delivery latency being published on their home page is another nice touch that shows they are dedicated to transparency.
I have the biggest respect for Postmark. Excellent product. Extremely well done APIs. Incredible performance and reliability. I've always chosen them for my projects and recommended it many times. And most of all, I wanted to support an independent product, made by awesome people.
I really, really hope they will remain like they are now.
Congratulations to the owners for staying true to their values all these years. Wilbit has always been a huge, huge source of inspiration for everything I've done. And congrats for the payout!
Same here. I saw the email this morning and my heart sunk. I know I'm not a big customer (I'm on the lower tier plan, $10/mo) but Postmark was a rock solid part of my setup and now I'm not sure how long that will last or when/if my plan will be seen as a waste of time/money. Postmark was so incredibly refreshing after having been exposed to a number of other products in the same space. I'm glad for the team but apprehensive about the future.
I'm hopeful that the product remains the same. I chose Postmark because it was the most simple transactional email provider I could find.
ActiveCampaign on the other hand was always a nightmare for me at my prior company. Their API had a 5 request / second rate limit. Which made it almost impossible to use for 50,000+ customers (syncing up emails / tags / campaigns).
I worked on a project that used the ActiveCampaign API. It had tens of thousands of users and an elaborate tagging system.
There were operations that we'd have liked to be synchronous (in the browser), but the rate limit and no useful batching mechanism (AFAIK at that time) meant they took over a minute to complete.
Exactly this. Postmark is my go to when the mail actually needs to show up. I don't do campaigns or other bullshit. When a service I've written sends an email, it's a password reset or similar.
On one hand, it's awesome Wildbit was able to sell Postmark on their terms. To be able to build something, make money, and then walk away when you want is a huge accomplishment. Hats off to them.
On the other hand, the reason I always chose Postmark over Sendgrid, MailChimp, et cetera, even though they were much smaller, is because they seriously cared about their customers. Support is fantastic of course, but it was really the little things that made the experience great.
An example, they manually vetted each of their API consumers to ensure one bad apple doesn't spoil the bushel. It's probably not cost effective to gate customers like this, but in the end I don't have to worry about MY email not being delivered by one of the major providers because some other person used Postmark to send a spam campaign. Stuff like this happened all the time with Sendgrid and the only remediation I've ever seen was "upgrade to our $90/mo plan and manage it on your own."
Maybe ActiveCampaign will keep this level of quality and care (it is the same team after all), but I can't help but be a little cautious. I've been burned one too many times by an acquisition of a great product by a not-so-great company.