*Took another L toda
[2022-08-02 01:14:07 AM] : Took another L today, confused what to do next.
I posted in the slack about month ago about amazon SES banning our email tool. (context: getsaral.com is an influencer management and outreach tool, right now).
We pivoted to using the Gmail API and did a lot of back-n-forth with them over the last 3-4 weeks, spent dev time making the edits they suggested, etc. They finally approved us, but their approval comes with a third-party security audit requirement that costs "up to $75,000"... which is crazy. I asked around and it usually costs ~$20k but that's still way too expensive for a bootstrapped MVP stage product like ours.
I'm just confused and frustrated now, we've spent 2 months trying to figure out an ubiquitous cold email tool, which delayed our time to market.
I can't drop the email functionality, without that we're just a fancy looking google sheet alternative without outreach capability (which all our competitors have).
I guess, my best bet is to go forward with just the simple CRM tool and see if it hits while we scramble to figure out this email situation.
Let me know if you all have any thoughts, I'm just thinking out loud here :pray:
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SARAL - Influencer Marketing Platform for Consumer Brands
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1 Reply
[2022-08-02 03:45:14 AM] : The Google API experience and the auditing cost sounds a lot like what Mike Taber in the Startups for the rest of us podcasts reports. Here’s a list on Spotify with all his updates: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4BGYE58gyDkg3Rqb1O0wxW
[2022-08-02 03:46:21 AM] : I remember that he didn’t need the audit at first for his email tool. Don’t remember what the reason was that he decided to get the audit. But maybe you also don’t need it for the first MVP?
[2022-08-11 08:11:14 AM] : Johannes we ended up dropping it. They required us to do it because we're using a particular sensitive scope of their API (to read the user's email - so we detect replies).
[2022-08-30 03:23:49 PM] : yeah, gmail is really strict right now. Have you looked into nylas?
I worked on an cold outreach product ~4 years ago and we were sending 4 million emails per month just fine. But the conversion rates were getting worse and worse, so they ended up pivoting. Haven't worked on email stuff for a while, so not sure if it would still work today. Cold email is very tricky.
[2022-10-06 10:37:20 PM] : Did you find a solution in the end?
It's a tad more complex, but if your client is "@awesomeclient.com", would setting up your product to use something like "<mailto:[email protected]|[email protected]>" work? You could set up an email server yourself for each subdomain ([clientname].saral.com) and work those email completely independently from the clients own email system?