This product lets people send up to 10,000 emails[1] at once to a cold list of contacts (ie, not opted in). Let's not kid ourselves: The use case is spamming.
The reason it's making $115k/month is because most other ESPs (Mailchimp, etc) don't allow spamming, so spammers flock to (and pay for!) products that look the other way.
To the creator: Good on you for creating a successful business. I hope you take these resources and do something positive for the world.
> to the creator: Good on you for creating a successful business. I hope you take these resources and do something positive for the world.
Not good on him. It's an immoral business. I don't see why the hn community would endorse this just because it makes money.
If the emails were also a tool for privacy, decentralisation or some good objective behind it, i could see the pros and cons. But here it's all pros for him, and all cons for the rest of the world.
You're confusing a couple of issues. It's not that we're looking the other way. It's that I wanted to design a system where we don't have to look at all. GMass doesn't actually send any emails through its own servers. Emails are sent either through users' own Gmail accounts or through a third party SMTP service like SendGrid. Those actual email server operators (Gmail or SendGrid) have pretty sophisticated systems to detect spammers. THEY will shut down a user's account before I could ever even notice it. I don't have to look, because the owner of the email server will do the monitoring.
Reminds me of a HN story awhile back from a guy who built a business with eye-popping revenue. The article was cagey about what the product was - some kind of imported good.
If that were my service, I'd be pretty embarrassed by the number of unhappy users who have commented on the blog posts about cancellation[1] and refunds[2]. Doesn't seem like a good look.
> Most successful businesses aren't based on revolutionary ideas, but rather improvements to the status quo. The media tends to focus on the revolutionary ideas, so it's easy to think that an idea isn't worth pursuing if it's not groundbreaking. But in my case, email marketing had been around forever when I started GMass but I found an unfulfilled niche and built a business out of it.
This is a really great paragraph. I think the part that I get hung up on is right at the end - how does one actually go about finding an unfulfilled niche? It seems like they are kind of difficult to find almost by virtue of them being unfulfilled.
It's difficult to go looking for niches without guidance or some direction on what to look for. And when you do find the online ones, you may find that it's hard to shake the incumbents loose because (a) the niche is tiny and (b) the market is already satisfied with the current producers.
The niches I have found always come by accident: "hey, we notice you have this product that's close to what we need. Can you build us a version that does xxx" where xxx is some trivial change that results in a product I can sell to others in that niche. Or "we know this has to be possible and it shouldn't be difficult, but we don't have the skills do it. We'll buy xx units if you can build it for us."
The second-order problem is that often even if you know the need exists and you have a customer, without good knowledge of the domain, it can be hard to figure out how to reach other customers (they may not be online much) and make more sales.
I had a site that would consistently rank in the top 5-10 for google queries, yet I had fewer than 10 hits/day for those queries.
Another issue I've come across is that when you're approached by someone with a specific need, it can be hard to decide if you've found a new niche or just a custom design for one customer.
None of this is to suggest that you shouldn't try, but that it can be harder than it seems at first glance.
In the successful businesses I know, finding that niche was often 1-2 years of exploration/iteration, where the final result looks vastly different from the initial hypothesis.
I think that they are incredibly difficult to find and most people (me included) can't identify "problems" in their day to day that could be improved by something - in hindsight - relatively simple.
I'm constantly asking myself: where are the pain-points in my daily interactions with computers/software etc.
So far there's nothing and I know that can't be true.
Have you ever used a product recommended thinking it's going to work a certain way and it works completely differently and it was not nearly as intuitive or helpful as you thought? Take those experiences and apply them to your own version of the product. See where it goes. Talk to people in various niche sectors: Librarians, movie ticketing, museums, etc. whatever. Ask them if the software they use has problems that are not being fixed or if they software has changed over the last 10-20 years. Most likely there is and nobody has taken the time to figure out how compete in that area and then like start from square one and build something good/modern/fast to use for the folks that need it.
I'm kind of talking out of my ass because I've never built a business but I've seen some terrible software that people are forced to use and been in many company-specific or industry-specific situations so I have buttloads of ideas. Most of my ideas come from hearing those pain-points or having my own pain points and searching for the right software and not being able to find it (or not finding what I need because I don't know the right way to look for it, which is another thing that should be a thing which is like, how do you figure out what kind of product you actually need?)
> how does one actually go about finding an unfulfilled niche?
Start with things you already have some domain knowledge of (better even, try to find unrelated things you know about that overlap in interesting ways and where few people have domain knowledge of both) ;
find what problems/frustrations practitioners in that field have and do your best to solve one of them in a very immediate, low cost of adoption way;
I cannot wrap my mind around why growth hacking/analytics tools make such profitable businesses. They don't add any actual value to society, so it doesn't make sense that they should be profitable at all. All they do is deceive people into thinking that a low quality product is actually good (and distract them away from better alternatives). Why is it that so many profitable businesses these days add 0 or negative value to society?
It seems that the best way to make money for yourself these days is by destroying value; by obfuscating facts, masquerading, deceiving, pretending, laundering, coercing, manipulating, diverting attention, saturating the media, manufacturing hype...
Funny, I don't see similar moral outrage at talented engineers working in Facebook and Google, doing no evil. (I do see such outrage at the companies themselves - but rarely at the developers working for them).
Yes, these companies do make useful products. But they have real negative effects on the world, which would have been better off if all those engineers had made these products for companies other than these lobbyist, competition-stifling, aggressive monopolies.
There's no real moral difference between selling your talents to the highest bidder and this specific case of running a spam service to make money.
I'm happy for people who find personal success according to their own value system, but my personal measure of self wouldn't increase if I spent my days expanding the amount of email advertising in the world.
> I was so excited to have a working version to play with that I paid the freelancer $5,000 dollars to build the backend that I needed under the condition that he delivered his part within seven days, which he did.
> All of this happened while I was living out of a hotel room in Oahu, Hawaii. My then-girlfriend was getting her yoga certification there, and the program lasted a month.
Ah, if only we all used our hotel room in Oahu for a month, and $5k to drop on some developer to help! We could be building status quo improvements.
Seriously though, that just comes off as completely out of touch with reality to me, or some weird "humble brag". Most of us probably have day jobs. Not all of us are probably lucky enough to be in a regulatory environment where moonlighting is protected. But by the time I get home, more software is almost always the last thing I want to do. Mostly, I want to sleep, or eat. Or recover.
By the time my mind recovers enough to think about coding something that appeals to me, it's Monday again.
But perhaps I'm just not the type of person that'll ever get $115k/mo.
Hey everyone - someone just alerted me to this post. I'm Ajay, the person interviewed in that article. Let me go through now and respond to people's comments.
Companies have every incentive to create recurring revenue. Wall Street these days is all about repeat business, from Tech to Industrials to residential services like security cameras and alarms.
Some companies like Adobe were extremely successful in changing their business model to that end, so investors expect all other companies to follow suit and severely punish those who don't
> I'd like to try that for $10 and not have a subscription...
$25 prepaid credit cards are pretty hard to keep billing after the first monthly bill and you spend the rest at McDonalds (which is awesome for that but they look at you kind of funny if there's only 35 cents left on the card).
> Also, I sleep with a CPAP machine, and I've found that it's enabled me to get by with only five to six hours of sleep, allowing me to be productive during most of my waking hours. Before my CPAP, I was sleeping 9-10 hours a day just to feel normal. It's weird, but my CPAP machine has been the biggest contributor to my productivity gains in the last few years.
This is my first time hearing about CPAP. Has anyone else tried this?
The article says he's tracking when recipients open emails and click links. So for every email one of his users sends there's some potential network traffic and data to be stored. He was probably able to offer the service for free originally because those features weren't added until after the subscription service launched. His AWS bill before adding those features was probably a few hundred dollars per month at the most. He also mentioned he is financially secure from selling a previous spam tool he created, so he could afford to run it for free for a while.
I didn't read thoroughly, but why does it need to run on AWS? Does the plugin send requests to a back end server and the server send the mass emails out?
My naive thought is that some frontend JS (without the help of a backend server) would be able to accomplish some of the features.
I thought so as well. But, if he's okay with it and the numbers pencil out well, there's not a lot of reason to improve it: probably better ROIs elsewhere.
This is impressive but I’m surprised he thinks it’s possible to build a personal legacy from an email tool like this. Almost all web software is transient and will be forgotten in a few years. Certainly not the stuff of “legacy after I’m gone.” Even mega apps like Facebook or Instagram will likely be long forgotten before their founders die.
It does happen, but it's rare. You have to be a true spammer or phisher to get shut down, and we've found that Google is a lot more lenient with G Suite accounts than regular gmail.com accounts.
[+] [-] gk1|7 years ago|reply
The reason it's making $115k/month is because most other ESPs (Mailchimp, etc) don't allow spamming, so spammers flock to (and pay for!) products that look the other way.
To the creator: Good on you for creating a successful business. I hope you take these resources and do something positive for the world.
[1] https://www.gmass.co/blog/you-can-now-send-10000-emails-with...
[+] [-] sametmax|7 years ago|reply
Not good on him. It's an immoral business. I don't see why the hn community would endorse this just because it makes money.
If the emails were also a tool for privacy, decentralisation or some good objective behind it, i could see the pros and cons. But here it's all pros for him, and all cons for the rest of the world.
[+] [-] ajaygoel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VectorLock|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apo|7 years ago|reply
Turns out it was counterfeit watches. Ugh.
[+] [-] fasteo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway53534|7 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/ao8gav/carta_spread...
[+] [-] lumost|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NeoBasilisk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfk13|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.gmass.co/blog/how-to-cancel-your-paid-gmail-mail...
[2] https://www.gmass.co/blog/request-a-refund/
[+] [-] dgritsko|7 years ago|reply
This is a really great paragraph. I think the part that I get hung up on is right at the end - how does one actually go about finding an unfulfilled niche? It seems like they are kind of difficult to find almost by virtue of them being unfulfilled.
[+] [-] HeyLaughingBoy|7 years ago|reply
The niches I have found always come by accident: "hey, we notice you have this product that's close to what we need. Can you build us a version that does xxx" where xxx is some trivial change that results in a product I can sell to others in that niche. Or "we know this has to be possible and it shouldn't be difficult, but we don't have the skills do it. We'll buy xx units if you can build it for us."
The second-order problem is that often even if you know the need exists and you have a customer, without good knowledge of the domain, it can be hard to figure out how to reach other customers (they may not be online much) and make more sales.
I had a site that would consistently rank in the top 5-10 for google queries, yet I had fewer than 10 hits/day for those queries.
Another issue I've come across is that when you're approached by someone with a specific need, it can be hard to decide if you've found a new niche or just a custom design for one customer.
None of this is to suggest that you shouldn't try, but that it can be harder than it seems at first glance.
[+] [-] davidivadavid|7 years ago|reply
What it does is add a common feature found in marketing automation/CRM systems to Gmail, a massively used platform.
It essentially unbundled a feature from a specialized product and made it available as on add-on on a prosumer product.
If you look at large platforms like Gmail, you can probably find isomorphic ideas.
[+] [-] yters|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SatvikBeri|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmilla1606|7 years ago|reply
I think that they are incredibly difficult to find and most people (me included) can't identify "problems" in their day to day that could be improved by something - in hindsight - relatively simple.
I'm constantly asking myself: where are the pain-points in my daily interactions with computers/software etc.
So far there's nothing and I know that can't be true.
[+] [-] wetpaste|7 years ago|reply
I'm kind of talking out of my ass because I've never built a business but I've seen some terrible software that people are forced to use and been in many company-specific or industry-specific situations so I have buttloads of ideas. Most of my ideas come from hearing those pain-points or having my own pain points and searching for the right software and not being able to find it (or not finding what I need because I don't know the right way to look for it, which is another thing that should be a thing which is like, how do you figure out what kind of product you actually need?)
[+] [-] GuiA|7 years ago|reply
Start with things you already have some domain knowledge of (better even, try to find unrelated things you know about that overlap in interesting ways and where few people have domain knowledge of both) ;
find what problems/frustrations practitioners in that field have and do your best to solve one of them in a very immediate, low cost of adoption way;
fail fast .
[+] [-] jondubois|7 years ago|reply
It seems that the best way to make money for yourself these days is by destroying value; by obfuscating facts, masquerading, deceiving, pretending, laundering, coercing, manipulating, diverting attention, saturating the media, manufacturing hype...
[+] [-] xamuel|7 years ago|reply
In other words, you might say OP is disrupting the disruption industry.
[+] [-] rglover|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danra|7 years ago|reply
Yes, these companies do make useful products. But they have real negative effects on the world, which would have been better off if all those engineers had made these products for companies other than these lobbyist, competition-stifling, aggressive monopolies.
There's no real moral difference between selling your talents to the highest bidder and this specific case of running a spam service to make money.
[+] [-] sfopdxnonstop|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabujp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martin_a|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WaltPurvis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deathanatos|7 years ago|reply
> All of this happened while I was living out of a hotel room in Oahu, Hawaii. My then-girlfriend was getting her yoga certification there, and the program lasted a month.
Ah, if only we all used our hotel room in Oahu for a month, and $5k to drop on some developer to help! We could be building status quo improvements.
Seriously though, that just comes off as completely out of touch with reality to me, or some weird "humble brag". Most of us probably have day jobs. Not all of us are probably lucky enough to be in a regulatory environment where moonlighting is protected. But by the time I get home, more software is almost always the last thing I want to do. Mostly, I want to sleep, or eat. Or recover.
By the time my mind recovers enough to think about coding something that appeals to me, it's Monday again.
But perhaps I'm just not the type of person that'll ever get $115k/mo.
[+] [-] ajaygoel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|7 years ago|reply
How about "Try us unlimited for $10" for X days.
For example - I have a campaign I would like to send out. to >2,000 addresses... I'd like to try that for $10 and not have a subscription...
[+] [-] airstrike|7 years ago|reply
Some companies like Adobe were extremely successful in changing their business model to that end, so investors expect all other companies to follow suit and severely punish those who don't
[+] [-] UncleEntity|7 years ago|reply
$25 prepaid credit cards are pretty hard to keep billing after the first monthly bill and you spend the rest at McDonalds (which is awesome for that but they look at you kind of funny if there's only 35 cents left on the card).
[+] [-] jcims|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henryw|7 years ago|reply
This is my first time hearing about CPAP. Has anyone else tried this?
[+] [-] OmarIsmail|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajaygoel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sciurus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajaygoel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbrameld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eloff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teacpde|7 years ago|reply
My naive thought is that some frontend JS (without the help of a backend server) would be able to accomplish some of the features.
[+] [-] pnathan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jumbopapa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slap_shot|7 years ago|reply
Markets are unimaginably large and complex, and they're always changing. Sometimes even the most basic feature can divide huge portions of markets.
[+] [-] drieddust|7 years ago|reply
One question though. If he is enabling his users to send mass emails using Google's infrastructure. Doesn't this violates Google TOC?
[+] [-] aboutruby|7 years ago|reply
Users risk having their account locked if they send too many emails (mine was for 1 day)
[+] [-] rajacombinator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atsaloli|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajaygoel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aloukissas|7 years ago|reply