Sidemail is the all‑in‑one email toolkit (API, newsletters, and more) that we wish existed for our previous SaaS startup — gives you head start, helps you follow the best practices, and is simple to work with.
Hello hunters!
My name is Kristyna, and I'm a co-founder of Sidemail.io. I'm super excited and a bit nervous to share with you the project we've been quietly working on in the past 2 years.
If you want to learn more about the story, please continue reading. 👇
If you want to jump right into Sidemail, you can create your account and test it out here: https://client.sidemail.io/register.
I hope you will like it!
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💡 Idea
In past years, Patrik, my partner in crime, and I made several smaller and bigger projects. From chrome extension generating single-use email address to a fitness diary.
On every project, we struggled with emails.
We had to design and code emails from scratch. We had to fix broken emails in Outlook, Yahoo!, AOL, etc. We had to deal with overly complicated software for marketing emails. We had to pray for correct deliverability every time a user requested a password reset email or SSO.
We needed something simple that would cover basic SaaS emails so we could not reinvent the wheel again and again. Nothing like it existed.
So, in 2018, we challenged ourselves to fix that — build Sidemail. In the words of Ross Edgley, we were naive enough to start, stubborn enough to finish.
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💌 Features
Sidemail is the all-in-one email toolkit for SaaS startups. It handles all transactional and marketing emails for you.
How it works:
• Email design
In Sidemail, you have a global email design and layout that you customize in 5 clicks — upload your logo, choose a color scheme, choose a font... It's mobile responsive, has dark mode support, and is completely white-label. We tweaked every detail to make it perfect.
• Template editor
Then, there are templates. In Sidemail, you build your reusable email templates directly in the browser without code. There are multiple components to build your template with — from basic text to a bar/line chart (e.g., to show analytics directly in email) or syntax-highlighted code component (e.g., to show code snippets directly in email).
And it won't break — we manually tested all template components on real devices and tweaked them until we got a consistent result in every email client (Outlook, Windows 10 Mail, etc.).
• Pre-built email templates
To give you the best starting point, we pre-built templates like single sign-on, password reset, account activation, failed payment, canceled subscription, trial expiration, and more.
• Email sending API
There's an HTTP API to send the email templates. In your call, reference the template by name or ID, pass variables in a JSON body, then Sidemail renders the email and delivers it. For each of your templates, Sidemail generates code snippets in Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, and cURL, so you can just copy-paste to jump start integration.
• Marketing emails
There's also all you need to send newsletters. I'm proud of our unique design here!
• Email automation and more
There's even basic email automation, hosted subscribe forms and Stripe integration. We added all of this because we didn't like how complicated other tools are + we needed it.
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🙋♂️🙋♀️ About founders
Sidemail is a 100% bootstrapped tiny startup made by two co-founders, @pkrupar and @k_vrbova. We do everything on our own without outside help.
We've been making side-projects together for 6 years.
We started building our first project Liftground in 2014. Thanks to building Liftground, we learned a lot. We learned how to code and make software from scratch. We learned how to work with design tools and to design software products. We found awesome communities like Product Hunt — thank you, @rrhoover, for building it 😻. We've got inspired by the best makers — thank you, @levelsio, @mikaelcho, @callmevlad, for being our motivation 🥰. We've set ourselves a goal to continue doing what we love, make products, and hopefully someday make a full-time job from it and be independent.
It feels special to share our story here today. We've worked hard on Sidemail for 2 years, and I'm super-proud of it. I hope you will like it as well.
Feel free to let us know your thoughts. Thank you!
Best,
Kristyna
💙 PS: To celebrate our launch, we prepared a 50% discount for your first year — expires in a couple of days. To apply it, click this link: https://sidemail.io?discount-ref...
No startup pricing? Without a freemium or lower entry price point, you make it much more difficult for market adoption and will always trail behind competitors like MailChimp. Please consider pricing for early-stage startups and then charge them once they break a certain threshold. Best of luck!
@jaceperry I agree. The subtitle "Email delivery made simple for startups" caught my attention but the pricing won't fit any my side projects at the moment, unfortunately. The solution looks great. Congrats to the makers.
@jaceperry Hey! Thanks for the feedback. Sidemail costs more for a reason, you get all the features (no surprising upgrade to use this feature down the road). I too got used to free plans that every corp hangs out, but there's always someone that has to pay for it (VC, enterprise customers).
@jaceperry@pkrupar your subtitle says "for startups" but little to no startups will be able to afford your product when there are other products out there that do nearly the same thing but for FREE. You are shooting yourself in the foot by pricing out of the target market. The bigger players will stick with proven technologies and will hardly switch over to your product no matter how many marketing dollars you throw at their faces. I used to be a founder like you and my biggest regret was remaining stubborn throughout the entire process.
@jaceperry@pkrupar Stubbornness is hopefully not our issue!
Based on the feedback, this week, we introduced a new $19 all-inclusive plan and updated the rest of Sidemail's pricing, so it's now 70% more affordable.
https://sidemail.io/pricing
Looks great but the pricing plans are a little bit high. Would you consider having a low-cost personal tier for other 1-person side-hustle bootstrapped without the big budgets?
@dialectic_sg Update! I have good news...
We heard your thoughts and decided to adjust Sidemail's pricing to make it more friendly for early-stage startups. So, Sidemail.io just got 70% more affordable!
The new all-inclusive plan starts at just $19 per month.
https://sidemail.io/pricing/
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