Posts Tagged ‘Start-ups’

Posted on September 22, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Our experience of sending bulk emails to users

Let me start by saying that Mailchimp is an amazing company and their bulk email service is worth every penny. They deliver a punchy service and their UI is awesome however we no longer use them as our account has now been deleted.

I certainly can see the value in newsletters but from experience our newsletters were more often than not perceived as spam and I think, ultimately, this has hurt our brand. Added to the fact that many of our @afrigator.com email addresses now end up in people’s spam/junk folder and I think you’ll see why we’ve ultimately decided to drop our newsletter service all together.

Maybe our execution was poor, maybe we’re just not experts at doing this but I can tell you in future I’ll be hesitant to send out any emails to users. It’s a tough one for a small online business as email is, fundamentally, your only communication tool with your clients and this tool needs to be used very wisely…….. or else.

I can in all honesty tell you that we’ve learned more than we’d have liked to (mostly painful stuff) and if I had to do it all again I would have never started email newsletters in the first place. We had all these grandiose ideas about how we could leverage off email to our users but in the end I think we failed.

 

Posted on July 29, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

My presentation at the MIH Media Lab Entrepreneurship Workshop

This morning I delivered the following presentation to the students of Stellenbosch University’s Media Lab. My topic was on the start-up lifecycle and I think it went alright. Students are sometimes hard to gauge but I hope that this provided some insight into life running a startup. There’s also some interesting insight into the Afrigator business which has never been released.

Special thanks to Darren Gorton for unknowingly allowing me to use his lighter side of startups presentation in mine! I simply love it! He’s also got a great post on funding for startups in South Africa which any entrepreneur must read.