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Show HN: Drag/Drop Email Template Creator for Transactional Emails

by bialecki on 1/3/13, 4:59 PM with 16 comments

  • by eob on 1/3/13, 5:26 PM

    I'm happy any time I see web design/development moving into the web browser and out of text files. It feels like the natural progression of things.

    Some comments:

    - The example email (Weekly Summary) made me think "SPAM!" as soon as I saw it, because it looks like the kind of email that Twitter sends me and goes straight to my trash bin. On the other hand, I imagine there are a lot of use cases where summary emails are welcomed.

    - Other than that, the image does a good job communicating the features you provide. I'm left wondering where the data comes from though. Do I upload a file? Integrate with my back-end?

    - I was confused when the iPhone image showed template tags instead of a rendered result. Are you trying to imply that I will be editing templates using my mobile? That seems weird. If you're trying to show that your design templates are responsive, maybe just show the rendered version of the previous Weekly Summary template on an iPhone.

    - Site looks slick -- I like it!

    - Seeing this make me think that it would be cool for some If This Then This-style framework / API that hooks into your back-end and generates mails automatically. That would enable people to send me the emails that I enjoy reading, like "SoAndSo just cheered you on FitBit".

  • by felipe on 1/3/13, 5:57 PM

    This is an excellent concept that targets a real pain-point I faced many times, which is: How to properly lay-out or template emails without the pain of actually sending transactional emails through SMTP and looking at them in the client (Gmail, mobile, etc...). This also prevents designers and programmers to collaborate, so your concept would allow designers and marketeers to design and change email layouts independently from the programmer, which is another pain-point for non-developers.

    Having said that, it seems that you expect the app to use your SMTP, and IMHO that's a deal-breaker. Once an app or company is already using a SMTP provider, changing to an unknown one (which could impact deliverability and so on) is a deal-breaker. However, if you provide a tool that somehow the marketing dept can change templates which then the developers can somehow fetch into the source codebase, now that would be (I think) a good value.

    I am a software developer (not a designer nor marketeer) so I may not be the target user for this tool, but I think it would be valuable for developers too.

  • by niftylettuce on 1/3/13, 7:24 PM

  • by scottmotte on 1/3/13, 6:43 PM

    Love the copywriting above the fold. It is very personable, communicates a need to me that I didn't know I had, and tells me it can solve that need (all in a quick read).

  • by eli on 1/3/13, 5:42 PM

    It would be really nice if I could start using the tool before giving you my email address.

  • by navs on 1/3/13, 8:23 PM

    I love the drag and drop HTML development idea. I'm curious whether there's any open source libraries out there or open sourced projects that can help me develop something similar. Any suggestions?

  • by MasterScrat on 1/3/13, 9:16 PM

    I really like the look of your site. Did you make it yourself from Bootstrap, or is it a template?

  • by dirkdk on 1/4/13, 12:29 AM

    Just disabled. Too much HN love? :)

  • by somid3 on 1/3/13, 7:04 PM

    love the ease by which I can set a template. nice