This is a big reason for sure. As you can see in this post, those IP addresses can be hit or miss depending on the provider. At Postmark, we don't really believe in dedicated IPs for all customers. We think that our customer base should not include any bad actors, and instead manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean. The benefit is not just clean IPs, but clean IPs that have an incredible transactional-only reputation with the ISPs. This is how we are able to delivery so fast to the inbox. We only really believe in dedicated IPs for higher volume senders, especially since reputation is moving toward the domain more and more. I wrote about this six years ago, and it is even more true today (https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated...).
At the same time, if you are willing to install and manage Postal on your own servers, it's not that hard to maintain your own IP with a great reputation. You just need a good hosting provider (probably not AWS), you need to set up your infrastructure like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, rDNS, and Return Paths, and most importantly you need to maintain good engagement (low bounces, high opens). At a glance, Postal looks like a nice option if you want to do it on your own for cheap. You just might lack the stability, support, maintenance, and performance that goes behind an ESP.
> manually approve every customer to ensure our entire CIDR ranges are clean
This is probably a key element of good performance. To keep my mail admin duties part time I simply whois the IP of evil senders and drop the resulting entire CIDR block into the our local blacklist.
Judging from the amount of it the sending email portion is not what spammers struggle with. It's the "maintain your own IP with a great reputation" part. How would Postal help?
That's apparently a process that takes time, but in the long run it could easily pay off. Over the years I've dealt with "Verio" selling my ip address to spammers. Before that they had entire ranges of IP blocked that I got caught up in.
A couple years ago I did the work to use "Mandrill" in an app and they got merged with "MailChimp" who changed how my app could use their service and I had to redo those routines again.
Well from the install directions they recommend 8GB of memory for the server. A simpler SMTP server like Postfix or Exim can do with much fewer resources, and a spam operation doesn't care about abiding by protocol for redelivery attempts, they just fire and forget and mostly opt for direct SMTP delivery.
Hey everyone, Chris Nagele here from Wildbit. For some background, I wrote about our reasons for moving to a private office plan. In short, it's more than putting on some headphones.
I had the privilege of working in this environment and I can vouch for Chris here. The design of the Wildbit space works exponentially better than any open office layout could ever work. Communication was isolated to where it was needed, and conference rooms exist for when communications need to be had in private. It's the perfect mix. It may have cost more to do it right, but the bottom line wasn't money, it was productivity and the ability to have heads-down time to get real, meaningful work done.
Disclaimer: Though that's not hard to measure, I did not personally measure it.
All I can attest to is that in terms of the macro level of productivity, it was a better experience. The slider between focus work and social interaction across the team went closer toward focus work when working at the office. Social bonds aren't diminished at all by the fact that everyone has a space to do the best work they can. They're strengthened. Team members feel trusted.
I certainly have some street cred here too: I have been in this industry long enough to have experienced the misfortune of working in an open office. A few years ago, I worked with a company that had private offices -- then moved to an open layout. In my experience, productivity tanked for a majority of the engineering team. The problem with that floorplan? Distraction. There was nothing but "stuff" happening all around you at all times. Imagine debugging an issue, or responding to a particularly precarious situation after a PagerDuty alert comes through, all while the following items are happening:
* Nerf darts randomly flying through the air with a frequency of about 10-30 per hour.
* People using their outside voices.
* People walking around (getting coffee, going to the bathrooms, getting something to eat).
* Journalists trying to advertise the company walking around getting tours.
* Hour long discussions right in the middle of the work area, even though we had conference rooms within distance.
* The constant feeling of being "surveilled" by the management team.
As I stated originally, I've been in this industry for a long enough time, and -- at running the risk of sounding too self-congratulatory (hopefully not) -- I'm primarily intrinsically motivated. No amount of management is going to change my level of motivation, because I find motivation with or without the presence of any external forces. They might sway me just a hair, but generally speaking, for me personally, the MORE I feel managed the more demotivated I feel. That's just my personalty.
I bring this up for a reason: It's not great, it's not terrible, but in my observations, it (intrinsic motivation) also happens to be a trait in the personality of a lot of the great engineering talent I've had the pleasure of working with over the years. People who aren't intrinsically motivated don't typically put in the time and effort required to be a great engineer who gets things done. Intrinsic motivation means that you put in your "10,000 hours" in earnest, with a pure desire to constantly improve because you're enjoying what you're doing. It takes time, blood, sweat, and even tears to be a great engineer, and if you're doing it only because someone else is making you, I just can't see how you're going to be anything more than "passable". Therein lies the challenge in hiring and focusing great talent on a unified goal.
All that said, when you hire for skill and talent, get the cream of the crop, and then put all of those bright folks in a room where they feel like they're being monitored, that leads to a feeling that "I'm not trusted", and that feeling of not being trusted leads to a feeling of "I don't trust them if they don't trust me". It's a very visceral and primal feeling. You see security cameras pop up in your neighborhood, and you first think, "They're watching me", then you think, "What are they up to watching me?". Distrust (even the sense of it where it may not exist) breeds distrust. It sows a feeling of distrust when you configure your company like a panopticon, and that's essentially what many open floor plans end up becoming. The modern day version of a factory line, with a foreman looming at all times.
You can see where I'm going with this. A lot of folks felt like they were being watched when working in the open floor plan, and I'd argue it sapped from their more useful, more lucrative creative energy. This isn't something that's talked about a lot when discussing the pitfalls of open floor plans because it's a sociology subject, but I observed it as a very real, very prolific problem in the organic culture (that is, the bottom up culture) of that organization.
My point is, I have seen and worked in offices that are designed wrong, and Wildbit got this right.
I enjoy working in an open office atm, it's nice having everyone so close. It is also a necessity for me to have a "no distractions" environment while coding. I'll throw on headphones and turn my desk so I have no visual or noise distractions.
1. Our pricing reflects the quality of delivery due to being transactional only. With much higher engagement rates, our speed and delivery is superior. Customers never have to wait behind a bulk campaign.
2. Dedicated IPs are a way for ESPs to pawn responsibility onto customers instead of themselves (and get a few more bucks in the process). They only make sense if you are sending a huge volume, but we do offer dedicated IPs for free for higher volume accounts. Instead, most people use our shared IPs and benefit from the volume of great engagement to get their emails delivered to the inbox faster.
3. We're the only ones to offer an extended full content history of every message for 45 days. You can search and see the exact email sent at no cost, which comes in handy when sending so many unique messages.
Full disclosure: I'm the founder of Postmark. Any questions, just email me: chris@wildbit.com.
Thinking of "email delivery as a commodity" is the first mistake people make - all ESPs are not created equal. If this were the case, there would not be such a huge variance in not only getting to the Inbox, but how fast you get to the Inbox. This is why we've focused on transactional only, knowing fully well we will grow slower as a business (and why we are more expensive), but have superior delivery since transactional email has a much higher engagement rate and reputation with ISPs.
The entire idea of "dumb pipe" or "commodity" needs to go away. There is a reason why companies like Asana, Desk, and Minecraft chose Postmark, since their email is critical to their business and choosing the right providers makes a real difference. Now, if your emails are not critical, I can see how any service might work. I have yet to come across a product owner who is comfortable letting their customers wait for their transactional emails though - no matter the size of product or company.
Full disclosure, I'm the founder of Postmark - the best "dumb pipe commodity" money can buy.
SparkPost/MessageSystems claims to have the highest inbox rate in the space, and their customer list backs this up. It's much more impressive than Asana, Desk, and Minecraft (think LinkedIn, Facebook, Zillow, Pinterest, etc).
They absolutely recognize that ESPs are a commodity, even reselling delivery to ExactTarget, Responsys, etc, as the "pipe". It's hard to believe your reasoning when the industry leader is saying something different.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc do not use Sparkpost, they use their on-premise installable software that many ESPs use and pay tens or hundreds of thousands for, which indeed is a dumb pipe MTA. Those big companies still have a full-time staff managing delivery and infrastructure. It's basically a replacement to Postfix, not a full fledge, multi-datacenter, multi-tenant hosted application to support many thousands of concurrent customers.
A hosted "product" is a different animal. Sure, it needs to have great delivery, but the work that goes into making it easy to troubleshoot when you have issues, minimize developer work, and bring useful data back into your application is something else. This only becomes painfully obvious when you deeply rely on email for your business.
There is a reason why Sparkpost left Postmark out of their comparison. We have the same data sources (eData), and we came out on top.
When we were searching for space this was our preferred choice. We wanted a large single floor space with offices on the perimeter. Each office would have a glass wall to see the open space. This way, as you said, people can see what is going on. Searching for office space is hard, so we ended up where we are and made the best of it. We still get the offices on the perimeter and the glass wall, but separated by multiple floors. Maybe we just put Dropcams everywhere so people can see when lunch is ready :)
These are great questions. I'll be sure to do a follow up post in a year and see where we are. I know that the biggest reward when we went from 100% remote to having an office was the feeling of being in touch with what was going on. It was also the spontaneous conversation. I am hoping we don't lose that.
It's actually the biggest reason why we have a chef prepared lunch. We found that it forces everyone out of their desks at one time to hang out as a team. We usually don't even talk about work, which is the way it should be.
The other assumption is that the break out rooms will become longer term project team rooms. So if a couple of people are working on a feature for a few weeks they can take over a room to focus together.
I can say for sure that being a remote team enabled us to work around a lot of these concerns. It's easy to feel isolated when you are remote, so we work hard to make sure all communication happens asynchronously or in chat, even if we are in the same room. We also use video a lot, and my hope is that we can use it even more in the new office with remote team members.
Your first point reinforces our decision on private offices. We encourage only working 8 hours a day. This way you don't have a chance to stay late or work long hours to find that "quiet time" when everyone is gone. It's up to us, the founders, to make sure you are productive during the day.
We believe that when you come to work you should make the best of those hours so you can spend the evening with your family, friends, or just relaxing.
I'm glad that you feel that way! I'm a big proponent of work-life balance, so being able to be productive enough through the day so I can leave without feeling guilty is a huge plus. I wish more companies held similar views.
Hopefully, if there are enough productivity gains and as the startup transitions out of super-lean mode, you could represent that increased productivity with a shortened work day/week!
Half of our team is remote. Using physical space for controlling productivity (or lack of) is not a solution. You and the rest of your team should keep each other accountable through performance metrics that are mutually agreed upon. Being a remote team for so long (15 years) has forced us to find alternatives to traditional office babysitting and it has helped us design our new office as well.
That's the best part, we are not funded at all and are building this office after eight years of profits from our products: Beanstalk, Postmark and dploy.io. We count every dollar that goes into the space and it is purely an investment in our team and culture. I'm personally researching everything from glass panels, to steel sourcing to carpet with our architects to keep costs down.
Visual distractions are huge. Huge huge huge. As someone who has trouble concentrating in the first place, tiny visual distractions (even just someone shifting in their seat in the peripheral) are enough to pull me out of flow.
At the same time, if you are willing to install and manage Postal on your own servers, it's not that hard to maintain your own IP with a great reputation. You just need a good hosting provider (probably not AWS), you need to set up your infrastructure like DKIM, SPF, DMARC, rDNS, and Return Paths, and most importantly you need to maintain good engagement (low bounces, high opens). At a glance, Postal looks like a nice option if you want to do it on your own for cheap. You just might lack the stability, support, maintenance, and performance that goes behind an ESP.