I'd love to hear any feedback the HN community has and I'd really appreciate any tips people have about marketing this site since I've not done much of that and don't know where to start.
1) Do you provide an archive? Can it be public?
And while I usually tell people (based entirely on my intuition rather than actual business experience) to charge more -- where does the 100 members limit come from? Certain types of groups, like alumni from a single subject/course/small business/hobby -- might organically grow past that point. Should they then migrate away from your service?
In general I wish you the best of luck - but for me (not really a target audience) -- I'd like to know how this compares to setting up a Mailman-list, D-lang forum or something along those lines for non-technical users? (Apart from the obvious, and undeniable value-add of you hosting the actual service).
There is a searchable archive of all messages which is only available to the list administrators. Since members of a list aren't required to have any sort of credentials the message archive isn't available to be but I do intend of make options in this area.
The limit of 100 members is mostly an attempt, at this time, to only tragedy small group. I simply didn't want groups of 1000's from the start.
As to how we're different from a MailMan-list etc. Our aim is to make setting up and managing an email list as simple as it can be. Group email is a very effective tool for small groups and we want to make it available to as many as them as possible.
I love, love this idea and how you've done it. But I'd be really sad to see the service take off and you can't support it because the model doesn't work.
I just worry about you charging a flat rate for something that has a variable cost (email). That's assuming you're using a service like Mandrill or SendGrid and not rolling your own.
Anyway, kudos. I love the looks of this and will probably be a paying customer several times over.
I have made spreadsheets working out how much lists will cost to run for various sizes and levels of activity and I think $10/year covers most reasonable cases.
Some competitors have more tiered pricing but I really wanted to keep things simple with a single headline price.
Your landing page design is really nice, too.
[1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3391-launch-basecamp-breeze-t...
It felt strange using a project for inspiration which had been canned after a few months! I believe 37Signals didn't get the traction they were after, but enough traction for 37Signals and enough transaction for me are very different things.
Can I ask how much disk is used (or how you much disk you project will be used) on average per email group?
I loved the simplicity of the UI and the short explanations.
We use Google Cloud Datastore which is quite reasonably priced at $0.18 per GB per month.
Grouplet is free, and has quite a number of groups using it. It's so cheap to run that I didn't feel it was worth charging for until I have an insane number of emails being sent every month.
Good luck, I hope it works for you!
This seems like a cool alternative to FB groups/Google groups/etc. though.
