Apple is such a massive company, it's easy to forget that each of these variations sells millions of units to customers who want that one product.
For example, many pilots have an iPad Mini for maps and charts. In a cramped cockpit, the regular iPad is too big. With much faster graphics and support for Pencil 2 it's a big upgrade, so I fully expect this to be the #1 choice for that crowd.
I would encourage you to try it out. The expectation on the other side is extremely low -- no one expects a conversation or honestly more than a two-word pleasantry. And the camera defaults to the back camera, so no one sees anyone's face.
My last call:
Me: "Hello?"
Them: "Hi. Can you tell me which can is soup?"
Me: "Can I see the other one?"
Them: "This one?"
Me: "That's cream of tomato."
Them: "Thank you."
Me: "You're welcome."
I toured the main FedEx hub in Memphis several years ago. They have many buildings that sort packages on high-speed machinery.
In one building, there was a long line of parcel trays, each carrying a single item. The trays would move fast down the line and, at just the right moment, tip the parcel out and into a bin below, each for a different flight. Because of the tray's speed (and the trays don't stop), the tipping needed to start well before it was over the bin, at a precisely calibrated time. A video of these machines is here, at 1m 45s: https://youtu.be/xytmh6t3Grk?t=105
It was one of the few sorting buildings that was air conditioned in the hot Memphis summers, and not for the humans. The humidity affected how quickly the parcels slipped off of the tray, and they might end up in the wrong bin.
> Give them money, while the company is apparently still going to worry about milking advertising dollars out of me?
Does Zoom have ads? I haven't seen any. I believe all of the ad tracking is for the reverse: Zoom wants to see if their own advertising is effective. For example, if they buy an ad on Facebook that you saw and then you install the app, they can attribute the install to that ad and measure ROI.
They can track that from the clickthroughs. The adtech economy is far richer that just showing ads and tracking ads -- the suggestion is that they're feeding data from your use of Zoom to enrich your advertising id(s) to help others provide you the most relevant possible advertising experience / track the living daylights out of you.
These are the same kinds of assumptions that lead engineers to think they can build a [any product] clone in a weekend. It's unlikely that the problem or constraints are nearly as simple as one may think.
Consider: single auth across all the state's services, external APIs, identity verification, address verification, employer ID verification, federal/military ID verification, income/tax verification, phone verification, bank account information, translation into multiple languages, accessibility features, etc. Also, there's probably a lot of legacy infrastructure and process.
Also, if "ability to burst to 10x normal filings per week that might happen once every 40 years" wasn't in the spec, I think they were right not to engineer for it.
Admittedly it's a value call. My thought is generally if it's a small incremental cost that greatly increases the robustness then you should go for it. But - sometimes the money or time just isn't there. I'm bothered more by the people not even wanting to have the discussion than by those who do a summary analysis and decide it's not worth it.
"Sixteen countries have shut schools nationwide, impacting almost 363.1 million children and youth. A further sixteen countries have implemented localized school closures to prevent or contain the spread of COVID-19."
It really depends on the brand and the type of email that you're sending (new product, content, abandoned cart, etc), and each email marketer needs to test for themselves. I've seen more textual emails work well when it's a welcome letter from the CEO or founder, but it's not a rule.
Broadly speaking, ecommerce is still a very visual experience at every step. It's really rare for me to see emails without images.
Have you ever thought about packaging up the analytics you can derive from this into a product offering?
The inspiration you mentioned in another comment is the exact impetus that would make for a lucrative offering, particularly on the agency side. Things such as email cadence, offerings, screenshots of the specific emails, etc. Either at an individual brand level, rolled up to a pre-defined category, or allowing individuals to choose their own basket of companies to create benchmarks from. Would be really useful when creating pitches, but also for ongoing digest reports for competitive monitoring.
And that's just based off of re-packaging what you're already showing. There are lots of additional useful opportunities that would only varying levels of effort to unlock.
Great ideas -- thanks! A couple of people have suggested similar, though selling to hedge funds.
Right now, I think the greatest growth is still from adding more brands and making them more accessible (improving search and navigation), to yield more traffic. Spinning up a new product and sales channel might be a distraction, but definitely worth thinking about as the site grows.
You could also repurpose the idea and leverage it as a traffic driver. Run a few high-level queries to get the baseline stats, then post those up on a benchmarks page.
That way you have a draw for those types of needs, yielding more traffic from that niche. And could (but don't have to) leverage it as a passive sales channel and low-effort product by just throwing a blurb at the bottom of that to contact if they're looking for something more specific. Which would be a low-effort product of just tweaking the queries you created to get the data for that page, plus the one time upfront effort of making a splashy Excel/Powerpoint template to drop the bespoke query results into.
That'd end up with a solid, minimal effort traffic driver. A potential passive sales channel with minimal incremental effort. And since the targeting/messaging is open ended in nature and you don't want to focus heavily on a new sales channel and product offering, you can let it sit there and mellow while seeing which potential market segments (hedge funds, agencies, in-house, etc) shake out organically. Giving you some potential insights into which area to focus on if you do eventually want to go from passive to active.
My wife uses your product all the time! She's a copywriter for a cosmetics company, and uses it to research what they've sent out in the past, and also what other brands have been sending.
She finds it super useful, so thanks for building it :)
Thanks for relaying that -- really appreciate it! Marketers, designers, and copywriters are definitely frequent users of Milled, so I'm building some new features for them in the coming months. If she has any ideas or requests, please let her know that she can email me any time: [my hn username]@milled.com
I'm interested in linking to affiliate products with a recipe site project. Can you recommend any resources on learning how to monetize via affiliates? Basically I'm working on a recipe site, and some of them involve the Instant Pot, so I don't think it'd be unfair if I generate a penny a click for linking to their product. Thanks.
There are hundreds of guides out there -- Google for the one that works for you. Though, I don't think you'll find anything that pays per click -- usually they pay on conversion (someone clicks and then buys). Google AdSense might work better for you.
The site was built from day 1 with SEO as the primary user acquisition channel. So most of the engineering effort has been to ensure that the images are saved, all of the text is preserved, and all links are crawled to their final landing page. The last one has been especially challenging, with all kinds of tracking links, blocked crawlers, and bad HTML -- all while trying to avoid click on any unsubscribe link.
I use Skimlinks for monetization. I could rewrite the links, but for now I am just using their drop-in JS script that rewrites any monetizable links automatically. Very easy (though they take a decent cut).
I can't see myself ever using this service, so I'm interested in what makes people want to. Would you be willing to share the sort of search queries that lead people to you?
People aren't searching for the service -- they're searching for the content. It's a very long tail of keywords that brands have used across millions of emails.
The vast majority of brands have no problem with what the site does, and use the site frequently for their own purposes. A handful have asked for the emails to be taken down, usually because they send discount codes that they only want to distribute to their direct mailing list.
I didn't. Instead, I manually subscribed to hundreds of newsletters myself to get started. Eventually thousands. It wasn't until 4 years in that I added the ability for brands to add themselves. Prior to that, they could only request to be added via an email form.
The thing keeping me sane was a lot of work on backend tools to streamline the process. A ranked queue of brands that I had sourced from various places, and automatically-generated email addresses.
I was running email marketing for a brand, and I noticed two things: 1) we spent several days to create each email blast, but the traffic / revenue impact was over in < 24 hours, and 2) I subscribed to dozens of competitor emails for research and I was tired of them.
My hypothesis was that a site that could collect them would be useful, and that it could help extend the lifetime of an email's content effort.
I asked around a little bit, but generally just built it. My hedge, though, was to time-box dev to a few weeks and then show it to more people for feedback before spending additional dev time.
It's a bit all over the place. ELB -> EC2 -> RDS Postgres. S3 for the storage of the emails and images, CDN'd by BunnyCDN. Hetzner for background job servers. Digital Ocean to run headless Chrome (browserless.io) on Kubernetes. Will consolidate a bit next year.
For example, many pilots have an iPad Mini for maps and charts. In a cramped cockpit, the regular iPad is too big. With much faster graphics and support for Pencil 2 it's a big upgrade, so I fully expect this to be the #1 choice for that crowd.