The Minimal Product Philosophy

A bit of our history and our minimal agenda.

Circa 2010-2014, whenever we built an app/website internally or for clients, we went through the grind of rewriting the customer communication layer over and over again. This was mostly to send transactional emails for signups and password resets. To avoid this chore, we built a little tool that could store contacts and hook into AWS SES to send emails. Anyone on the team could use this tool and have a customer communication layer in a few minutes flat. In 2018 we built a more powerful contacts module (one that could store billions of contacts and contact meta data) and launched our internal tool to the external world under the unassuming name of 'Send With SES'.

We built Send With SES to simplify our work. Send With SES must work for you - not the other way round. This means keeping the product extremely simple and easy to use. This has become our foundational tenet. The same philosophy continues today.

Perhaps the most complicated part of using Send With SES is the initial setup process which involves integration with your AWS account. Once done, our minimalist agenda kicks in. The things we do (or rather don't do) are these .....

Minimal change: Send With SES has had the same UI/UX since 2018. The internet has become extremely fragile. URL's or blogs you bookmarked just one year ago seem to have vanished. On the contrary, our early beta users (from 2017) can still see their campaign statistics data in the same familiar UI. Even we are surprised we managed to achieve this.

Minimal feature creep: Send With SES stores your contacts and sends them messages (currently emails, and sms, and very soon, live chat and shared inboxes). That's it. Our tech is pretty minimal - primarily Node.js and SQL. No shiny new things.

Minimal user friction: Our users are busy building other products and Send With SES is probably the least obstructive tool in their arsenal. Right from registration to sending an email, our users can achieve most things within 3 clicks. And by keeping product simple, we get very few support requests, mostly from new users stuck on the initial AWS integration part.

Minimal pricing: The cost implications of keeping things minimal are phenomenal. We can process a billion more API calls in the very next hour and our server costs would barely budge. We do not have the burden of venture capital. All these mean we can offer Send With SES at a very low cost without compromising the longevity or survival of the product.

Updated: 28-Aug-2023

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