Philip Manavopoulos is the founder of Doorbell, a tool that makes it simple to collect and respond to feedback from websites and apps. We met him at Lead Dev where he told us, “Postmark is the app I’m happiest to be paying for!” Doorbell uses email and integrations with other communication tools to collect and respond to user feedback.
Phil started building Doorbell four years ago and treated it as a tech playground at first. Cost was Phil’s biggest concern when he was shopping for email providers (and other services) in the early stages of building Doorbell. Free was the perfect price, and when he saw Mandrill’s free plan, he decided to use their service. As time went on and Doorbell grew, Phil started getting scattered reports of missing email. He assumed these delayed or missing messages were normal. Customers would contact him wanting to know why a password reset email hadn’t arrived when they asked for it, or reported not getting an email notification when someone replied to an ongoing conversation.
When Mandrill announced their billing changes, Phil decided to compare how much it would cost to stay on Mandrill versus using a different email service provider. Phil tells the story like this: “When I looked at the cost to stay on Mandrill and compared it with other providers, Postmark was going to cost me less each month than other providers, given the scale Doorbell had reached. Doorbell uses SMTP to send emails, so the migration was really simple. I grabbed the settings and credentials from Postmark and popped them into Doorbell. Eventually, I want to do a tighter integration with the Postmark API, but I like not having to worry about email as a single founder working on a side project.”
If a customer emails me to ask about a missing message, I can go right to the message history dashboard in Postmark to find it. Since I moved to Postmark, there hasn’t been any message I haven’t been able to find there.
Since the migration, Doorbell has continued to grow. Since moving to Postmark, the number of missing or delayed emails have noticeably dropped. Phil said, “If a customer emails me to ask about a missing message, I can go right to the message history dashboard in Postmark to find it. Since I moved to Postmark, there hasn’t been any message I haven’t been able to find there.”
Phil has improved the Doorbell experience by leveraging the Postmark API and its webhooks. Doorbell customers can reply to messages from their inbox and Postmark parses those messages and sends the replies through Doorbell. Doorbell also uses the Postmark API to keep track of bounces and let their customers know when an address is unreachable. This data is stored in the app and shows up when anyone tries to send a follow-up message. The same data is used in Doorbell’s Slack integration so teams can keep track of bounce messages as they work (alongside message notifications).
Email is an integral part of Doorbell, and Postmark handles this core infrastructure so Phil can focus on improving other parts of the Doorbell experience. “As a solo founder, I'm always reviewing and evaluating 3rd party providers. Can I get a better deal? Can I find another service that is more reliable? I’ve stopped asking those questions with Postmark. It hits the trifecta of great customer support, excellent service, and good/affordable pricing. I’m all in for Postmark!”
As a solo founder, I'm always reviewing and evaluating 3rd party providers. Can I get a better deal? Can I find another service that is more reliable? I’ve stopped asking those questions with Postmark. It hits the trifecta of great customer support, excellent service, and good/affordable pricing. I’m all in for Postmark!
