It's not very often that people stick with a software tool for over 10 years. How long ago is 10 years? Chromebooks had just hit the market. Google+ had just been launched. Netflix had just started online video streaming. Emojis had just been introduced on the iPhone. Well, you get the idea.
The point is, a decade is an incredibly long time, especially in the world of tech. That's why we're proud to have many customers who’ve been with Postmark since the beginning.
Justin Britten, founder and CEO of Prefinery, is one of them. He started using Postmark in 2011, and he’s still sending all of Prefinery’s emails with us today. We asked what made him stick with us for over a decade. Here’s what he said.
Prefinery manages pre-launch waiting lists for SaaS businesses, mobile apps, and fintech products. They help companies grow their customers through viral referral campaigns that build buzz and hype around new product launches.
As a bootstrapped SaaS company, Prefinery is run almost single-handedly by Justin Britten. With their lean and agile team, Prefinery has delivered massive launch campaigns for companies ranging from startups to the Fortune 500—and email is a core part of their services:
All of Prefinery’s email communication is built on top of the Postmark API, and those emails are crucial for managing the pre-launch waiting lists: opt-ins or subscription confirmations, thank you emails with referral links, follow up emails with invitation codes to access the newly launched product, nudges for someone who hasn’t referred a friend yet, and so on.
When Prefinery’s customers run campaigns, all their custom, branded emails go through Prefinery. Prefinery, in turn, depends on Postmark’s API to deliver these emails and uses Postmark’s webhooks to handle unsubscribe suppressions as well as email bounces. And once Postmark introduced support for sending promotional email, Justin started using our Broadcast Message Streams for emails that aren’t strictly transactional, such as reminders to folks on a waitlist who haven’t referred a friend just yet.
What Justin appreciates most about Postmark is the stability and consistency of the product and the brand. In the past, when he tried out other API products, the constant changes they made resulted in endless headaches for him as a developer.
At other companies, there’s just too much flux that affects me negatively as a customer. The API is changing, the UI is changing, the price is changing. When I had an integration with MailChimp, every year they were coming out with a new API. It was a constant battle to keep Prefinery up-to-date with that integration, until I finally gave up.
In contrast, he’s found Postmark to be remarkably consistent and dependable during the 10+ years he’s been using it.
Postmark’s API is consistent, super stable, and fast. The UI has remained consistent. The brand looks almost the same. There's a sense of continuity rather than flux. Not constant changes in the branding or UI, or chasing unnecessary features. Postmark has done a really good job of growing and changing in little ways that are beneficial, not detrimental, to me as a customer.
Thanks for noticing, Justin! We’re always improving Postmark, but it’s important to us that we do it in a way that never causes extra work for our customers. So whether you’ve set up an integration with Postmark last week or a few years ago, we’ll ensure it keeps working without you having to make updates. Even when we launch new features, backwards compatibility is always key.
As a fellow bootstrapper, Justin feels a connection with the Postmark brand. That’s a major reason why he’s stuck with us for a decade.
There's not too many people bootstrapping businesses these days. Postmark is one of very few examples. Philosophically, I prefer that way of running a business instead of ‘hey, let's go out and get funding and try to spend other people's money as fast as we can and look for a sale.’ Yes, there are other email providers, but it's nice to do business with a company where I feel a connection because we have similar values.
Indeed, Postmark is built by the team at Wildbit, a small, people-first company. We’re profitable and privately owned, so we don’t have investors to please or sky-high growth targets to hit, and we aren’t chasing the next big acquisition. We focus on building great products and a sustainable business that puts people over profits—and that answers only to you, our customers.
Are you a bootstrapper, too? We’d love to support you. Check out our generous discount for bootstrapped startups.
And while you’re here, check out Prefinery for your next product launch!
