I have been using it for almost 1.5 years and really like it. It takes a moment to set up and has way less features than Mailchimp (less third party integrations, segmentation features etc.), but the price is awesome and Amazon SES is also very cheap. I haven't been using it with Digital Ocean (so don't know how well that works).
Amazon SES also has very good IPs. If you check them on https://senderscore.org you will see they usually rank above 95%.
The only problem is Amazon SES strict policy against bounces and complaints. So your list has to be very clean and ideally double opt-in before you can send. Also Amazon SES starts you out with 10k emails/day and 5emails/sec. You need to ask for a quota increase (which was always granted in my experience) before sending higher volume faster.
My tip: If you have some old/invalid emails that you know will cause problems with Amazon SES, send to your most active (recent openers and clickers) first and then gradually introduce your older emails. Monitor your bounce and complaint rates to stay below 5% and 0.1% respectively.
That's just in the beginning. As your volume increases and your stats are ok (low bounces and complaints) you can ask for a quota increase (+ speed increase) which is usually granted. It'll take a few days until you are up and running with a bigger list.
Maybe Asimov's 3 visionary laws will come in handy soon:
1.) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Great advice! I would agree with everything except maybe that “I just had to hack something together…” always is a bad thing.
Especially from the business point of view this article stresses, it can be reasonable to 80/20 your way out of certain problems and then polish it in the future.
The problem with the "Don't hack things together" advice is that it's invariably written by developers who like to write code, enjoy writing about code, and want to be seen as thoughtful and influential people in their development community. Those sorts of people tend to gravitate towards the projects that have the scale where code quality is critical because what they work on lasts for years with thousands of people building on it.
If you're a developer who throws code together in a few months for clients who aren't paying for a quality product, and maybe you'll come back to it a couple of times in the future when it needs a new field added or a page title changed, then a hack is perfectly valid and can hugely improve your business's bottom line over spending even just another 10% making sure you've got tests and documentation and defensive code and so on. Spending time on the maintainability of code that no one will ever maintain is a waste of time.
Thanks for this comment. I kind of feared saying something like this would be begging for down votes, but I'm glad I'm not alone. I truly believe that a good developer knows how to strike a balance, and if he/she wants to be a hero to the team, sometimes a hack is better than stressing out 4 other people because you are insistent about adhering to an architectural pattern in the face of a looming and important deadline.
This has been a major point of contention for us recently with team members that can't distinguish 'urgent' matters from 'important' ones.
As well as your average customer. Your average customer couldn't care less about the maintainability, testability, or cleanliness of the code. They care about getting the features they asked for within the time frame they were promised for the price they were quoted. You could argue that those things all play into that and are things they should care about and I wouldn't disagree. But the reality is they don't. If you tell them you have to push it back because you need to clean up the code and make it look pretty you're going to have an unhappy customer.
Could an article based on the same data not also be titled "Seed rounds increasingly replaced by Series A"? Because while Seed rounds are in decline, Series A is up.
Series A also are higher amounts than Seed, so volume in investments is actually going up.
Also, it doesn't matter if something is called Series A or Seed. In the end it is about the amount of dollars available to entrepreneurs.
I think this is also about choosing your battles wisely. When you build something new you will find it is hard. You will have a lot of flexibility choosing how to go about it. It's not necessary to reinvent the wheel on every front. That's why I love frameworks (Bootstrap, Ruby on Rails, templates, even spreadsheets for business plans etc.).
Frameworks quickly allow you to go from 0-80% without having to start from scratch. You just take something that already exists and then fill in the gaps with your values, colors, content etc.
I agree with gitaarik that in the grand scheme of things libraries are also like a framework.
Amazon SES also has very good IPs. If you check them on https://senderscore.org you will see they usually rank above 95%. The only problem is Amazon SES strict policy against bounces and complaints. So your list has to be very clean and ideally double opt-in before you can send. Also Amazon SES starts you out with 10k emails/day and 5emails/sec. You need to ask for a quota increase (which was always granted in my experience) before sending higher volume faster.
My tip: If you have some old/invalid emails that you know will cause problems with Amazon SES, send to your most active (recent openers and clickers) first and then gradually introduce your older emails. Monitor your bounce and complaint rates to stay below 5% and 0.1% respectively.