Minimalism
SENDUNE (formerly Send With SES) has had the same UI/UX since 2018 and you can expect that to continue into the next decade. This is our way of 'Minimalism'.
Circa 2012-2014, 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 easily hook into AWS SES to send emails. Anyone on our team could use this tool and have a customer communication layer in a few minutes flat. In 2017 we built a robust contacts module (one that could store billions of contacts and contact meta data) and in Jan-2018, we launched our internal tool to the external world under the unassuming name of 'Send With SES'.
We built SENDUNE to simplify our work. Our goal is to have SENDUNE do the same for you. 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 SENDUNE 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: SENDUNE 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.
Minimal feature creep: SENDUNE stores your contacts and sends them messages (currently emails, sms, otp's, and very soon, shared inboxes for customer support). That's it. Our tech is pretty minimal - primarily Node.js and SQL. No shiny new things.
Minimal user friction: You are busy building your own products and SENDUNE is designed to be the least obstructive tool in your arsenal. Right from registration to sending an email, you can achieve most things within 3 clicks. SENDUNE just gets out of your way.
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 SENDUNE at a very low cost without compromising the longevity or survival of the product.
What sets SENDUNE apart is our focus on a minimal set of features combined with an extreme obsession with usability. These are our First Principles.
Familiarity: SENDUNE has had the same UI/UX since 2018 and you can expect that to continue. Even if you login after a gap of one year your muscle memory will kick in immediately.
Longevity: SENDUNE started as our internal tool somewhere around 2014. In a world where startup death is the norm, we have been publicly available since 2018, and - ceteris paribus - will continue to be available well into the next decade.
Continuity: Longevity doesn't make sense without feature continuity. Links 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. That's what we mean by continuity. If we introduce a feature, we make sure it lives long. No 'planned obsolescence' here.
Dependability: Things must just work. The familiar button you click to send an email must work every time. API integrations must be 'set it and forget it'. We achieve this by adopting boring technology and being skeptical about shiny new tech. We're not averse to new tech. We experiment a lot but don't send things to production unless we're sure we can manage it for the long term.
Updated: 09-September-2024