Yash From Momentum (00:00)
Hello and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for this show where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, scaling their teams and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Alaa from SMTPing. SMTPing is an all -in -one email delivery solution.
It helps you do everything you need to do before you hit sign on that email campaign. And we're excited to hear their story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive into the world of SaaS founders. Hey, Alaa, thank you for joining in. How are you doing today?
Alaa (00:44)
Hey, Yash. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be within your podcast. I'm doing great. And waiting for your questions.
Yash From Momentum (00:54)
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for joining in. And so my first question is, I was going through SMTPing's website as part of the preparation for this conversation. And one of the things that I saw was that there is a free forever version that you offer. I mean, there are certain limits, but there is a free forever version for SMTPing that I could get for myself. So I'm a big fan of the Dark Knight.
And one of the things that that Joker said in the dark night was if you're good at something they would do it for free So would love to understand from you like why have a free -forever plan? Especially when most of your competitors would have a 14 -day trial or a 70 trial or 21 day trial
Alaa (01:26)
Yeah.
Yeah, actually, it's not a new thing regarding. I mean, even in the email industry with all its fields, you see email marketing platforms or called email platforms. There are actually some not too much, but some who are offering free forever plan for those, for example, who are in an early stage or just small agency agencies who have, for example.
a contact list of let's say below 500 contacts. Yeah, they can use that you see. From the moment when they exceed the 500 contacts, they will be obliged to pay. And I wanted to apply this on email validation. Of course, I wanted to be generous regarding this. First to bring prospects, test the quality of the service, of the features.
Yash From Momentum (02:08)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Alaa (02:31)
And of course, just to show that somehow it could be useful for them. This is mainly actually why we suggest this. And in email validation, yes, it's a new business model based on subscription. Maybe now we are three or four doing this as far as I know, you see with competitors or.
Yash From Momentum (02:46)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alaa (02:55)
those who are suggesting at least the email validation feature. For us, the starting, when you open an account, you get like 10K credits, which means one credit is equal to email validation. We do not count the unknown results, and we do not count as well the duplicate results. For example,
Yeah, if within an email list you have, for example, two rows of yash at momentum .io, it will duplicate this address, make it one, and do not count this as consumed credit. Yeah, it doesn't cost actually that much. And why not? I mean, we have...
Somehow we have to raise you see the expectations as well. And yeah, see our limits as well So this is mainly why and after that each month now we are establishing to 2k credits 2 ,000 credits and For the same reason as email marketing platforms as long as you have you still have like less than 2 ,000 contacts
Yash From Momentum (03:41)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Alaa (04:09)
where you need to send like once per month, once per week, three times a week, et cetera, et cetera. Regardless your email sending frequency, you have these 2K. If you need more, you have also other plans which are one time purchase or subscription. This is actually more or less the business model. So yeah, we offer a free...
bundle let's say for those who need it at least when they start
Yash From Momentum (04:37)
And so would it be fair to say that having a free for your version with some limits is a good way to acquire some early customers who are also maybe in their early stages of their own journey? So they also have smaller lists.
Alaa (04:53)
100 100% this is how it works at least for me I come from a digital marketing background partially yes this is a funnel system and everybody loves trying free stuff you see so why not so why not of course and out of that I mean out of
10 ,000 or 100 ,000 or 1 million subscribers you will always get a conversion rate you see which varies between 0 .2 % and 0 .1 % and 2 or 3 % at its highest you see so yeah absolutely
Yash From Momentum (05:33)
Got it. So give us some, like, let's take stock of SMTPing. So at what stage are we, like, what is the metric about SMTPing that would best describe the size and scale of operations? So is it like how many users and how many customers you have? How many emails are being validated? Like, what are the numbers that you can share that will give me and the people who are listening to this conversation, like, some sense of the scale and size at which SMTPing operates?
Alaa (06:00)
Yeah, since our official start one year ago, one year and two months actually, we got now more than 2K, I think, or 3K users. And regarding email validation, like we did a variety of the number, we did a variety first for local test for us, for email list and also
our subscribers as well. Now we exceeded, I think, I don't know, but a big number, a really big regarding email validation. The servers are working like 24 /7 you see. And yeah, with some marketing campaigns, we need also to multiply the number of servers in order to.
Yash From Momentum (06:40)
Yeah.
Mm -hmm.
Alaa (06:50)
Yeah, maintain at least the stability within the performance, yeah. Email-validation performance.
Yash From Momentum (06:55)
These are great problems to have. So of course, as a part of this podcast series and these conversations, I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of SaaS founders, fortunately. And the way that I'm able to very clearly understand whether a SaaS founder is very early stage or they have something out there in the market is when the conversation shifts from
When are we building the next feature? How do we make what we have more stable, faster, less bugs? How do we optimize on the server cost and stuff like that? So the challenges are very different. Before you are in the market, you are always thinking of, hey, I've got 10 features. I need the 11th one. And then as soon as you go in the market, you start to think about, how do I make sure that everything that I have is
Alaa (07:37)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yash From Momentum (07:47)
But these are great problems to have, right? And so, so that indicates a scale.
Alaa (07:49)
But yes, for this one, I want to say to every SaaS founder, you have to get one DevOps as a co -founder because he will help a lot. He will cover at least 90 % of the scaling performance and stability problems, you see.
He knows the cost of the servers. He knows the best plans. He does automation. And as a SaaS founder, you can be a technical guy and you can be not, which is my case. It helps a lot unless the SaaS founder is already DevOps or has some skills in DevOps as well.
Yash From Momentum (08:11)
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I'll tell you what, so like six, seven years ago, then whenever I would speak to a SaaS company or any product company, they would list like early stage companies, they would list DevOps as a key skill that they need, right? Then they would have that. One of the recent trends that I'm noticing,
Alaa (08:41)
Yeah.
Yash From Momentum (08:51)
is that since AWS and Google Cloud and Azure are giving you 5 ,000, Google gives up to $100 ,000 in credits for GCP. And because of those credits, these early stage companies have stopped thinking of DevOps as an important skill because it's not going to bother them for a year, year and a half, which is the wrong thing to do. Because if you don't have a DevOps person, it is not just linked to the cost of the server. It is also linked to how do you design the database.
Alaa (08:59)
Exactly.
Absolutely.
Yash From Momentum (09:20)
how the queries are run and how the data can be fetched in an optimized fashion. And so that is an interesting tip. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Alaa (09:27)
101 % BG
I agree 101 % regarding this. GCP and AWS are just doing their marketing work. It's like, it's an attack of Titan between each other actually. But there are still a lot of things to do. You see, there are also some programming staff. They do Python, they do automations and they do indexation. It could be also,
Yash From Momentum (09:38)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Alaa (09:56)
data scientist job as could be also as well DevOps job and like let's take for example AWS it has at least more than 120 features or services now even a technical guy a senior developer cannot do that no it's a job RPC
Yash From Momentum (10:02)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, doesn't do everything.
Alaa (10:22)
And that's why both of them are suggesting those certifications as well, I mean GCP and AWS, because it's an apart job actually. And it helps a lot, you never know.
from where you are at this stage and you will be at this stage you see it could be within like five minutes and it will get a huge traffic and all the website will crash you see so you will certainly need it here
Yash From Momentum (10:48)
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. And so here's something that I wanted to explore as a part of this conversation, which was your background is in Salesforce implementations. So at Salesforce, you have Salesforce certificates, especially the marketing cloud certificates of Salesforce. And so how do you go from marketing to founding a SaaS company? Talk to us about
Alaa (11:05)
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Yash From Momentum (11:16)
the challenges of finding early team members because those people are required to have very different skill set than you have. And so how did you go about it? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Alaa (11:23)
Absolutely.
The idea started to mash up into my head within September 2021, July, September 2021, during the COVID period, actually. I didn't know, I mean, in my environment, I didn't know so many developers. I know a handful of them, but I know also that requirements for developers.
are very high. Why? Because they are extremely requested in the job, as a job everywhere, where I live, France, Europe, the US, North America, etc. So of course, obviously, they will not
generally they will not bother their head knowing that they will have with other companies a good salary, good conditions, working from home, scheduled the tasks, you see finding someone who may take the risk and sacrifice all of that at least partially and
In return, you will give him the promise of that the SaaS will work within this timeline, et cetera, et cetera. You explain to him how does it work, email validation, because still now many people in the IT, digital marketing world, yes, they do know it, but still it's not a very mainstream thing, you see, like email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, for example, you see. No. So,
Yash From Momentum (12:41)
Yeah.
Alaa (13:06)
If you succeed to implement this idea, you sell it to a guy who will be ready or might be ready to take the adventure with you, yeah, all the rest will be easy actually. Why? Because he knows the technical constraints.
Yash From Momentum (13:21)
Yeah.
Alaa (13:25)
In the beginning, I just thought that I will buy a VPS, implement some code into it within Telnet query, and it will be OK. The thing is not that at all, you see. This is probably the push.
Yash From Momentum (13:25)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the technical co -founder actually knows, you know, the 999 ways of not making a bug. So they know, they know which are the wrong ways of like what incorrect engines we might take. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Alaa (13:51)
Of course.
Absolutely, absolutely. And for me, what it seems actually very easy to do for him, he has to interpret that within his code language with IT code. So it will be functional within several tests as well. You see, so I have also to understand this, you see. And yeah, this challenge now.
Yash From Momentum (14:09)
Yeah? Yeah? Yeah?
Yeah.
Alaa (14:22)
I might think that we overcame it you see but still I mean it's full of challenges and yeah this is how we started actually and just yeah just right after like we we have run many many tests about the performance about the accuracy about so many things so yeah till now we are four
You see, and this is how the team was actually built. The vast majority of it, yeah, it goes thanks to and due to the co -founder Mehdi, to who also I dedicate that, yeah. I offer him that.
Yash From Momentum (15:09)
And so you look after GTM for SMTPing, right? So we go to market, marketing growth, all of that. Can you talk to us about, like very early stages, can you talk to us about what are the GTM channels that you are exploring right now? Like some experiments that you are currently running, some experiments that have worked, some experiments that have not worked. Can you talk to us a little about that?
Alaa (15:34)
Yeah, we have ran three months ago one month campaign or one and a half month campaign on email warm up. Our email warm up feature with Google Ads.
Yash From Momentum (15:46)
in his campaign is like a paid campaign like on Google ads or something like that.
Alaa (15:49)
Exactly Google ads Google ads. Yeah, this is the main channel actually We work on It gave great results until we have been contacted by a Appsumo and since then we start to focus 99 % on the email petition feature which is features featured and selected in the absolute catalog of actually so We have just run
Let's say, yeah, one month and a half test campaign on Google ads. Yeah. And of course we are keen also to optimize it within the next couple of months, months because we are not too much as email validation, email warmup platforms now or email warmup softwares on internet. And yeah, we are keen also to
Yash From Momentum (16:27)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Alaa (16:42)
get a piece out of this market which is raising as well.
Yash From Momentum (16:47)
And so as a person who's looking at growing a SaaS product and then building it also, what are the top two or three metrics that you look at every day or every week? So the metric that you are currently obsessed with, that this is the metric that I need to take from X to Y over the next three months or the next six months, what are those two or three metrics that you're looking at?
Alaa (17:08)
Yeah.
For us, it's certainly first in terms of sales and in terms also of acquisition is the number of subscribers because we know it can be very, at least for our niche, for our field, it can be very easily, not very easily, of course, but easily converted. Otherwise...
following the road map. I mean for that, yeah we have to ensure, I mean the competition is fierce.
And we need a lot of also other tools such as integrations, for example, with email marketing platforms, make it easy for developers with the robust REST API, and so on and so on and so on, you see. So this is the main obsession, actually. And now...
Yash From Momentum (18:02)
Yeah.
Alaa (18:10)
Let's say from February 2024, it's more the support responsiveness. Responsivity. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so our promise is to answer every question, every inquiry to every problem within our chat tab or.
Yash From Momentum (18:21)
Got it. Got it. Got it.
Alaa (18:33)
email support within other chat tab. It's from five to 10 minutes on the support. It's within 48 hours. And yeah, we know that this is a very important thing, extremely important to have real time shot. You see it doesn't, which doesn't sound like an AI. It doesn't sound like a bot you see, and it has to be personal. So
Yash From Momentum (18:39)
Go on.
Yeah. Yeah.
Alaa (19:01)
This choice was made to be strategic for us, you see, because support, yeah, it can change a lot of things, really a lot of things, and we have seen it and we are seeing it now as well.
Yash From Momentum (19:09)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So when we were running a ClientJoy and ClientJoy was a CRM for freelancers and agencies, we ran it for about four years. Earlier this year, we got acquired by a US based company serving about 13 ,000 businesses from 90 countries. And so one of the things like if you look at our G2 reviews and Trustpilot reviews, you will see that like a third of the reviews mention that the support is great. And they also
Alaa (19:19)
Yeah.
Exactly.
Absolutely.
Yash From Momentum (19:40)
They mentioned the support person by name, right? So you'll see reviews where they say, hey, Tanmay was great or Nirav was great and they helped me do A, B and C, right? And so, and all the time, like our engineering team would always like, this would be a friendly banker internally, but they'd be like, hey, you know, we build the product. Why are they crediting you in the reviews and stuff like that? But yeah, so it's a part of the product experience, right? And it's extremely important. Yeah, no, for sure.
Alaa (20:05)
Absolutely 100 % I totally agree with that. I totally agree with that fast support efficient support You are suspect yet to get five stars review you see yeah
Yash From Momentum (20:10)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so this brings us a lot to the last piece of this conversation, which is where we ask you the question that was asked to us by our previous guest, and that question was reserved for you. So the previous guest was Lena from UnSchooler. UnSchooler uses AI to help you create great digital courses and set up an LMS as well.
Alaa (20:37)
Yeah.
Yash From Momentum (20:46)
So really good quality videos and digital assets that you can create on unschooler and then run your own LMS as well And one of the questions that she had that she is currently battling with is that since it's it's an LMS Of course a lot of industries can use it And so what? How do you in early stages? How do you identify the cohort? Or to go after or the use case to go after so, you know that you've been advised to and probably rightly so to focus on a niche
Alaa (21:00)
Earth.
Yash From Momentum (21:14)
But then which niche to focus on because there are three or four different niches that exist in their current customer base. So that's the question for you as to how would you answer that? How would you go about it? And then I'll also ask you to ask the question to our next guest. We'd love to understand.
Alaa (21:30)
Yeah. As I told you before, the podcast actually, I totally expected you see a question of the kind because everybody is looking for that. For us, we are quite lucky you see regarding this. We know that every company almost needs email marketing within the last two years. Actually, there were
Yash From Momentum (21:36)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Alaa (21:54)
let's say a micro revolution you see within the email marketing industry, which is called email outreach platform you see. Now there are several, there are at least six or seven you see. And within that you can do your cold email campaign, look for prospects either from agencies or SaaS platform and so on. For us it helps us
Yash From Momentum (22:06)
Yeah.
Alaa (22:21)
a lot, you see, it helped us a lot regarding this and we didn't look actually that much for that, you see, even for those who were acquired or converted through what I told you, our Google Ads campaign.
We kind of expected that as well. They were from the digital marketing sphere, you see. Either agency owners, either digital marketing executives, either lead generation experts or executives or companies and so on and so on, you see. And lately...
We have seen it also more narrowly. If I can say that, you see, it's almost also the same profile. Why? Every company now needs email, you see, either email marketing, either updates, either transactional and also transactional, like a welcome message, for example, if it will bounce, it will cause problems.
Etc, etc. So for us, it's kind of a gift. You see, and yeah, the choice is also that. I mean, everybody needs SMTPing. So you see the conversion is kind of guaranteed.
Yash From Momentum (23:46)
Yeah.
Alaa (23:47)
How to say that? You have just to do the right job. You have just to do the right performance and it will come, you see. For other niches, I know that it's very, very competitive. If for example, we'll talk about crypto, if we will talk about LMS, not so many people know about LMS. For example, they know Udemy, but they don't know LMS, Learning Management System, you see. This is the thing.
Yash From Momentum (23:51)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're there.
Alaa (24:13)
Exactly. And also copywriting. When within your homepage you do this first phrase, you see, for example, the first LMS system with AI. Nobody will go, 99 % of people will not go and Google LMS, you see. They will say, what's that, you see. But when you make it simple,
Yash From Momentum (24:16)
Mm -hmm.
LMS, yeah, yeah.
Alaa (24:39)
And when you say learn with AI, yeah, this will, interval the attention of people. And since then they will say, yeah, I would like to try that. You see, so this is the strategy actually, like an email, email marketing. Don't say warm up your email, warm up your email server. It doesn't, it doesn't come like this.
Yash From Momentum (25:01)
Yeah.
Alaa (25:04)
This is the way how to land in inbox instead of from. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. This is the text.
Yash From Momentum (25:04)
Yeah.
land more emails in inbox, right? Or something like that, avoid spam. Like talking about benefits instead of features, right? So is that what you're hinting at?
Alaa (25:19)
Just how to make it simple because not everybody knows the technical terms, you see. And to be honest, if you are building a SaaS platform, people will come. I mean, you don't have to worry about traffic. You have to worry about your copywriting first, you see. This is, I think, one of the best strategies to make.
Yash From Momentum (25:23)
Cut it.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Alaa (25:44)
Like do not expect that people will know about your field, you see. Like doing LMS. You see, no. Learn with AI as simple as that, you see. And of course then for example, for us as a strategy, since we are very focused on, let's say midterm, longterm,
Yash From Momentum (25:44)
credit.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Alaa (26:09)
how to say long term strategies. We work on SEO as well, you see, either like on off or on, you see. Yes, we do have an SEO strategy regarding this. We do have also officially our blog, which is a part, which is kind of strategy for us, which is called SMTpedia and where
Yash From Momentum (26:12)
Yeah.
That's a nice name, yeah.
Alaa (26:38)
Yes, absolutely. You have to do like this. And many brands, many brands do it actually. Many brands do it and many brands acquire like high quality blogs in order to be how to say an inbound strategy, marketing strategy, you see exactly to bring traffic. I'm sorry I didn't talk about that. It just came now, you see, but yeah.
Yash From Momentum (26:41)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, no, but that's OK. This is helpful, right? When I'm starting a SaaS company, this is meaningful conversation. So please, please continue.
Alaa (27:08)
Yeah, it just came to my mind now, but yeah, I maybe have to enlighten it more you see and this is where you can talk about the technical stuff How to build a server which are the SMTPing error codes? Which is the most optimal? HTML template you have to send you see this kind of what Google likes actually to show on the first positions so Yeah
Yash From Momentum (27:13)
Shoshan.
Mm -hmm.
Alaa (27:35)
This was from the beginning when I decided to make SMTPing as a brand. It should be accompanied by a blog, but it should be separate as well. Why this one? It has the potential, at least the name you see for now, SMTPedia, to be the reference in email marketing where people go and troubleshoot their problems, seek for new ideas.
Etc etc. And since then yes, you can redirect them to SMTPing you see This is the plan for now
Yash From Momentum (28:11)
Correct, understood. And what's your question that I should ask our next guest?
Alaa (28:17)
The first one that you asked me how do you form or build your team? Yeah, this is very problematic. That's why I talked about the importance of DevOps, you see, at least referring to my experience. It's very important. Like how is it from university? Is it based on some criteria? Is it based on
for example, the resemblance in coding with the same technologies and so on and so on and so on, you see.
I believe that there are some solopreneurs who do the code, the marketing, the management, et cetera, from A to Z, you see, maybe for microsaas or maybe also for just SaaS with many features, you see, by their own. But I believe that the vast, the very vast majority, yes, they are actually teams. And yes, two is always better than one.
Four are always better than two, you see, and especially, yeah, I mean, money will come. If that's the issue, money will come, traffic will come, conversions will come. The main challenge is to give a stable and performant product. 100%.
Yash From Momentum (29:24)
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Got it. And with that, we come to the end of this conversation. Alaa, thank you once again for joining us and sharing your wisdom, your knowledge and your experiences. And for all the people who joined us and who are listening to this or watching this on Spotify or YouTube or wherever you are, you'll be able to find the link to SMTPing in the description.
Alaa (29:55)
Thank you.
Yash From Momentum (30:09)
Please go ahead, check out the product as well. And thanks again, Alaa, for joining in. And all of you guys, until next time.
Alaa (30:17)
Thank you, Yash.
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