When a hackathon project becomes internal tools becomes a side project and then becomes its own business
The story of Pepo Campaigns
At Pepo, our primary focus is a new type of social messaging app. We are currently in beta trials of Pepo with a few hundred early users. More on that later.
This post is about a different product from team Pepo:
This is the story about how a hackathon project became internal tools became a side project at a new company became a very interesting new business.
Back when our team was working on Fab+Hem, we sent more than 1 billion emails to customers, across daily campaigns, transactional emails, and marketing automation emails. We also spent a fortune on 3rd party email providers: $150,000 per month at the height. Not only was it super expensive, we were always chasing deliverability through the 3rd party providers and they struggled to keep up with our ever-growing feature requirements, especially around marketing automation and designing email campaigns.
In 2012-2013 Amazon AWS began enabling companies to move their email marketing to AWS SES (Simple Email Service) — which held the promise of exponential increases in reliability, scalability, and deliverability yet at a fraction of the cost. But, there was a catch: AWS SES is essentially just pipes. In order to make use of those pipes, you must rebuild all the features you require on top of the AWS SES platform.
Towards the end of 2014, a couple of our developers won an internal hackathon competition by demonstrating a proof-of-concept that we could move off of 3rd party email providers and switch entirely to an in-house developed platform running on AWS.
Following the hackathon, they said they would need 6 months to rebuild and replace the core functionality of the 3rd party platforms we had been using and then another 6 months to add on the various enhancements our teams had been clamoring for.
We said, “go for it,” and within 6 months we had successfully replaced the 3rd party providers and we then rapidly iterated on the backend and front end capabilities through the end of 2015.
When Hem was sold earlier this year, the acquirer did not purchase any of the technology.
When we started our new company, Pepo, this year, we purchased the in-house email marketing technology. A small team at Pepo has been working on the side since then on both improving those tools for our internal own use, and packaging them up as a Software-as-a-Service for any company to use.
Today I’m thrilled to announce that Pepo Campaigns is open for business for any company to use.
Pepo Campaigns is the first enterprise-grade email marketing platform built on AWS Simple Email Service, solving the AWS e-Mail opportunity for businesses all around the globe.
Pepo Campaigns is the first enterprise-grade email marketing platform built on AWS Simple Email Service — enabling organizations of all sizes to harness the power of AWS without writing a single line of code.
The 1–2–3 of Pepo Campaigns is thus really simple, and we think quite compelling:
- Before AWS, email marketing was expensive and unreliable
- AWS came around, enabling any company to send emails through Amazon at a fraction of the cost, but it’s just pipes: you have to build all your own functionality on top of AWS
- Pepo Campaigns is the first full-featured SAAS solution for email marketing on top of AWS. Just sign up and go.
Pepo Campaigns builds on our team’s 6 years of experience sending >1 billion emails through campaigns, transactional, and targeted trigger emails (for large e-commerce companies like Fab.com), offering any sized company enterprise-level features at startup speed.
- Create gorgeous emails with our drag-and-drop template tool;
- optimize your campaigns using insightful reports and analytics;
- target your campaigns with advanced segmentation and A/B testing;
- Leverage powerful marketing automation to create sophisticated trigger flows;
- utilize our API’s to send transactional emails
— all made simple with no code required on your end, so your developers can stay focused on the technology while your marketing team can focus on the message.
Here are some screenshots. You can see more on our website or just sign-in and start using Pepo Campaigns.
It’s really cool to see the evolution of what was once a hackathon project — the passion of one of our lead developers — turn into an interesting side project, and now into what could potentially be an interesting business on its own. Thank you to Abhay Singh for driving this for two years and for Francesco Pacella for pushing me earlier this year to include Pepo Campaigns in the Pepo family and for being the lead force in productizing Pepo Campaigns this year for the world to use. You guys are awesome!
Our plan now is to turn Pepo Campaigns into its own thriving business and to continue enhancing and expanding the features based on customer feedback and based on our product aggressive roadmap. In addition to just email marketing to your existing base of customers, we’re also working on some innovative list-building features within Pepo Campaigns which we think are going to be a big hit with out customers.
If you read this far, thanks, and please vote up Pepo Campaigns on Product Hunt so even more people can learn about it and give it a try.
