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.
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.