Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike review their progress on their 2017 goals thus far, and discuss an article about how to get your emails delivered in the Gmail primary tab.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Rob: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Mike and I review our 2017 goals to see our progress so far through about the first half of the year. We also talk about how to get your emails delivered to the Gmail primary tab. This is Startups For The Rest of Us episode 345.
Welcome to Startups For The Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: I’m Mike.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Sir?
Mike: Well, I’m really close to finishing my two-step signup process. Unfortunately I’ve spent most of the last three to four days doing nothing but refactoring unit tests.
Rob: That is a bummer. Yeah, it’s good to have in the long run, a bummer to do right now.
Mike: Yeah. Although they have saved me in several places where I definitely would have not uncovered the problems that came up because of it. It’s just painful refactoring certain pieces of it, generating new data, and having that all thrown in there, but it’s working
Rob: Yeah. That’s what they’re for man, is to alert you to something, edge case that you missed. That’s how I always think about it. If they fail and you have to refactor, you’re thinking to yourself, “All right, why is this failing? Why am I rewriting this?” Having to rewrite a bunch of your test, that’s due to the big change you made to your data model, is that right?
Mike: That’s part of it. Some of the refactoring was just to make it easier to write the unit test in the long term so that I can add a bunch more data in there and use somewhat generated data. But of course when you’re generating data, you have to massage the stuff that’s being generated in such a way that it actually matches what would be in the system to begin with.
For example, I’m using something called autofixture which just generates data for you based on the types. For a string, it’ll just throw a goo it in there. Unfortunately that doesn’t work for an email address. There’s always places where the data itself, the data generation needs to be fixed so that it generates something that’s a little bit more accurate. And then there’s places where it’s only expecting two characters for the country code and it generates 30 or something like that. That stuff needs to be fixed so that when it goes to throw into the database, it will actually not fail and then afterwards then my unit test will succeed. Stuff like that.
Rob: There it is. It sounds like so much fun.
Mike: Oh yes, very much so.
Rob: That was sarcasm in case you didn’t detect it. For me, I’m actually hopping on a plane in about eight or nine hours and flying to Stockholm, Sweden for Brennan Dunn’s Double Your Freelance Europe Conference. Both Sherry and I are speaking. Since we’re doing that, we’ve taken this opportunity to leave the children at home. We’re going to hang out at the conference for a couple days. I think it’s three or four days actually. And then we’ll wind up staying in Stockholm just for an extra couple days to see the city. We’ve been there once before but it was only for about a day or a day and a half and really interested in digging in. There’s so much cool stuff there.
Mike: Are you coming back?
Rob: I am coming back. Without the kids, you could imagine Sherry and I will be asking ourselves that question every day.
Mike: “Do we really want to come home?”
Rob: Come home? Yeah, definitely.
Mike: We can push this off.
Rob: We’ll call home and be like, “We got snowed in.” “It’s the middle of the summer.” Yeah, looking forward to that and also to getting back. It’s fun to go away but I’m actually in the middle of working on a lot of interesting things. We’re pushing a lot of features right now to production, we’re just really hitting our stride, have a good shipping velocity. When you enjoy what you do, it’s also hard to step away from it for a few days but I think it will be good. I think I’ll come back refreshed. I’m looking forward to get back in the saddle.
The first thing I want to talk through today is something we mentioned last week. It’s that you and I in December of each year, we set out a few goals for ourselves, typically three or four each. In the past, we tend to just revisit them the following December and we say we succeeded or failed or whatever.
It was interesting, we’re about three months into this year and you’ve suggested that we just revisit them. It makes sense to do it again now because we’re almost halfway through the year in another week or so, week or two, we’ll be halfway through the year. I thought we could quickly step through as a precursor to the main topic and just run through these goals again and report on our massive successes or immense failures that we’re currently experiencing.
Mike: Great.
Rob: Yeah I know, fun. Why don’t you kick us off.
Mike: My first one was to log at least 100 days of exercise this year. The past two months or so have been pretty rough just because my shoulders screwed up. I’ve only logged 20 so far this year.
Rob: Oh, wow.
Mike: Yes. I should be up closer to 50. I’m pretty far behind at this point. I knew I’d be behind just because of what was going on. The doctor put me on some medications. It was 1,000 mg of Naproxen for two weeks, which is above what the normal dosage would actually be. I think if you go over the counter, I think they only recommend 600 mg or something like that per day, but she has me on two 500 mg tablets twice a day.
That actually helped quite a bit. It was mostly I think inflammation in my shoulder right now. Now I’m getting to the point where I can move it around a little bit. I’m doing some physical therapy to help just give me some flexibility and range of motion back. It doesn’t hurt as much as it did before but I still have to be a little careful of it, because I just don’t want to have a major regression or anything like that.
Rob: Oh, totally. Yeah, that’s a bummer. Have you thought about bike riding or swimming or something? Something that won’t put impact on it?
Mike: I didn’t even have the range of motion. I literally couldn’t lift my arm up above shoulder level before, so swimming would be difficult. Although we just opened our pool this past week so I might be doing it anyway.
Rob: Yeah, yeah. That’s a bummer, man. I felt the same way a few weeks ago when I got strep throat. I was basically out of commision physically for about a week and a half or two weeks. During that time I also didn’t exercise.
I have a similar goal to you and it’s two days of exercise per week. For the first three months of the year when it was still cold here, I was almost getting it, man. I think we reported about that in March. I was definitely getting one day a week, some weeks I would get two days, and others it just wasn’t happening. It’s hard when it’s five below or five above zero to do that even indoor stuff, just wasn’t shaking out.
Since the sun came out and it started to get warm in March, I’ve been very consistent. In fact, I’ve been probably up at three days a week. Because with the sun like this, I mentioned last week that there’s bike trails from my house. It’s about a 25 to 30 minute ride to work. Every office day, which is three days a week, I’m riding to and from work. It’s almost 50 minutes of riding. I need to look to see how much that is, five miles or something to get there, four to five miles. It’s decent, it’s not a huge ride but someone like me who really just needs to not be completely sedentary, I’m definitely ahead of where I normally am and feeling pretty good about this goal.
At least through September, October, and then we’ll have to see what I can do during the close of the year through December 31st. As it gets cold, I know that that will negatively impact my ability to do it.
Mike: And your motivation.
Rob: Yeah, right, both.
Mike: Yup. Yeah, I’ve definitely got some catching up to do on this. It is something that I still want to keep on track as a goal. It’s not like I want to throw this aside and walk away or anything like that. I still think that getting to 100 is still doable but I’m definitely going to have to double up my efforts a little bit.
Rob: Totally. How about your second goal which is making Bluetick profitable, including your time? Where do you think you are there?
Mike: Well, I’m not as far along as I would like to be but I still think that it’s doable by the end of the year. I’m at over $1,000 a month in revenue which I hit a little while ago, I think last month or the month before. It’s still going up. Slowly onboarding people and looking at ways to get more people on it faster. That has to do with the two-step sign up process.
Once that’s done, I’m probably going to spend at least a week or two just working on the marketing side, getting a lot of the marketing copy, and getting some videos built that illustrate how the product works and what it can do so that I don’t have to explain it individually to each person. I feel like that’s the bottleneck right now. It’s just me having to explain everything. The product itself works pretty well. That’s nice to see. I’m not afraid of it falling over and breaking if I add a bunch of people to it but I would still be concerned about adding 200 people or something like that.
Rob: Sure, but you can go slow. Yeah, it’s nice to say you’re not concerned about falling over and breaking because I remember a time, I don’t know how many months ago it was, where you were concerned about that.
Mike: Yeah. I’m definitely past that at this point. Just because the level of unit tests and just the infrastructure behind it, watching the logs, watching all the stuff that’s going on, and how much synchronization is happening between the mailboxes and stuff, I’m not seeing anything where I’m like, “Oh my god, this thing is going to fall over and die at any given time.”
Rob: Yeah, that’s cool. My second goal was to not start any new projects. It was to run the three MicroConfs, continue the two podcasts, and then working on Drip obviously, and to take a break from the chaos of launching new things. The only exception is I maybe second author on Sherry’s book, ZenFounder Guide to Staying Sane. I forgot what the title is.
So far so good. I haven’t launched anything new, I do have hobbies, I’m tooling around with investing and stuff like that, doing a lot of reading but I’m actually on track to do nothing which was the goal. Sherry is working hard on her book right now. I’m weighing in a little bit here and there which has been fun. It’s been nice to have the time to do that. How about you on your third?
Mike: My third previously was to blog every two weeks or so but I canned that about three months ago.
Rob: Yeah. Didn’t we dismiss this funnel together?
Mike: Yeah, we did.
Rob: I was like, “Why are you planning to do that?”
Mike: Yup.
Rob: It’s like Bluetick’s smart board is what it comes down to. Cool.
My third goal was to do one to three angel investments this year and I did one. I was actually a follow on round and it’s for more of a brick and mortar business in California. The first round, I was not even really an angel investor. I literally invested less than $1,000. But this round I bought a bigger chunk. I feel good about that. They have some growth in there. They’re going to start franchising which is a good model, I think, for them.
I think that’s been about it. One to three angel investments per year I think is probably my pace for now. So far, so good. I have evaluated several other opportunities and nothing has been a fit for what I want to do and has the valuation that’s in a range that make sense for me but that’s been a nice little fun side thing to do.
Mike: Do you have anything in the near horizon that you’re keeping an eye on, that you’re looking at? Or is it just completely, I don’t want to say completely empty, nothing right now that you’re looking at actively to evaluate and pursue, and you’re just looking at stuff as it comes up?
Rob: Yeah. There’s nothing in the pipeline right now. Stuff comes and goes. Someone approached me in MicroConf, we had a conversation, we exchanged the numbers, and talked about stuff. He wasn’t quite far enough along where I think it make sense for me to do it. Another one, there were a couple others where, I think I’ve mentioned this, it’s like when you’re raising at a $10 million or someone who’s at a $30 million evaluation, it’s not even angel investing anymore.
My little check doesn’t even make sense, even if you 10X it. I make a little bit of money but you have to get to $100 million or $300 million in revenue, or at least in valuation I guess, that’s not my game. My game is to invest in real businesses that are going to make money. If there’s an exit, that’s fine but I don’t want that to be the exit strategy.
You look at businesses, a lot of my recent investments, you look at Churn Buster, you look at CartHook, and you look at LeadFuze, these are business that could be as they grow that can be wildly profitable and don’t need this massive valuation or a bazillion users. They’re profitable today if they weren’t growing type thing and just reinvesting back in.
Those are the types of things that I’m looking for, and at reasonable valuations. If I’d invested at any of those at high valuation, it doesn’t make sense, you have so little of the company that you can never get it back even if they do become wildly profitable. If you make only a few thousand bucks a year back and you wrote a check for $25,000 or $50,000, it just takes too long to get paid back. That’s where it is.
I had a fourth one, it was my honourable mention. I was pretty vague about it. I basically said there’s this list of features in Drip that I want to get launched this year. I have them listed in this doc and we’ve launched one of them, we’re working on the second, and I have a third that we haven’t started yet. I actually think we’re on pace to hit all three of these by the end of the year. It’ll make a lot more sense when at the end of the year I can look back and point to these features.
I guess one of them is sharable workflows. We went live so it was not a secret at this point. I just don’t like to project a road map. There’s competitors and there’s all kinds of reasons not to do that.
Sharable workflows, which means you can take a workflow out of your account. You could put it in another one of your accounts with one click or you could share it with people, you could post it on your blog and people could import it into their Drip account. It’s also nice for internal education. It’s like we’re cranking out. We’re going to be cranking on a big library of them where you can just one click import a webinar funnel, this funnel into that funnel. It just makes a lot of sense to do that.
Mike: Cool. There’s something else you guys just launched recently, snippets.
Rob: Yeah. What’d you think about that global snippets? Yeah.
Mike: It caught my eye because I have snippets inside of Bluetick. I’m like, “Oh, I haven’t launched that. You bastard stole it.”
Rob: Oh, funny. Oh man, yeah. We’ve been working on this for a while and had it in the hopper probably four or five months ago but really buckled down on it last couple of months. Snippets are cool, man. People can use them as email signatures or they can use them as a webinar call to action, or even some people who advertise in there have a little ad unit in their newsletter could stick it in there. It’s just a piece of HTML or an image or something that you can change once and it changes it everywhere.
Mike: Got it, yeah. I basically had the same thing, but it was literally called snippets. You could just drop it anywhere. It includes the liquid tags and it can do whatever you want.
Rob: Yeah, yeah. That’s cool. There’s only one, as far as I know there’s only one competitor of ours that has anything similar to snippets. They did it plain text only so you can’t do any HTML, you can’t embed images, you have such little flexibility. We really wanted to do it, I don’t know, the right way I think and this is the way you should build this.
Mike: Am I that competitor? You’re stealing my Dropbox stuff.
Rob: No. You’re not, man.
Mike: Just kidding.
Rob: Is yours text only?
Mike: No.
Rob: Yeah. Okay, haha. No, I don’t get to. You’re in sales automation.
Mike: Yeah, yeah.
Rob: We’re in email marketing.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Cool. Let’s dig into this article. It’s on chamaileon.io, it’s the blog. It is actually a guest post from Zoran Orack who is an email marketing consultant. He ran a bunch of tests about factors that affect primary tab placement versus promotional tab placement in Gmail.
If you’re not familiar with the Gmail multi-inbox, which I personally do not use because it makes me feel like I have three inboxes I have to check all the time, Gmail auto-sorts your email into the important, promotional, and notifications. Is that right? Is the third one notifications?
Mike: I think it’s social.
Rob: Social, thank you. Social is like Twitter, Facebook, and whatever, Instagram, all these notifications you get. I’m guessing GitHub stuff probably goes in there. Again, since I don’t use them, I’m not actually that familiar.
The curse of a lot of email marketers is if you do things, I won’t say incorrectly, but if you don’t do things smart, you can wind up in the promotions tab and a lot of people completely ignore their promotions tab. It’s where they get a lot of emails from Groupon, or from people trying to market to them. It’s not spam obviously but some people consider it when they look through and they think, “Oh this is one step above spam.” If you want to build a relationship with an audience, especially if it’s a one on one blogging relationship where you’re giving advice as a person, you want your stuff to wind up in the inbox.
There’s an argument here to be made. Let’s say you’re an ecommerce website, you’re keeping in touch, you probably should wind up, it’s probably right that you wind up in the promotions tab. Trying to game the system and use these tips to get into the primary inbox I would actually say is not a good idea if you really are just selling with your email.
Mike: I think a big point about this is really just making sure that you don’t end up in a place where people are much more likely to overlook the emails from you because you’re clearly sending them for a reason and you want them to be read. It’s not like you want these emails to go off into the ether and have nothing happen with them. If they’re not being read, if they end up in that promotions tab, and a lot of people are ignoring them, or they have much lower open rates because they’re on that promotions tab, that doesn’t do your business any good.
Again, these tests are all about at least letting you know how you can stay out of the promotions tab and what sorts of things influence that. I don’t think that any of this stuff is foolproof nor will it ever change. I think that’s one of the key points to keep in mind here is that even if you do all the right things, you could still end up in the promotions tab just because of the nature of the algorithms on the back end. All the stuff that goes into the search ranking factors, you really can’t see those. Some of this stuff is just trial and error and you may end up there anyway.
Rob: Yup. Those are all good points to make. Your open rates will be substantially less if you are on the promotions tab, just the way it works out. Some people never check their promotions tab, other people just clear it out, skim through it.
The author of this email says that Gmail is the most popular client right now. When I do a search, Litmus has the 1.29 billion opens tracked. They said it was in May of 2017, so just a month ago. They say the Apple iPhone has 31%, the Apple iPhone client has 31% of market. Then Gmail is second, and then Apple iPad, and Apple Mail.
I know that maybe the less consumer emails that are sent, let’s take for example all the emails that Drip sent last month, the majority of them are opened in Gmail. Take it for what’s it worth, Gmail is either the most popular or one of the top. Promotion versus inbox is also a big issue. In fact, emails that arrive in the primary inbox actually send a notification if people have those active on their phone and emails that arrive in the promotion tab do not.
Mike: Alright, let’s dive right in.
Rob: Cool. The author talks about how if you search Google for how to get into the inbox, there’s all the same tips. It’s like don’t sell, authenticate your domain with DKIM and SPF, greet recipients by name, have no more than one link in the email, don’t include pictures, don’t use RSS campaigns, don’t use heavy HTML, all this stuff.
What he wanted to do is just run a few tests and see if he could trigger the promotions tab. The first thing he tested, and this comes back to everything I’ve been saying for years Mike, is that heavy HTML email, it’s going to go into the promotions tab and that’s what they do. This guy, he goes into Mail Chimp, he creates a very simple HTML email, and it’s got an image but it’s definitely HTML. There’s no qualms that this is text, a text email and it’s got the share buttons at the bottom, it’s got a bunch of stuff.
All it says is let’s see in which tab this ends up. It’s got a picture of what looks like some dessert. And then cheers, and he puts his name, and it goes right in the promotions tab. This is not a sales email, he doesn’t mention products, he doesn’t have any links in the email aside from the view this in a browser, the Facebook share link at the bottom.
This is it. You’re going to hit. If you use heavy HTML and a lot of design, you are much more likely to wind up in the promotions tab. You can still use HTML, but use HTML that looks like plain text, and that is the default template in Drip. That’s why we did that is we know that it’s A) a more personal experience, and B) it’s more likely to get to where you want it to go.
Mike: He’s got screenshots in the article. If you look at the screenshots, it’s very clearly a newsletter email. CSS styles are definitely embedded into the email, there’s Twitter and Facebook links at the bottom. I’m sure there’s an unsubscribe link if they sent it through MailChimp. It’s all centered, you can very clearly see that it was sent from some sort of newsletter. Just that stuff alone, even the one without the image, it still looks like it was a newsletter of some kind. As you said like that, heavy HTML, it seems to me like just styling your emails as if it was a newsletter, that’s going to throw it into the promotions tab.
Rob: Yup. And then, he was concerned maybe it was just the image so he took the image out, leaves the rest of the heavy HTML, still goes into the promotions tab.
Again, you mentioned this could change over time, this is just one person’s test, this is not definitive by any stretch but this is what we’ve seen too. We send a lot of email every month and this is in line with my experience across tens of thousands of people sending it through our system.
Then he goes with light HTML email. He doesn’t have DKIM and SPF authentication which is where you sign it with your own domain. He just goes with, again, it looks like plain text, it is actually HTML, similar to the Drip default template. I’m sure you can get these templates in Mail Chimp as well. Sure enough, I think it’s the exact same text, and it is the exact same text but it looks more like plain text. It winds up in the inbox.
The only link in there is an unsubscribe link because it was through Mail Chimp. It has the Mail Chimp image at the bottom, the share link there, and that’s it. That’s the simplest way to get in the primary tab.
Then he wanted to run another test and he added more formatting, he added several bullets, he added a hyperlink that just said click here for more info, and he started pitching. He says, “The best product everyone enjoys just got better. Here’s some features that you like, features you beg for.” He’s being silly with it but he definitely is pitching a product. He even includes a price in the email and he had a sale-sy subject line. There it is, he still made it into the primary tab.
Mike: I do wonder how much of an impact it has that he’s sending the same email to himself multiple times. I wonder if there’s anything in the algorithms that look at how much email you have received and have opened from a particular source. I’d be curious to know whether that has any sort of impact.
My feeling is that in looking at emails that I’ve received or that I have sent, the more that something has been opened, the more likely it is to appear in certain places inside your email, or the more likely it’s going to not be classified as spam. Because obviously, there’s learning algorithms behind it. I don’t know how across the board those are or if they are localized to just your account based on what you open or what you tend to open.
Rob: Yeah. I agree with you. What you’ll see is when we get to the end, he’s continued to send the same way and he trips one filter and it goes to promotions, even after he sent all these emails. It helps disprove that thought.
My theory on this, again this is based on seeing a lot of email get sent, is that doing just a few emails isn’t going to give you the positive reputation if someone opens a few of your emails. If you’re sending mass emails, Google knows if you’re sending 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000, I believe. I think that if you have low engagement with those, that they do start to see that as a signal that your stuff is lower quality or that people aren’t engaging. By engagement I mean opens and clicks.
I don’t know, the author of this article is sending five, six, seven emails which is what he did with minor variations over the course of a few hours. I just don’t think there’s enough data there that Google would really, really engage with it. Obviously there’s a chance that they could say, “Well, if it’s from this sender and you’ve opened their email in the past, then it’s more likely to go to the inbox.” That would be intuitive. But again, he trips a filter here in a couple examples that we’ll get to, and it goes right to promotions. That almost dispels that. It almost makes me think that Google needed more data in order for their machine learning to form an opinion on it.
The next step. He had plain text that was formatted, he included a price, and a link, and it was still in the inbox. So then he decided to add images, he added two images, he left everything pretty much the same, still went into the primary inbox.
Mike: He removed the price though.
Rob: He removed the price. That’s right, he removed the price, he added images, went into the inbox, and this is where he trips it. With the image and the plain text, he added a price, and then it went into promotions. It’s really interesting.
Once you’re going with the plain text look, remember, again, it’s an HTML email, it’s just not heavily formatted, you’re in the safe zone. You can add images, you can add formatting, you can add links, you can add bullets, doesn’t matter. At least again in this example, it didn’t seem to have an impact but he added an image and a price, and that seemed to send him in. That’s pretty interesting.
Mike: Yeah. That’s what I would almost expect from something like that though. You get a newsletter from a retailer or something like that, it’s probably going to have an image or a picture of what it is that they’re trying to pitch you, and a price associated with it. Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense that that would have triggered it.
Rob: Right. Again, this is the promotions tab. The whole point is it’s people trying to sell you stuff. If there’s a price in an image, that lends itself to doing that. I don’t think there is two if statements in Google’s algorithm that says, “If image and price, then promotions.” It’s a big ass machine learning algorithm. That’s how they work. There’s some bayesian filtering going on and I think that’s what it’s picking up.
One of the last test he runs, I guess it’s the last test, is he’s trying to refute the RSS to email thing. People had said if it’s RSS to email then it’s going to go straight to promotions. He does an RSS to what looks like a plain text email. Again, it’s html. Of course, it doesn’t set off the filter. It goes straight to the inbox, which would make sense.
I’m not a fan of RSS to email because I think it’s not a very personal way to engage with your list but I don’t think that Google really cares that much about it. Since a lot of RSS email is bloggers anyways, that’s often not promotional content. You’re not selling stuff. You’re often giving valuable information, writing an article, offering advice. You can debate whether that’s promotional or not but personally if I’m subscribed to someone’s’ list, of Brennan Dunn’s writing or Ruben from Bit Sketcher, Hiten, I want that in my primary. That’s important to me. I’m not subscribed to a bunch of list that I don’t want. If I was, I would unsubscribe from them.
Mike: Yeah. I’d be curious for that specific example, the RSS, if you were to also add in the images and the price of any kind or multiple prices if it would trigger, it seems like it should.
Rob: Ah, it should, yeah. I bet images would be fine.
Mike: Yeah. I think you’re right. I think the images would be fine. I think possibly a price might be fine but I wonder if they take into account like how close it is to a link as well. I don’t know. That was something I noticed about the emails. The price was not necessarily right next to the link.
Rob: Yeah. Or the image. It’s not like it was clustered together like it was a product. It just happened to be in the same email.
Again, we will link this up in the show notes if you do want to see the screenshots and the emails. It’s a fun little romp through and it does confirm a lot of what we’re seeing in the space as well.
Mike: I think that one of the directions that all the stuff leads to is just providing value from the emails that you’re sending to people so that you don’t end up in the promotions tab. You can sell to some extent but you have to be delivering value to people in order to get them to engage with your emails to begin with. If you’re not doing that, then it’s a promotion. Chances are it’s going to get chucked out with all the rest of the advertisements.
Rob: Yeah. Another thing to think about is each of these things is a signal. Although he says you can get into the inbox without SPF, DKIM, the SPF, DKIM is not a bad thing to set up. It is going to be in general a positive signal to someone like Google.
I also think this is where people don’t prune their list enough. I think this is one of my soap boxes is if your open rates are less than 10% on your list, you need to prune that thing, because Google is smart and so are the other inbox providers. They’re starting to catch onto this stuff. If they see you have a mass mailing and very few people are engaging with it, they are going to start to putting you in spam or in promotions.
In my opinion, you should have open rates above 20% but there’s a grey area there between 10% and 20%. That’s where pruning can help with engagement and therefore help get you out of some of these sticky situations that you can wind up in if you’ve kind of not been cleaning your list.
Mike: I think that about wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us, you can call into our voicemail at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for the full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Mike, Checkout faker for generating test database data. There are versions out there for most languages (rails, laravel and .net). Huge time saver and will keep your tests passing.
Thanks Scott. I switched over from using AutoFixture to using a combination of NBuilder to generate sets of objects and Bogus for populating those objects with data. Bogus is based on an implementation of Faker and I’ve found that it works really well.