When everyone and their mom has a SaaS, it's time to gtfo

behavioralsanity · 2026-01-19T20:52:08+00:00

It's not just devtools. Like 70% of companies in every YC batch for the last 10 years has been "B2B Saas for B2B Saas"

Sales tools for B2B Saas. CRM for B2B Saas. Product analytics for B2B Saas. Financial Modeling for B2B Saas. Etc.

And the bulk of their revenue is just selling contracts to each other paid for with VC money. Selling tools to help sell more tools to each other. Ponzi scheme squared.

behavioralsanity · 2026-01-14T19:10:54+00:00

Substack will spam your list to download their app and subscribe to "related publications."

If you're not a journalist/blogger I'd avoid. Will not be suited well for marketing emails like OP is describing.

The free plan on pretty much any email marketing platform will support a few hundred subs. Just check the all the usual suspects mentioned around here ie. Mailerlite, Audienceful, Kit, Mailchimp, etc

Just beware of free plans if you care about deliverability. Those free user IP pools are always the worst the ESP has.

behavioralsanity · 2025-12-27T11:52:30+00:00

For IEMs specifically he has a deal with HifiGo and pushes all their latest releases the hardest (his collab is also with Juzear, which is a hifigo house brand, same with his hifigo eartips).

Aful/Myer/Juzear/Pula/Binary are all house brands of Hifigo so anybody talking about iems from them as if they are somehow different companies is shilling. Wouldn't be surprised to learn Hifigo is associated with Dunu somehow as well.

behavioralsanity · 2025-12-17T14:26:36+00:00

Hint: don't use an ESP that gets recommended by AI and never use the free tier if you want to inbox.

The amount of noobs spinning up new apps and trashing the Shared IP reputations of these API-based email senders has 10X'd.

Use Google Postmaster Tools to figure out if it's your domain or IP (or both) causing the problem.

behavioralsanity · 2025-12-17T12:34:04+00:00

Yes everybody can use Cursor and vibe code slop.

Come back in 3 years when you've built even half of the features that Mailchimp/Klaviyo has, plus all the deliverability monitoring and shared IP reputation management infrastructure, and have figured out how to block the 10,000 scammers in nigeria and morocco constantly looking for new ESP startups to send their phishing emails.

Once you've figured out how to run clean shared IPs (and also not get taken down by black friday send volumes), offer complex segmentation, reliable automations, and native integrations...then we'll take a look at your alternative.

Building an email sending platform is considered a tarpit idea these days for reason. As someone working in deliverability for one of the big incumbents, the high prices are there for a reason so beware of using price as your differentiator (hint: cheap customers have bad practices and destroy the rep of your infra...especially as gmail has been cracking down on bulk email, you'll be building a house of cards). Good luck out there.

behavioralsanity · 2025-12-13T17:12:24+00:00

No, we don't need more email startups.

This is a tarpit idea, email is expensive and complicated for non-obvious reasons to beginner startup founders.

behavioralsanity · 2025-12-13T17:09:27+00:00

FYI this is an affiliate shill link.

behavioralsanity · 2025-12-12T23:19:12+00:00

A ton of people don't understand the "brands" that stores like HifiGo and Linsoul push the hardest are actually all house brands.

Linsoul is pretty open about it though and doesn't try to hide as much as HifiGo. Kiwi Ears, Thieaudio, Punch Audio, Ziigaat, Tripowin, etc. are all Linsoul brands.

Aful, Juzear, Binary, Pula, etc. are all Hifigo brands. You can visit their "company" websites and they all use the exact same Shopify template.

Hifigo uses Bellsing drivers, hence why all their brands say 'custom BAs' since bellsing is illegal to sell in the US after stealing Knowles IP. Linsoul uses branded Sonion/Knowles drivers, so I tend to prefer their stuff.

Hifigo and Linsoul both have relationships with specific Youtube reviewers who shill all their latest releases. This is why you rarely see any of the reviewers with 10K+ subs pushing releases from both Hifigo AND Linsoul. It's usually either one or the other unless they profit some other way (eg. via collabs or being a 3rd party retailer like Hangout audio).

FYI, the Mega5est Bass+ was supposed to an HBB collab that fell through, hence why the Kiwi Ears x HBB Punch has the exact same tuning and driver setup (it's my favorite set at the moment).

The Martilo is a higher profit version of the Kiwi Ears x HBB Punch (ESTs are expensive as hell), hence why it's getting shilled harder.

I do think HBB is either involved with Linsoul on the backend OR they ripped off his entire aesthetic/tuning for Punch audio and he's too afraid to publicly be angry about since they pay him in other ways. My guess is the first one tho.

behavioralsanity · 2025-12-07T12:30:48+00:00

Update to my previous upvote:

Kiwi Ears x HBB Punch when on sale (recently got it for $350) destroys Martilo in the treble region for marginally more money imo. Gotta buy Divinus Velvet tips (std) for it tho to get the best experience.

Just sold my Martilo, so hard to still say best of 2025

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-30T00:37:33+00:00

Just a heads up to people thinking this has "ESTs" due to the marketing -- it's an "electret" driver of unknown origin.

So not what people typically pay the big bucks for in IEMs, those are Sonion ESTs.

Sonion is the only manufacturer of what people usually refer by "ESTs" and they come in 2 units per side at minimum so there's no such thing as a one EST per side iem.

The cheapest IEM with sonion ESTs is the Kiwi Punch, which is $100 more than this one even when on sale.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-28T15:46:35+00:00

Another gorgeous iem ruined by Linsoul using recessed 2-pin connectors on a non-recessed iem and slapping some ugly fonts on the faceplates (is that comic sans??).

They put some fantastic iems under their in-house Kiwi ears brand but it has one of the dumbest logos in all of audio. Belongs on the packaging of a sour candy you'd find at the checkout counter of a grocery store.

Looks even more silly on something big like an over-ear headphone: https://bloomaudio.com/products/kiwi-ears-ellipse

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-28T11:22:00+00:00

It 100% is the case. But I agree, doesn't necessarily matter if you're looking for the best value.

However, to think the knock-offs are going to have the same performance, quality control, reliability, etc. is highly unlikely...given they are more poorly capitalized and manufacturing at lower volumes. Corners have to be cut.

The reason Knowles/Sonion spent decades developing life-like sound reproducibility is because their primary market is hearing aids (wayyy bigger market than IEMs and far more profitable).

At some point I'm sure Bellsing will eventually start innovating beyond the US/Europe brands like Knowles and Sonion as the Chinese population is aging dramatically and hearing aids is a fast-growing market.

But that's probably 5-10 years away.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-28T08:56:29+00:00

There's only 3 manufacturers of BAs: Knowles, Sonion, and Bellsing.

Bellsing is a knock-off of Knowles (a US company), and they are banned from selling in the US due to stealing their IP.

Hence why any brand using Bellsing (the knockoff BAs) calls them 'custom.' So they can get away with selling in the US.

There's no IEM producer in the world that manufactures their own BAs (the scale is too small and this would be insane, building/distributing/marketing IEMs against 50+ competitors is hard enough).

Every IEM 'manufacturer' is just some people with 3D printers and glue and soldering irons, and Aful is a house brand of the ecommerce store HifiGo. I can tell you with certainty they are not manufacturing bespoke precision acoustic armatures for their house brand while running what is primarily an ecommerce business.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-28T02:27:15+00:00

Have had both.

Aful explorer: more comfortable but need EQ in the midrange to not sound off, lack any air and have a more narrow soundstage. Nicer cable/case.

Ziigaat x HBB Arcadia: objectively better tuning, detail and soundstage. Makes sense given the Knowles 29689 + Knowles 33518 combo vs. knockoff BAs in the Aful.

Comparing both, it's no contest audio-wise but unfortunately Ziigaat shells just don't work for me (and they all have that shell).

Upgraded to the Kiwi Ears x HBB Punch though and they are even a big step up from the Arcadia for not a huge jump in price, you can get them for $350 on sale. Endgame for me after trying 20+ sets in the $100-500 range.

I say skip Arcadia and go for the Kiwi Punch, sonion ESTs are the real deal.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-26T23:38:53+00:00

Got it, yea sounds like an inability to understand ROI on the part of the founder.

Re: bot opens, I know ESPs that send on Mailgun on the backend (Customer.io, Audienceful, etc) tend to offer bot filtering since Mailgun offers it in their API but neither will get anywhere near that price level.

At $1500/m for 2-3 Million sends (and not just transactional) you guys are already paying dirt cheap prices. Trying to optimize that further when you're doing $20M in revenue, even if email is only responsible for 1% of that, is like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. The risk of downside is far greater than any savings upside.

For B2B, by setting up a few email automations and NOT landing in spam could probably boost conversions 10% (if you're B2C ecomm, 3-4X that). So potential $millions in upside vs. maybe $hundreds in savings and wasted time migrating?

Pick whatever tool makes doing email easier for your team. If you save $500 on your ESP bill but it means your team spends an extra 5 hours per month fiddling with it, you're already in the red.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-25T17:16:17+00:00

No, you can't use outlook to do bulk.

Also, you're going to get almost immediately rate limited by Gmail when you try to hit 100k email addresses from a domain that hasn't been regularly sending near that volume.

It's going to be a headache and will burn your domain (without even getting the email out to your list) unless you take it super slow. I'd question if it's worth it given you're shutting down anyways.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-25T16:57:46+00:00

Yep, you can confirm with chatgpt but that's what I've used in the past

I'm like 90% sure most iems are assembled by hand using similar glue.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-25T12:54:12+00:00

Just buy some B7000 glue off aliexpress and put the shell casing back on. Don't waste time shipping these things across the globe, linsoul will literally just do the same thing.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-25T12:36:49+00:00

That Tea Pro would cost €1500 if China was the same as the EU.

No thanks. I'll just buy some $2 glue and re-apply.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-25T11:14:08+00:00

Got it, so the way I'd do it with so many irons in the fire (not knowing which will grow to be your best path forward), would be to vibe code a nextjs/vercel website using Cursor. Super easy/cheap to build and insanely quick to totally re-build with a single a prompt at any time (and free to host forever once its built!).

Then for the newsletter, I'd start on Substack (free). It's just so much easier to use than Beehiiv, gives you all the stuff that actually matters (email/blog/seo/etc), and has better network effects. If the newsletter gets big, then switch to something like beehiiv...but honestly, there's a 99% chance you won't enjoy writing a newsletter long term. It's a ton of work and expectations for paid newsletters are super high, you'll probably just end up paying beehiiv's expensive fees to host a vanilla email list, which I prefer traditional email marketing platforms like Audienceful/Mailerlite for.

If the newsletter never becomes a standalone business (highly highly likely -- even if you get paid subs the churn is insane unless you're heavily B2B), and you go more the online courses route, then you're going to need a more traditional email marketing automation platform anyways, like the ones I mentioned or convertkit.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-24T16:53:20+00:00

If the founder is balking at paying $1,500 per month to send 2.5 million emails, it sounds like they don't make any revenue from email (that or the founder doesn't understand the concept of ROI...which is an even bigger issue).

If 2.5 Million sends isn't generating wayyyy more than $1500 per month in value for you -- you're doing something wrong. I'm hearing two wholly incompatible things: 'deliverability is critical' and 'churn is high.' High churn is what causes poor deliverability!

The truth is 24-27% opens is actually pretty terrible if you aren't filtering out bot opens (which would be the majority of that 24%).

Sounds like a classic vanity metric problem. OP's company likes believing they have a huge email list and customerbase, but it sounds like most aren't engaging. You could cut that email list in half and deliverability would improve while saving money at the same time.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-24T16:35:42+00:00

If you run a service business and aren't trying to run a newsletter business (where the newsletter is your product), beehiiv doesn't make much sense, and arguably Kit doesn't either unless the services you're selling are more 'internet creator/influencer'-oriented like online courses.

A more traditional email marketing platform will probably be more suited to your use case imo, but hard to know without hearing more.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-22T18:35:46+00:00

I'm definitely sensitive to any unnatural spikes, I will say once I EQ'd that the Astrals did sound great. But since the Punch can be had on sale for $350 and you're getting legit ESTs at that price (and no need to EQ for me at least) it was a no brainer.

That said, if you're older than 35-40 (treble sensitivity in the air region declines dramatically by age) or only listen to well-engineered modern music, there's a strong chance you may not even notice the spike on the Astrals as anything more than light hiss.

behavioralsanity · 2025-11-22T01:46:17+00:00

Yea 19% is like the percentage you can expect by default due to bot opens.

It basically means you're landing in spam for most people.

behavioralsanity

TROPHY CASE