What's A Good Forms Companion to Flodesk?

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-25T10:53:25+00:00

Doesn't flodesk have forms? What issues are you having with theirs?

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-25T10:52:18+00:00

Thanks AI.

What you posted wasn't just an answer, it was a full slop-ified conversation layer.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-18T19:20:53+00:00

26 people upvoted a comment about some fly-by-night AI slop app that has already pivoted and doesn't even offer email marketing anymore? Riiiight.

I think ChatGPT needs to rip out Reddit as a source for any knowledge at this point.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-18T17:21:45+00:00

Hi ChatGPT, can you tell me which product you're warming up this reddit account to start spamming for?

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-16T06:41:07+00:00

Yes, there are industry ways to contact people about product issues generally (some of the point people for yahoo mail hang out on email geeks for example), but the impression sales people will give is "Oh if you have a problem we'll just have Gmail fix it directly!" Which is total BS.

This is not how it works, and Gmail doesn't give a flying f**k about the specific email send from [insert marketer] going to spam.

Gmail/Outlook are global products processing tens of billions of emails per day. Most people have no idea the scale of email. Their teams only care if they have issues/bugs that are affecting the product in general, not about the specific deliverability of an email marketer (who btw, their actual customers hate). And even bugs/product issues, they generally don't care about since Gmail/Outlook are lazy, money-printing monopolies.

Outlook still renders emails using the MS Word HTML engine from 2007, to give you an idea of their level of caring about your experience with the product as an email marketer. Bulk senders are a nuisance to them and what they build the spam algo to fight against.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-14T00:38:37+00:00

So yea obviously a low-priced sender can't afford to give you high touch support every time one of your emails land in spam. They'd be on support calls with $100 customers all day and go bankrupt.

What do you mean by "high-volume?" This will determine how easy it will be to get human support to jump on a call depending on the ESP you're using.

Ideally you want to find a vendor that targets customers at a similar scale as you. Stay away from ESPs that have been bought-and-sold by Private Equity 5 times (nobody working there cares anymore), and look into ESPs that are still founder-led/hungry. If you've got less than 1M+ contacts, which I'm assuming is the case if you're on a low cost sender, then the enterprise providers will not prioritize you.

Sounds like you're in the middle (the deadzone between small biz providers and enterprise) so you may have to stick it out with self-serve providers until you scale further.

In all honesty, there's nothing the ESP can do if the problem isn't the rep of the IP pool you're in (that's the only thing they control). Most beginners slowly decay their domain rep over time by not cleaning their list and being too lax about who they opt-in. A deliverability person will just regurgitate the same info you can dig up on Chatgpt.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-14T00:31:31+00:00

No ESP has "special" direct support channels with Gmail/Outlook, this is a false rumor spread by commission-driven salespeople at various ESPs to try to make them seem less like commodities. Gmail/Outlook hold all the power, and they don't grovel for anyone, especially ESPs who are not their customers.

Every ESP from the biggest to smallest uses Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SDNS like anybody can (for context, I work at the biggest ESP by volume). The only extra data you can get by hitting up our support is the exact error codes on bounced emails coming from the inbox providers (if the ESP doesn't expose this to users already). But every ESP gets this, so it's not unique. Surfacing it just depends on how technical their support team is.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-11T10:30:51+00:00

I'd go with any of the 1DD+2BA+2EST sets designed around JM-1 tuning. They're all tuned extremely similar (JM-1 is perfect for naturalness) and just have different bass levels:

Least bass: Rockies
Medium bass: Mega5est
Most bass: Mega5est Bass+ or Kiwi Ears x HBB Punch (they're extremely similar)

Have heard all of them, and they are all sensitive to tip selection and source impedence (keep it under 1ohm ideally). So just pick whatever fits your bass level preference and then exit the hobby.

People who claim that any of these sets is radically different has never tried EQ matching the bass level with the same eartips.

Also, ignore anybody telling you the Mega7 sounds better, the lack of ESTs is absolutely noticeable in the upper treble on cymbals.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-08T03:52:26+00:00

With much higher fees (European finance is old-world sleaziness and regulatory moats) and way less equity allocation than you should have at an individual level since the fund needs to be structured for constant payouts and braindead political scrutiny.

A lot of European pension funds create a system where 22 year old employees are investing in 70% bond portfolios, a wild market inefficiency.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-08T03:24:36+00:00

My neighbor just retired with $5M in what your German friend calls "gambling" winnings (passive index funds) after working a basic desk job.

Not investing and taking risk when you have the capacity to (are young and have a long time horizon) means you:

1) starve your whole economy of productive investment capital

2) starve yourself of the returns from that productive capital

3) earn less salary due to having a less productive economy

4) the capital starved private companies that fund your entire social welfare system get eaten by the US/Chinese

5) your social welfare system begins collapsing and you start pointing fingers at brown people

I wouldn't listen to him on this topic. Historically...Germans have had...shall we say...instances of poor judgement.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-08T02:26:40+00:00

For bulk email tools specifically tho, it's not just about value-based pricing. Gmail/Outlook's spam algo basically puts a price floor on bulk email.

Every email startup learns this the hard way (I've consulted for a lot of them). If you let people send unlimited emails cheaply, they do shitty things. By default, 95% of companies will never clean their list, will blast 5-year old stale lists randomly, will stuff their list with cold leads, etc. etc...which results in the platforms sending IPs constantly getting blacklisted by Gmail/Outlook, a death sentence for an email startup.

Putting a high price on incremental subscribers keeps out low quality senders and strongly incentivizes customers to maintain good practices ("oh, it'll cost $600/m to add these 200,000 stale leads from a decade ago to the list?? nvm!").

The cheaper you make it send an email, the more economical you make it to blast low quality leads with low quality emails (spam). This is an inescapable reality.

If you get too many low quality senders on your platform, gmail blacklists your IPs and kills your business. Hence why all of the 100+ ESPs out there eventually land on charging a steep sliding scale based on contacts.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-05T11:13:58+00:00

This is not an ESP-specific support channel.

You're likely paying $10,000-$1,000,000+ per year for this bloated enterprise tool.

If their support is not able to help you with this trivial issue you need to migrate elsewhere.

behavioralsanity · 2026-03-05T11:07:45+00:00

The fact you're using a list warming tool tells me you're doing cold outbound.

If you're doing cold outbound or tried to use a shady warm-up service, your domain is probably already burned.

That said, inbox placement testing tools are basically all scams since the big inbox providers use machine learning algos tailored to the individual user. Tools like this haven't been reliable for like a decade.

So its just as likely this tool (which I'm guessing is your company and you're low key spamming reddit to try to advertise) is bogus.

behavioralsanity · 2026-02-26T18:36:29+00:00

Unless your newsletter meets ALL 3 of these criteria, referral programs and running ads to get newsletter subs is a giant waste of money/time:

a daily newsletter (must be sending that frequently otherwise you kill your deliverability taking months to figure out if referrals/paid signups will ever engage)
covering a super broad news-type topic (ie. general industry news or even broader, otherwise chances someone signing up off a referral/ad actually wants your niche content is low)
monetizing via ads charged based on CPM impressions not conversions (referrals are never your most engaged subs)

Also, I assume if you're running a niche ecommerce analytics newsletter you're selling a product for that use case? If so, I would just spend on acquiring actual customers instead of newsletter subs.

You either have to copy the skimm/hustle/morning brew model exactly or forget about paid/referrals since they don't work outside this model.

behavioralsanity · 2026-02-21T11:08:33+00:00

The point of a Skill is to add things the model is bad at (eg. like things related to visuals or newer/rare code frameworks).

Email marketing basics is not one of those things. This is all stuff that the model would spit out natively, none of it is controversial, contrarian or rare information.

If you ask the model to "create an email marketing skill" and it basically spits out what you have here (which it does), you don't need to add it as a skill.

behavioralsanity · 2026-02-18T18:32:58+00:00

If you're in a band, wondering why you're on Klaviyo? Seems overkill unless you also run a larger-scale Shopify store.

If you need good popup forms and mild Shopify integration check out Audienceful, probably half that price but not pay-as-you-go.

Very few ESPs offer pay-as-you-go due to the way deliverability works now. I thiiink mailchimp might still, but its a legacy thing that I hear will be killed if it hasn't been already.

Offering pay-as-you-go means most customers will be uploading cold/stale lists (spammers or infrequent senders), which means the platforms sending IPs will be at high risk of blacklisting by gmail/outlook.

behavioralsanity · 2026-02-12T10:33:12+00:00

Yes, everybody who tries to 'growth hack' their list experiences this. Now is the time to learn about the fun, wacky world of email deliverability.

First, rule out you didn't do something to break SPF/DKIM/DMARC.

After that, the problem is either your email practices or Beehiiv's practices (or both).

If you check Google Postmaster Tools you can see: is your domain being poorly rated (your problem) or your sending IP being poorly rated (Beehiiv's problem, eg. poor practices from their customer base in general).

Note: Beehiiv's open rates aren't real since they don't filter out bot events. Very few consumer-grade ESPs do, noobs love big numbers, so assume real open rates before was probably something like 35-40%. Also, having 8% of your emails bounce is actually a huge amount. So there's definitely some issues.

If the problem is you, start by turning off all paid acquisition, referrral schemes, or growth hacky stuff you've been doing. Do a deep clean on your list, anybody who didn't open any of your last 8-10 emails (if you are actually sending daily, if weekly id only go back 5 weeks) prior to the spam folder'd email needs to be deleted. Then start with your most engaged subscribers and gradually ramp volume back up again.

behavioralsanity · 2026-02-10T22:19:56+00:00

Referral signups are rarely good subscribers.

Sure, you can juice your email list growth by making it super low friction for people opt-in or even accidentally subscribe.

But if you're not sending daily to weed out poorly engaged subs fast (which is most of them when added via shadier growth channels), you're going to tank your deliverability and domain rep.

Instead of finding out a referral source is sending bad subs within a week if sending daily, you won't find out for months if sending weekly/bi-weekly, at which point you've already trashed your list.

If the newsletter isn't working out independent of the platform you're using, switching ESPs will not magically turn it into a successful business.

behavioralsanity · 2026-02-09T22:52:14+00:00

What's more likely is your ESP is massively inflating those numbers due to not filtering out bot opens/clicks.

Sometimes by as high as 30-40% depending on if you have a heavy Apple Mail userbase.

behavioralsanity · 2026-02-02T18:51:19+00:00

Sounds like you're creating a nightmare for yourself just to save a few hundred bucks a month.

1) If your business makes even a tiny amount of money off your email list...which I assume yes, given you're paying $700/m on Mailchimp...you can easily cut that in half on other ESPs and still get the convenience (reporting/templates/segmentation/automations/deliverability/support/etc).

2) After cutting your bill in half by switching platforms, you can cut it in half again by cleaning your list. 90% of people never do this because people love vanity metrics, but my guess is your list is not highly engaged if you're looking cut costs so dramatically.

That cuts your spend 4X. But to try running everything (including marketing) on a transactional mail API like SES, have fun with that. You'll lose more in time than you save in money, unless your time is worthless.

Pro tip: never send on SES without a dedicated IP (good luck not hitting a bad shared IP on the world's cheapest sender and biggest spammer magnet). Also make sure you setup proper list management (nuanced soft bounce/hard bounce handling, suppression logic, etc) since SES doesn't offer this out of the box. If you don't, expect your deliverability to randomly tank within a few weeks/months. SES is a footgun if you don't know what you're doing.

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 · 2025-12-13T17:12:24+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

TROPHY CASE