On Launching An Email Marketing Solution For WordPress

Tareq Hasan

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Published: November 22nd, 2020

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Tareq Hasan

Founder, weMail

$120

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

weMail

getwemail.io

from DHAKA

started July 2020

$120

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Hello. I’m Tareq Hasan. I’m the Co-Founder of weDevs along with my partner Nizam Uddin. We founded weDevs back in 2008. Since then we keep building successful WordPress products, and so on.

Some of our popular plugins include Dokan Multivendor, WPERP (the very first WordPress ERP system), Happy Elementor Addons, WP User Frontend, and many more.

Hence, as we are getting bigger with prospects and innovation, we launched weMail a year ago. weMail is our flagship email marketing platform designed especially for WordPress based websites. If you have a WordPress site for your business, weMail can gear up your email campaigns to a new height.

Right now, we’re a platform at $100/month and 500 active installs, and over 12K downloads.

on-launching-an-email-marketing-solution-for-wordpress

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

At weDevs, we need to send a huge amount of emails for multiple reasons. Since the beginning, email marketing is one of our key arsenals to reach people. As the number of sending email campaigns grew consistently, it became a necessity to look for an affordable email automation platform.

Just focus on improvement. If you are keen on innovation, have an eye for thorough research, you can improve each day gradually.

Therefore, our marketing and engineering team conceived the idea of developing an email marketing solution for ourselves. So, you can put it like that, weMail came to fruition out of necessity.

The primary goal was to build a WordPress based email marketing platform, as all of our products and websites are built on WordPress. Though, the main focus was to save a huge chunk of money email marketing costs us each month.

It leads us to think from the user’s perspective. Moreover, there was a lack of such email tools focused solely on WordPress.

And, that makes a huge difference. weMail is designed to save money, and gain more. Anyone can use weMail integration in their WordPress site for free. But they don’t need to fall short of quality.

weDevs have an army of dedicated and creative individuals who work behind many of our successful products which are earning millions. So, we aim to achieve the same thing for weMail.

Though the email automation industry is huge, the competition is too stiff. As a startup, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome every day. Even so, we strongly believe to turn weMail into success. To do that, we depend on our innovation and the support of the users. We are closely in touch with them and bound to make weMail flawless and powerful.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

Well, the initial process was creating mockups from the get-go. We would design the workflow first then dive deep into the UI process, figure out an intuitive way of visual UI for users.

Our research and developments depended heavily on thorough research. We compare the features of the existing email automation tools in the market. Then try to find out which will stick and which will not. And, if there is any scope that let us introduce something simple and we were ready to take that chance.

For example, one such unique feature is our third-party sending APIs. weMail will give you almost every needful email automation feature, and you can choose an affordable email sending gateway. This combination will save your money and effort for big times.

Adopting this service model wasn’t easy for us. Because most of our competitors provide an established way of sending emails.

We believe this would be a big catch for us. However, we never stop our updating process and keep innovating. So, the newest features are being added frequently, and which don’t work or reported issues, the weMail team takes immediate measures.

Since weMail is based on WordPress, most of our components share the same styles of WordPress to keep it simple, and clean.

If it comes to the cost of developing, the process is a continuous one, regarding investments and efforts. Our initial cost was for the webserver, domain & Google cloud servers, and Google cloud functions. You can also consider the investment behind our marketing, engineering, and design team along with the logistics.

Describe the process of launching the business.

We launched through ProductHunt first, it briefly became the 4th product of the day on our launch day. We had a separate campaign plan for the launch.

We wrote down and finalize social copies, reaching out to people, putting up an opt-in form on our website to reach out to the people who have expressed their interest earlier.

We piggybacked on the success of weDevs. Having a great & financially capable company does come in handy at times, you know.

The lesson learned here was, we should have been more active on social platforms, we should have made groups and curated a community to get better user feedback.

Therefore, we go on trying to let people know how convenient it would be to adopt weMail for their business.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Our first step was to cut down the niche and target people for a specific platform. Eventually, we were noticing that our WordPress-based email solution attracted customers from WordPress communities around the world.

So, for aspiring founders, it’s always a good strategy to start with a community first. Then work your way around the product to make it suitable for the end-users.

While we spend time developing the technical aspect of weMail, we also focus on creating and growing a leading email marketing resource through blog posts, documentation, tutorials, and videos.

Content marketing helps us more than anything to gain the attention of curious people who want to adopt a new email automation tool for their business. It does work gradually. We have a steady reader-base and the daily site visits are on a growth curve.

we are planning to launch retargeting ads to bring back the lost visitors and convert them. One of our core retention plans depends on sending monthly and occasional newsletters, and social media sharing.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

For any startup, it's always the biggest challenge to find a steady path and get on with that. It’s because when you are new to something, you may see a lot of options and a plethora of diversions. Often you make mistakes. Sometimes they will be minor and you always get back on track. Also, people tend to make a wrong or unfortunate move so easily.

As we are talking about weMail, we didn’t go with influencer marketing at first. At times, we failed to understand the gravity of such a marketing approach. But we should have done that. Maybe it would help us gain momentum more easily. As you know, people love to be influenced by industry experts and who have the right authority.

Furthermore, in the beginning, making the product perfect is another false dichotomy that we fell into. But with time, we focus more on creativity and dynamism. We understand that a blind passion to make something perfect often obscures the possibilities of invention and customer convenience.

However, right now, our integration partnerships are on point. It drives us a steady amount of WordPress plugin installation.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

The platforms we use mainly are WordPress. For other back end stuff of the product we use - Laravel, MySQL, Google Cloud Functions, and many bleeding-edge techs under the hood.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Books are the biggest factory of ideas. We can’t really name a few ones. Writers like Brian Tracy, Robert Kiyosaki, Spencer Johnson, or Daniel Kahneman always help us to understand the market and how people grow perception of something. As Charles Baudelaire said once, ‘a book is a company, a multitude of counselors.’

Especially, we follow Seth Godin’s principle, which inspires us to do things with more openness and impact. Therefore, weDevs’s own internal marketing expertise helps us to figure out the most profitable strategies now and then.

Furthermore, we also listen to the podcasts of Tim Ferris, and we think it would be a great help to anyone interested to start something new. Ferris covers almost anything that can add up to ideas on creativity and living.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting?

Well, it’s always been a bit confusing to tell something inspiring. Rather than telling what to do, one can explain or describe what has one done for his achievements. As we still consider weMail as a startup, we have yet to achieve our milestones. So, this is exactly what we are doing, sharing our journey with you.

If your business is about digital products, you can do these things step by step - plan your launch, write down a copy for everything, create a community on the first day.

And, one crucial thing. Don’t bother about perfect products. They will never be perfect, is there anything really perfect in this world? So, just focus on improvement. If you are keen on innovation, have an eye for thorough research, you can improve each day gradually.

Furthermore, always be transparent about the product roadmap and the mistakes you’ve made. Users will eventually be with you when they are honest about your work and mistakes. They will believe you when they understand that you care and you do want to provide value.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

No, not at the moment. But we keep hiring talented people with the right potential from time to time. Whenever a professional individual or a post may be vacant, we published a job circular in the weDevs Lounge and followed a thorough recruitment process.