Today we have with us, The CEO of Elastic email, Michael Findlater, Let's go through his entrepreneurial journey,
Josh and Michal being highly technical software engineers were looking for a partner who has similar experience, but brought more business awareness to the company. I guess with me also being an entrepreneur with my own company Finnysoft, my experience/education and personality, we just sort of “clicked”.
Prior to Elastic Email I was a Principal at Softworks Group where I was the lead developer and then manager of the product Alinity, which is an Association Management platform specializing in regulatory management such as registration, continuing competency, conduct and more.
In the early days, I spent 3 years as a database administrator for GE Fanuc, one of General Electric’s 13 business units at the time. This is where I got my SQL chops!
As for education, I have a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Alberta. I majored in Management Information Systems and minored in Organizational Theory. I also studied music in college for a couple of years obtaining a Music Diploma and chased a childhood dream for a while to be the next big rock band! (
When I’m not working, I spend most of my time with my beautiful wife and a lot of time on the lake water skiing.
We believe email is going to be a commodity and we have built our business around that. By writing every line of code down to the protocol level, we own the MTA and that allows us granular control and flexibility that many of our competitors can’t offer.
As for challenges, we’ve had many. Scaling and building a distributed system is not trivial and we have learned a lot with the growth rate Elastic Email has had over the years. Our most notable challenge however is dealing with spam. This unfortunate reality of our business has caused us to spend an enormous amount of resources over the years which I would much have preferred to spend elsewhere innovating and creating.
Elastic Email actually has a survey tool that you could create for this and send to your list. The survey results are easily viewed and exported as well from our dashboard.
Elastic Email also has a custom form builder, so you could create a specific form that includes a custom field for attending an event. You could then send out a merge tag in your email that will automatically generate a link to this form where your contacts could update if they are attending the event or not.
One thing I love about our product is that it is designed in such a way that we see our customers being creative and creating solutions we didn’t even conceive.
If you want to have success over the long term, list management is the only solution. We watch customers jump from provider to provider, changing out their IPs and all this action to try and get emails to people who don’t want them – it is like pounding a square peg through a round hole and is kind of silly in my opinion.
- Hi Michael, Glad to have you as our guest, Please introduce yourself in your own style
Josh and Michal being highly technical software engineers were looking for a partner who has similar experience, but brought more business awareness to the company. I guess with me also being an entrepreneur with my own company Finnysoft, my experience/education and personality, we just sort of “clicked”.
Prior to Elastic Email I was a Principal at Softworks Group where I was the lead developer and then manager of the product Alinity, which is an Association Management platform specializing in regulatory management such as registration, continuing competency, conduct and more.
In the early days, I spent 3 years as a database administrator for GE Fanuc, one of General Electric’s 13 business units at the time. This is where I got my SQL chops!
As for education, I have a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Alberta. I majored in Management Information Systems and minored in Organizational Theory. I also studied music in college for a couple of years obtaining a Music Diploma and chased a childhood dream for a while to be the next big rock band! (
When I’m not working, I spend most of my time with my beautiful wife and a lot of time on the lake water skiing.
- We at Boost Bloggers believe that every entrepreneur has a story, can you tell the story of your startup and challenges faced to make it successful company.
We believe email is going to be a commodity and we have built our business around that. By writing every line of code down to the protocol level, we own the MTA and that allows us granular control and flexibility that many of our competitors can’t offer.
As for challenges, we’ve had many. Scaling and building a distributed system is not trivial and we have learned a lot with the growth rate Elastic Email has had over the years. Our most notable challenge however is dealing with spam. This unfortunate reality of our business has caused us to spend an enormous amount of resources over the years which I would much have preferred to spend elsewhere innovating and creating.
- What differentiates elastic email from mailchimp and other competitors?
- "Up to 1.5 lac free emails per month with personalization, and tracking"- This is statement that got my attention when i visited elastic email for the first time, but doesn't that affect the revenue model ?
- Can we send RSVP mail for attendees of an event, If yes how?
Elastic Email actually has a survey tool that you could create for this and send to your list. The survey results are easily viewed and exported as well from our dashboard.
Elastic Email also has a custom form builder, so you could create a specific form that includes a custom field for attending an event. You could then send out a merge tag in your email that will automatically generate a link to this form where your contacts could update if they are attending the event or not.
One thing I love about our product is that it is designed in such a way that we see our customers being creative and creating solutions we didn’t even conceive.
- Could you share one trick that could drastically improve performance of an email campaign?
If you want to have success over the long term, list management is the only solution. We watch customers jump from provider to provider, changing out their IPs and all this action to try and get emails to people who don’t want them – it is like pounding a square peg through a round hole and is kind of silly in my opinion.
- How do we track performance of email campaigns in elastic email and tell us about efforts put in to improve it.
- What next? What can we expect more from elastic email?
- Let's get to the personal side, Who's your role model and why?
- If you were to give a piece of advice to youngsters, what would it be?
- It was a great pleasure interviewing you Michael, One last question, What are your thoughts on our blog?
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