FounderQuest How Building Our Own Campaign Mailer For Rails Set Us Free
This week Ben, Starr, and Josh break down Heya, their freshly shipped open source email campaign mailer for Rails developers. Learn how Heya works, how it can help with GDPR and Soc 2 compliance, and how it saves Honeybadger $$$ in Intercom and Segment costs. Plus, don't miss the hot thermometer takes!
Show Notes:
Links:
Heya
Flex Tape
Honeybadger
Full Transcript:
Starr:
I saw some article about how some grocery stores like taking people's temperatures before they let them in.
Ben:
Yeah?
Starr:
And the one they showed actually projected, using a laser, the temperature reading on the person's forehead.
Ben:
Nice.
Starr:
And I thought that was so cool. And I was like, "I want one of those." And so I actually started searching for it. And I was like, "What if you want to take your own temperature?" Then you have to go to a mirror and-
Ben:
Shoot yourself in the head.
Starr:
Shoot yourself in the head. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn't even think about that imagery. That's kind of gross. Oh, Lord. There are all sorts of problems with that, now that I think about it. So, yeah. We just got an old fashioned digital thermometer.
Josh:
Every other morning. You just wake up and go into the mirror and you're just like.
Starr:
I don't know if you guys have this, but I realized that I have this thing sort of hung over from childhood, which was back when I was a kid, it was pretty common still for people to have mercury thermometers.
Ben:
I still have it.
Starr:
You still have one? Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Starr:
Mercury thermometers are a... I mean, it might break. But-
Ben:
It's the gold standard, man.
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
It's the gold standard, yeah. That's what they use in chemistry labs, still use a mercury thermometer. But the one thing that I was always scared to do. They tell you when you're a kid, "Well if you bite down on it, and it breaks, then you're going to have mercury in your mouth." And that basically just means you're going to die immediately. I mean, not really. But that's the impression I got. And so even though our thermometer now is digital, I still have this anxiety. It's like, don't bite down on it. You know?
Ben:
Yeah. Honestly, I'd be more concerned about the broken glass in my mouth than I would about the mercury.
Josh:
The glass could be a problem. Yeah. Yeah.
Starr:
Yeah, I guess so.
Josh:
Yeah we have one of the forehead contact ones, and it works pretty good. Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah, the reason why we have four thermometers is we had the original, the glass one. That was our first one. And then we upgraded and got the digital one when the first kid was born. And then at some point later, we got one of those forehead ones. And that was great. And then when the older one went off to college, one of the recommendations from... They had the orientation for parents as well as orientation for the kids.
Ben:
And the orientation for parents, they said, the medical person got up and said, "If you don't send anything else with your student, send a thermometer." Because they get so many reports of kids not feeling well. They could have called the clinic and say, "Hey, I'm not feeling well." And I'm like, "Well do you have a fever?" And the kid's like, "I don't know." And they're like, "Well do you have a thermometer?" And the answer's always, "No." So they said, "So please send them with a thermometer." And so we got one. We got a thermometer and set him up. Now he's back at home, so now we have four. So that's how we have four thermometers in our household.
Josh:
Smart. Yeah, I can imagine not many college kids have a thermometer.
Starr:
All right. So today I think we're going to take a mild break from simply talking about the fact that everything outside of our little bubbles is on fire, and we're going to talk about some cool news that Josh actually shipped something, and we're going to talk about it. And that thing-
Josh:
Josh and Ben.
Starr:
Josh and Ben. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Ben.
Ben:
But mostly Josh.
Josh:
Ben did all the cool stuff.
Starr:
Yeah, I'm just saying I didn't do anything. That's all. That's why I'm announcing it. Yeah. So this week we released Heya, which is Josh's sort of email marketing gem Rails engine thing. So what does it mean to say that we released it? What's the state of it?
Josh:
Well it's been on our GitHub, if you went and looked for it, for a few months at least now. It's open source. It's just a GitHub repo. But this week we announced it and started talking a little bit about it. I posted on Reddit. And then it got picked up by Ruby Weekly this week too. So that kind of got it some attention, and more people know what it is now. Which is, it's basically a campaign mailer, like a sequenced mailer, for Rails. So it works kind of like, I don't know if you're familiar with Action Mailer? Sending you just vanilla emails in Rails. This basically feels just like Action Mailer, but it lets you send sequences of emails. And the emails within sequences can be segmented. So you can send different emails to different people who enter a campaign. So it's very similar to Intercom or Customer.io. But it's a direct plugin self-hosted in your Rails app with direct access to your user database, which is my favorite part.
Starr:
Yeah. And it's a little bit timely, just sort of accidentally, because the main reason that Josh sort of really wanted to do this, let me just talk for you, Josh. Let me speak for you.
Josh:
Yeah, please do.
Starr:
Or that we wanted to do this is because we were paying a really large amount of money to Intercom for essentially this one feature. Are we allowed to say how much money we spent? Does anybody remember?
Josh:
Yeah. Well we were paying... It was around a thousand a month, I think, at one point. And then that's also not including Segment, for instance. We were using Segment to send our data to Intercom and a few other places, and that was another $400 a month. So we were probably all in for $1500, $1400/1500 a month I would guess.
Starr:
Okay. So it's a pretty big chunk of change.
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
That was even with trimming the user database from time to time, to keep the cost down.
Josh:
Yeah we were doing all the stuff. We were doing all the things that people do with Intercom.
Starr:
Because they go by the user, right?
Josh:
Yeah.
Starr:
So you can't actually store all your users in there. You've got to-
Josh:
Yeah.
Ben:
Yeah.
Josh:
And when we say user, we mean user in your database, not users that can use Intercom. It's how many users of your app you are wanting to message. So we were storing just our active users, and still it was astronomical.
Ben:
Yeah. Which ...