After a few weeks without any email router interviews, we welcome today Julien Tartarinfounder and CEO of the startup Mailjet.
Can you give us a brief history of Mailjet? When was the platform founded, by whom? Has the business model evolved since the beginning of the adventure?
The adventure began in May 2010 when I discussed for the first time with Wilfried Durand an idea that was in my head, to create an emailing platform to facilitate the life of developers. Wilfried was immediately enthusiastic and a few days later he mentioned it to Thibaud Elzière (founder of Fotolia) during a conference.
Then, everything happened very, very fast! A team was formed and a beta version was presented at the Le Web 2010 exhibition. Early 2011, the first version is deployed and mid-2011 we hire our first employees. Two years later, we have just passed the milestone of 40 employees ... and it's not over yet!
What makes Mailjet unique? What sets you apart from other players in this highly competitive market?
Mailjet was developed by developers for developers! The heart of our solution is really the deliverability aspect. We provide developers with tools (API, smtp relay, etc.) that enable them to integrate emailing into their projects as simply as possible.
For example, there were no plans at all to integrate a newsletter creation within the platform. Because we needed it internally, we made it available to our customers. This tool only uses our API to function, and we offer our customers the possibility of integrating it into their platforms. Spreadbutton, for example, does this with its Social CRM platform.
Another specificity of Mailjet is its technology developed entirely in-house. This means that we have full control over our costs and are able to offer some of the most competitive prices on the market. It also allows us to offer a no-contract, no-commitment model. All of our customers are free to leave whenever they want, at no extra cost.
To conclude with the specificities of MailjetI can also mention our anti-spam policy which is extremely restrictive! We do not accept any purchased database and we carry out a rigorous monitoring to detect those of our customers who do not respect these rules. We often close access to some of our customers in order to preserve our excellent relations with ISPs and webmails.
What are the 3 main challenges for the next few months in the emailing world?
First of all, I can't help but mention deliverability! This is a concept that is unfortunately still too poorly understood! However, the influence of deliverability on campaign performance is far from negligible. Can you really afford to have your confirmation emails arrive in the spam box of your customers?
According to the latest reports from Return Path, in Europe, 3% of emails arrive as spam, and even worse, 13% of emails are blocked without you even realizing it. Today, your reputation as a sender is not only based on your IP address. The domain is taking over. This means that your reputation will stick to you. Where previously it was possible to start from scratch by changing your sender, tomorrow it will no longer be possible! And nobody wants to change their brand name every six months.
Then, one of the other challenges of emailing today is the professionalization of the whole emailing chain, and not only newsletters and other advertising emails. Transactional emailing offers a much higher level of reactivity than any newsletter and yet it remains the poor relation of emailing.
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In third place I would mention the use of emailing in mobile situations! Not to ride the wave that has been agitating the emailing world in recent months, but simply to highlight the radical change in usage that is taking place.
What are the next evolutions of your platform?
At the moment, we are in the process of completely overhauling the deepest layers of our platform. For the past two years, we have been experiencing a very significant growth in the number of emails sent. To give you an order of magnitude, while it took us two years to send our first billion, it then took 8 months for the second and only 4 months for the third.
When this overhaul of our foundations is complete, it will also be much easier for us to visibly evolve the platform. There are already plenty of new things planned on our roadmap, but we prefer not to communicate on this one 😉
Do you offer your customers a "Freemium" mode (free version with reduced features)?
Yes !
If so, what do you get out of it?
Mailjet gives free access to all the features of the platform with a limit of 200 emails sent per day. This model allows our customers to test the platform before switching to one of our paid plans. This is very important for developers, for example, who can test the effectiveness of our API or our plugins during the analysis phase of their projects.
What do you think of the French emailing market? Is it mature or is there still room for new innovations?
There is always room for innovation! Email may be an old medium, but it is evolving as fast as its environment: mobile devices, cloud technologies, filtering technologies, authentication, ...
The French emailing market is a mature market, but one that has lost its ability to surprise and reinvent itself in recent years. Today, we are faced with a few well-established behemoths that no longer excite the crowds. However, the technological environment has never evolved as fast as it does today, so it is imperative to adapt. Who can still understand in 2013 that an API can be a paying option in an emailing tool? Not us!
A last word to conclude?
The easiest way if you want to make an opinion on MailjetYou can visit the website and register for free on the platform. On the other hand, our team regularly participates in events all over France and Europe, whether it is during a Hackathon, a meetup, come and discuss and drink a beer with us!
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