A Conversation With Avi Goldman of Parcel.io

The Future of Email Newsletter

News and research on the future of email.

Early maps had cryptic warnings about unknown territory — 'Here be dragons!' and such. Since someone clicking the play button a podcast is launching into an hour of unknown, perhaps similar warnings would be useful. For this episode, the warning would be "Here be technical founders!". (Pirate voice - 'Arrh!')

Avi Goldman, the founder of Parcel.io, sat down with host Matthew Dunn to swap absurdly techie and founder-ie opinions about the challenges and opportunities of growing a SaaS company. Parcel.io is "A code editor that knows email" — an honest-to-goodness tool for email developers. Avi and his growing team shipped the official V1 of Parcel a few months before this conversation.

Email is a challenging development environment, and very, VERY few companies have built for the distinct technical challenges (and differences) of that environment. Email is HTML, but it's not web HTML. Email CSS is not web CSS, and — one of many topics batted around — email does not have a scripting language like Javascript. Avi also shares some sound and thoughtful advice for aspiring startup founders.

If your job involves the technical side of email (or of something), you'll enjoy this conversation!

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00]

[00:00:09] Matthew Dunn: Good afternoon. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn host of the future of email my guest today. Yay. We finally, we finally got this nailed up Avi, Goldman, founder of Parcel.io. Welcome. Yay. We get to talk again?

[00:00:22] Avi Goldman: Yes. Hi, thank you for having me. How are you doing

[00:00:25] Matthew Dunn: today? Oh, you know, I found we were chit-chatting in advance, uh, uh, V and I share the.

[00:00:32] Uh, company, founder tech, founder, a set of hair, hairballs headaches, burdens opportunities. So there's a bit of a kindred spirit thing there. Tell people top-line in case someone's listening to, what is he talking about? Parcel parcel in a few cents.

[00:00:52] Avi Goldman: Parcel is the email coding platform. So for anyone who's not using the drag and drop editor built into their ESP Parsons, the way to build that email, it's got a ton of power to just basically help you be more efficient, have less questions, be more certain about your code, pass the, do all the things you need to do as you're creating really good.

[00:01:14] Matthew Dunn: You have in website's gorgeous by the way, a code editor that knows email. And I'm like, yeah, exactly. Why? Because email HTML not it's different. So different language almost

[00:01:30] Avi Goldman: right. It's got so many different challenges and like, even though it's, it's HTML. Like you're worrying about syntaxes that you just, you don't see anywhere else in the world.

[00:01:41] Right. We're working with MSL comments, we're working with Microsoft, like own CSS properties. We're thinking about, you know, the support from apple mail, you know, being able to play with Flexbox and then we're, you know, still working with tables. And so we get to do all this fun stuff. And we have to support all this older stuff and like that balance and like having it, like when I'm working on emails, myself, like having an editor that actually has all the audit complete and the intelligence and linked to the right documentation and all that, like, yeah, I'm a fan

[00:02:13] Matthew Dunn: you fed you're fed.

[00:02:14] Well, I, I get poke a tiny amount of fun at you. It's like you're working with HTML standards that are damned as old as you are.

[00:02:22] Avi Goldman: Uh, you're, you're not wrong. Um, move them, got me beat for sure.

[00:02:27] Matthew Dunn: Jay's wow. Right. And, and, you know, as, as a, as a, you know, you're a developer as a developer, you appreciate, I, we, we come to say, God can the tools know the dumb stuff so I can concentrate on the other stuff and email.

[00:02:44] Has had a, a real hole there, I think for a long time, aside from, as you mentioned, drag and drop editor environments, which makes some tasks easier and other tests impossible.

[00:02:55] Avi Goldman: Yes. And I think it's email super interesting, like just in the way that the industry moves in. Right now, if you look at like the web dev industry, like, and we're like all the modern frameworks are, people are actually starting to pull from the email world of like, okay, let's create really nice UI on top of really well-built components.

[00:03:15] Like that is something that industry is shifting to. While, you know, email at the, you know, the past five years we've been looking at kind of the power of what we can do beyond just like what a drag and drop editor gives us. So it's like, we're, we're almost like switching places and like where kind of innovation is happening.

[00:03:32] Um, which is a really interesting

[00:03:34] Matthew Dunn: thing to watch. Yeah. And, and, um, let me, this is a quick rabbit hole to go down, but there, there are there, they're not standards, but there's, there are some more widely accepted. Sin syntaxes and additions. I'm thinking of liquid for some reason, um, right. That they don't necessarily make the end of delivery job happened, but they can make it easier to get there.

[00:04:00] And I'm, I'm always a little surprised that like stutter start partial adoption, but no, you know, nothing, nothing universal. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:11] Avi Goldman: We're looking at that. It's an interesting problem. I think. So it's interesting, right? Like, I guess when you're talking about personalization and liquid or mustache or Al chimps, you know, version Django, whatever you're using, I think from like an ESP perspective, it comes down to, I think what's really well supported in the framework you're using to build your underlying service, right?

[00:04:37] Whatever you're using for your email rendering and template and personalization engine, like there's decisions there and also. I mean, there's, there's, you know, from the darker pattern, do you have some better lock-in um, and there's also like guarantees around like not overlapping. So parcel does have a little bit of, um, power that we can talk a bit about, like the components and part of it like to do too, when I was creating.

[00:05:02] I was looking at all the popular ESPs, all the popular templating languages, the personalization languages, and being like, how do I make sure that what I'm creating doesn't conflict or at least has the fewest number of conflicts because you just, you don't want to have people like having to like, think about, okay, it's going to go from this system.

[00:05:19] And then that system, so like having differences does have value there. Yeah.

[00:05:25] Matthew Dunn: Well, you, you, you mentioned that you mentioned that back and forth. You mentioned it back and forth trend. I want to delve into that for a second, but quick question computer on your desk. Macro windows. Okay. Ditto on. And I don't think it's a Mac exclusive thing, but, um, um, I'm guilty of running.

[00:05:45] A lot of apps made a culpa. There it is. I said it lots of tabs. Um, I've started using, uh, I think it's a hot flavor to it. Uh, platform called obsidian. Yeah. Have you heard of that? No. Um, there's this niche called PKM personal knowledge management, which is people who are a lot more anal, but a lot more anal about keeping notes than I am.

[00:06:09] But I'm sitting in, is this it's it's gorgeous. It looks a little like parcel, honestly. It's gorgeous. Um, it's getting quite popular, but a big piece of its appeal is that it's a complete, not proprietary. Yeah, all your stuff is in markdown, plain text on your own disc. And somehow that's massively appealing to people which is part of that back and forth swing that you alluded to, where we go from, solve my problems, even if it's proprietary and rapid.

[00:06:38] And then we go back to, uh, hang on a second. I can't escape from you vendor lock-in V vendor lock in fatigue in whatever it is. Yeah. All of that stuff. And it's funny how we Seesaw back and forth from that. Isn't

[00:06:54] Avi Goldman: it? Yeah. And we like it almost swings in parallel or an opposite, but like it swings with the other aspect of single tool for everything or many tools for each individual problem.

[00:07:06] Yeah. We're like right now, we're we are swimming more towards like, you know, like entire customer management platforms that own the data and the sending and texts then push and like, right. We're having like multichannel and that's where we are right now. And at some point in the future, we'll swing back to, you know, the selling point being like, we specialize in one thing and that is the thing we do.

[00:07:28] And that's why you should use us. And so my dad going at the same time as like, you know, You can walk, but you items, you know, swing in opposite of parallel directions.

[00:07:38] Matthew Dunn: And yet is it. You don't get to go on both paths, right? There's limited time resources, decisions, you know, code base, et cetera. Like I gonna do this and sometimes later you go, wish I hadn't.

[00:07:54] Sometimes you go out. That was just brilliant. Thank you very much.

[00:07:59] Avi Goldman: You would like to take credit for the things that you look out on for sure. Uh, D

[00:08:03] Matthew Dunn: J yeah. All the way to the bank. So go gigging out for just to second. The, the dev stack underneath parcel is what

[00:08:14] Avi Goldman: um, we use. So my background was a very long time ago in PHP, and then switched over to JavaScript node five, six years ago.

[00:08:24] So that's everything in parcel is JavaScript. Front-end, back-end all running node backend. Uh, react front end using next JS as the platform. And then all the files, you know, are stored on a combination of a kind of S3 compatible bucket for file storage and a Postgres database. So, yeah, it's a pretty simple stack, some serverless functions in there just to be fancy.

[00:08:54] Nothing too crazy.

[00:08:56] Matthew Dunn: What? And at the same time, that's, that's a reasonably, it's a reasonably cutting edge, like stack of stuff that you just described there. I mean, 10 years ago, if someone said, blah, blah, blah, JavaScript back in. I don't think so. But now, uh, yes, indeed. Thank you very much. Oh, my word is that fast?

[00:09:19] Yeah, we're just tiptoeing into that terrain and going. Um, I'm blown away. Um, looking out there, um, in our quest slash Matthew stubborn to not let apple dictate everything much as I like my Mac. Um, and in dealing with MPP for campaign genius, um, we did something I'd been eyeing for a couple of years. Our handling of.

[00:09:50] Images and pixels in part, thanks to Apple's nudge is now on the network edge, not on the cloud. Um, and yeah, CloudFlare workers and the, the, uh, the performance scalability just makes my jaw drop and I've been around big iron for a long time. And. I don't believe what I'm seeing. Right? Uh, like

[00:10:19] Avi Goldman: single digit

[00:10:20] Matthew Dunn: milliseconds, single spot.

[00:10:22] I think our average, I think the one that handles pixels, it's like two and a half milliseconds average, like the whole operation. And when, you know, code update is like ticketing tech, bam. I just did a global deploy by going bam. And it's just about that fast.

[00:10:41] Avi Goldman: Is that first load, like the generation where like, like we're CloudFlare, like the top of my work or hands-off to like the server to do the actual. It this generation, then you kind of have that really fast response or is it all done on just on the edge? That's why

[00:10:57] Matthew Dunn: awesome. It's well, it just, and it, and like I said, the performance aspect of it just makes me go, wow.

[00:11:03] And, and, and the, like this, you know, we ha we, we arrange some, uh, some friendly traffic and got buried with like 5 million requests on one week. And I mean, usually you'd be sweating bullets and just watching. Wow. And this is all really, this is historically derived from get a Google and others going, oh, we want that the language was stuck with JavaScript to do more, to be better, to do more, to be faster.

[00:11:36] And it's gone to did it, did it, it didn't until now you can do your whole stack on fundamental. W a language that was written in three weeks by Eichmann for the browser back in the nineties.

[00:11:49] Got a lot of innovation since then. Yeah. I mean, it said a stunning amount of innovation. It's sort of, it we're really jumping around here, man. It bears out Turing's thesis from the thirties that essentially all, all computing machines are universal computing machines. Right. And JavaScript was going to become.

[00:12:07] Uh, first-class language. Why? Cause enough marketers willing to do stuff with it to make it get there. And, and you look at the number of apps you run now. And I put apps in air quotes that are actually, that's the Lang lots of growth. Yeah. And, and unbelievable, unbelievable performance and stuff like that.

[00:12:26] And it, it definitely changes the world of things. Let me hook it back to email though. One of the things I think people don't understand about. Is that there is no compute engine. There is no compute in email. It is and be dumb and always will be in my humble opinion. And that limits what we can do within the email client dramatically.

[00:12:52] And if you don't get that sort of basic paradigm difference, and you wonder why email can't do X, Y, and Z, that you can do on a website. That's why, but you get, you get, you get one remote call and that happens to be image load. Like, that's it, that's it.

[00:13:12] Avi Goldman: There's definitely some clever things you can do with that, right.

[00:13:14] That we've seen. There's lots of clever things you can do with that, but yes, you do have a single input threat. Then you've got, you have a single input and output and you've got a single, uh, Integral interaction for us, right? Like, no, no flexibility in that supports you go to the app world, which is a

[00:13:33] Matthew Dunn: whole other, which a whole other thing.

[00:13:35] Yeah. We can arm wrestle over that one all day long, but, um, yeah, it's a single episode. And now the output. Thank you. Apple is product. Yep. So even that got just like, oh, hon hands behind the back, uh, right. Come show up to the fight with at least one tied back. It's, uh, there's a bit of a ship in a bottle challenge to, to make an email do the things that that would sort of like it to do aesthetically.

[00:14:05] Performatively marketing wise, you know, that seems so easy. Oh, my web guy could do that in a day. No, you can't. Right.

[00:14:13] Avi Goldman: And that's well, that's how white people become, you know, people is because it's a fun problem. It's a hard problem. And you get sucked in and it's very hard to leave once you're in this world.

[00:14:22] Yeah.

[00:14:23] Matthew Dunn: I was going to ask you if I was going to say, okay, why, why Y you. Bright energetic young founder guy. And you're in your marrow. Why? Why? So my,

[00:14:38] Avi Goldman: honestly, the truth of it is, is that I got into email, just coincidence, coincidence. I met some folks from SparkPost at a hackathon. Um, at university of Maryland back in 2015, and I had like, they had an interesting challenge and they were very nice to me.

[00:14:59] They put up with me and I was like, cool, these are some good folks. And I, um, you know, they, they, they took me on as an intern and that was. An absolutely amazing time and I've just really enjoyed working on the problem and just learning more and there's always more to learn. And so it just accidentally fell into actually the hackathon just had its eighth anniversary this past weekend.

[00:15:21] When I got to see some old friends who, who I initially met there. So it had been our, I think it was our seven year anniversary since we had just met and stuff. I fell into the email world. Nice.

[00:15:33] Matthew Dunn: So like, like, like so many in the email space didn't necessarily plan to go there. Yep. People are a big piece of it, like a, you know, community and this sort of community is everything.

[00:15:45] And the, the, the, the, what's the word I'm looking for, that the culture of the community, which I. Surprisingly consistent, you know, supportive, um, generous long-term relationships all over the place. It's, it's really quite something it

[00:16:05] Avi Goldman: really is. And like, yeah. I mean like folks you meet one day or just, those are people you're going to know for the next five, 10 years.

[00:16:13] If you stick around an email, which is just an amazing thing, right. Really amazing things.

[00:16:19] Matthew Dunn: And.

[00:16:23] It's easy to underestimate, but like there's a, there's a chart that some company does. Like what, how much traffic is happening on these various channels on the internet every minute. And, uh, my, my, my friend and friend and colleague Dela Quist pointed out that they dropped email from that chart after a few years, because it would so ridiculously dwarf everything else, their measures.

[00:16:50] Pie chart, like, okay. Email and let's deal with the other

[00:16:58] you're not going anywhere. So, you know, it's the deriding, it is old school is kinda, is that when it's cheap, easy entry point, but truth be told there's a whole lot of stuff happened in there every day. All the time. 300 plus billion messages. Oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:12] Avi Goldman: Um, if I remember correctly, you made a bit more of an active decision to, to join the email world.

[00:17:19] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for asking. Um, I had, well, yes and no. My first job with email and the title was in 1990 pre SMTP. Um, when email was a corporate thing seriously, but corporate land email systems were a very competitive landscape. Relatively short amount of time. So, you know, it was around it and then did other stuff and around it again and did other stuff.

[00:17:48] But, um, in pursuing I've always, media is kind of my focus and background as a scholar as well. And like email seems like the big channel, but it's not keeping up from a, uh, it's not keeping up from a tools for communication perspective. And by that. Emails still astonishingly text centric. Yeah. Um, and what relatively, what relatively small proportion of visual communication, you see an email content tends to be not particularly thoughtful, quite shallow.

[00:18:27] And the last decision made, oh, get that from clip art and we're doing. Argh, right? Argh. On when most other media channels, if you really look at it, most other media channels to becoming more and more visual, more and more video centric, which won't happen, email more and more interactive at least to some extent like, so email could do more than it's doing.

[00:18:50] Let's see if we can help nudge, nudge that along was the thing that pulled me back into it. I'm like sort of the, I wonder if this is possible. Damn that works. Huh? Nobody doing that? Yeah. That's

[00:19:05] Avi Goldman: oh, you gotta be careful hacking. It just might take the next few years of your life.

[00:19:10] Matthew Dunn: That is for darn sure. But you ended up knowing a whole bunch of stuff you didn't know by the end of this timeframe.

[00:19:17] Right. Did you expect to go down the no Javas? Like, was that a super delivered? I'm going to go down that rabbit hole and say goodbye to PHS.

[00:19:26] Avi Goldman: Yeah. Um, I think that when I was leaving PHP, it was more that there was more entry-level content being made, I think, per node, um, which I think really helped me along.

[00:19:41] So it was purely like educational resources. There was a lot of stuff going on with DSP world too. And I think I just wasn't very well integrated into the PHB community and I found, fell into the notable. And that was it.

[00:19:54] Matthew Dunn: Interesting. Interesting. I did it. I did it bass ackwards sort of. I mean, I, I realized for the stuff that we were creating, that I needed to sort of, I hadn't touched hands on Devin a long time.

[00:20:09] I'm like, okay, start over. Hm. Think Python might be the way to go. Which is a decision I'm very happy with. Like Python is Python is. Daddy is for language, but more and more stuff that needed to be done. Not on the back end. Like more JavaScript, a little more this. Okay. Let's try no. Let's tinker with workers and like that.

[00:20:32] And they're, they're they're they're decently complimentary have not gotten to do what you've done, which is a top to bottom. Uh, Con consistent stack, but you know, it's okay. Yeah.

[00:20:46] Avi Goldman: And I think even like, honestly, even with everything being JavaScript, the number of tools in the tool chain for an entire dabbles group back is ridiculous.

[00:20:54] Like, um, the difference between the running, the serverless functions and the Firebase stuff and the, you know, actual server and the react like running. Like each of them just have the different build tool or a different dev tool and a different deployment target, and a different CICB tool. That's actually doing the deployment because of some proprietary, something like, so like know amount of tool, like there's just a whole learning curve for each thing, even though it's all the same language, it's a

[00:21:24] Matthew Dunn: lot, it's a lot to keep track of.

[00:21:26] Did you, did you track that controversy recently? What was the, the, the JavaScript library for. That the guy blew up. Did you, did you, did you read about

[00:21:35] Avi Goldman: this and this, that one super

[00:21:38] Matthew Dunn: common? Uh, I think an NPM library, I think so. Yeah. Open source develop and work in our for years and it had hundreds of thousands.

[00:21:51] Of deployments and the guy's like I'm tired of laboring away and watching, you know, big cloud companies make a ton of money while, while I get nothing out of this. So he basically screwed his code base and then everybody pulled the latest version. Watch theirs go bunk on their face.

[00:22:11] Avi Goldman: Wow. Yeah.

[00:22:15] I mean,

[00:22:16] Matthew Dunn: that's a tough one. You talk about the tooling and the deployment and the pull request and like all of the pieces involved that aren't just of your making. And then you go, there's a big dependency on, you know, bad actor, good

[00:22:31] Avi Goldman: actor. Yeah. There's so much trust in the ecosystem that's been recently.

[00:22:37] Like it's not even always about someone being an app. Like, first of all, open-source maintainers. That is a, that is a tough thing to get into. And you don't know what you're getting into when you get into it. Like you just, you have no awareness or at least I have known many people who have no awareness of it, then you're, you're dropped into it.

[00:22:55] And you realize that people are depending on your code for their jobs and their livelihoods. And there's fear around that and there's expectations and you make no money from it. Um, and so like, that's a whole thing. Um, and then people aren't bad actors, but like MPM recently used, um, encouraging everyone to turn on to FFA because there been some hacks and as people have been publishing, you know, um, you know, malicious versions of popular code basis.

[00:23:21] So like it's a, it's a tough issue. It's, that's a rough one. Um,

[00:23:26] Matthew Dunn: um, and at the same time it makes the world go round right now. Right. Like, like bore and more, you know, most and that, you know, cloud infrastructure open source, this, this, this, this, this piled on top of it and yeah, well, we eventually have to, we eventually have to actually regulate instead of self regulate in that world.

[00:23:51] Avi Goldman: So there is a new tool that's popping up because we all need another tool. Um, but it's called, I think it's socket security. If I remember correctly, um, let's see, um, socket.dev. So it's a new tool that is kind of, um, I think analyzing. NPM packages. They have a get hub, um, action. It will automatically scan when new things come into your, and they basically give each package, they score to kind of help detect and, you know, handle and proactively look for kind of supply chain code issues.

[00:24:29] So it's definitely like there's, there's definitely a movement there, which is great to see because you know, there, there is probably too much trust in the system right now. Yeah, yeah,

[00:24:39] Matthew Dunn: yeah, yeah. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. That's given us velocity, but risk. Yep. Plot lots and lots and lots of I did. D have you done, have you, are you a maintainer of, or contributor to open source?

[00:24:55] Yeah,

[00:24:55] Avi Goldman: I've done that in the past. I've done it less recently, truly because I don't have the consistency that that to, to really be a good contributor to the open source. Um, I tried to share my code whenever I can. Um, but you know, I think that the things that are making are, you know, very specific or niche and I'm okay with

[00:25:21] Matthew Dunn: that.

[00:25:23] So like, you know, Richard Stallman gets paid by someone else to do other stuff. If he had to make a living. With the code that he wants to give away, he might have a different perspective on it to be blunt like that.

[00:25:41] Avi Goldman: Yeah. I mean, that's a tough one. Yeah. I mean, we depend on it so much. There's gotta be some way for those folks to make money and to make the system sustainable.

[00:25:50] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how that one works out. I mean, the opportunity it makes. You know, for someone in your CDs, like with a vision to start a company, you know, do something better, help customers solve a really big complex problems. Like you wouldn't have done it without the open source ecosystem.

[00:26:09] I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ditto, ditto. Yeah. Interesting. Um, switch gears a sec. Um, parcel V1 shipped. What'd you say three or four months ago?

[00:26:21] Avi Goldman: Uh, yeah, January 25th.

[00:26:24] Matthew Dunn: Congratulations. That is, that is

[00:26:26] Avi Goldman: big.

[00:26:27] Matthew Dunn: What did it, did it feel a little scary to push the, the

[00:26:31] Avi Goldman: go button? I think it was a very relatively calm experience.

[00:26:37] Um, like I've been more scared for other launches I've done in the past. Like when I first opened up. That was scarier. But with this, I had like very reasonable expectations of it and understood that this was just the beginning of a next step and that there was going to be a lot to follow. And so I wasn't too worried about, you know, turning it on and watching everything go up.

[00:26:57] It was more turning it on and making more people aware and better education. And just starting that whole push. Um, like before V1, I did, um, we were doing zero outbound model. Um, I would tweet about new work and that was it. Um, it was all, all the growth, all sign up with surely community and word of mouth.

[00:27:19] Um, and so we've started to do more, you know, actual email stuff and newsletters, and we've actually created a LinkedIn page. And so we're starting to do that work, but, um, that was really what the turning point was at that point. I think we were already a month and a half into kind of the stability of the V1 and like hitting.

[00:27:39] The problems we want to solve with the product. It was more just deciding now we're, we're, we're ready to go out into the world and talk about something we're really proud of.

[00:27:48] Matthew Dunn: So the target, your ideal customer and a new one walks in the door tomorrow, what do they, what do they look like?

[00:27:56] Avi Goldman: Yeah. So there's, there's two folks who I really ended up working with a lot, um, brand folks, right.

[00:28:02] People who are in house, um, people who. Really detail oriented who are creating campaigns or using multiple platforms, that sort of thing. You know, and they, they have very, very specific needs of keeping everything on brand and being able to test easily and, you know, working with other people on their team, um, and then getting that email into their ESP, into their sending platform.

[00:28:25] And then on the other side of things, you have freelancers agencies, folks who are, you know, creating for multiple brands who are working with clients. And so those are kind of. At the end of the day, it's always someone who's working with code or with content. So, um, you know, their email developers, their copywriters marketers, folks who have, you know, need to be involved in that process.

[00:28:45] Um, yeah. And I guess more the, you know, copywriting and marketers more on the brand side, on the agency side, it's mostly meltdown.

[00:28:55] Matthew Dunn: Got it. Do you have a hard time? Do you have a hard time getting them to give up, uh, habits and muscle memory for. The dragon drop, you know, building a platform at, are they going?

[00:29:07] Thank God I've been waiting for you. I wanted to do all these things that we couldn't. No,

[00:29:12] Avi Goldman: I think there's a little bit of both for sure. Um, there's definitely like, oh, this is cool. There's a lot of power here. Um, and also you'll have that same feeling on a single team, right. Someone who has a more like parcel serves a very technical audience right within the marketing world.

[00:29:29] You know, there are people who are just jazzed about being able to really take advantage of everything they can do and really have a lot of power. And then there are folks on the same team who, you know, are, you know, might struggle a bit more. And that's something we're looking at is like, how do we make everyone feel welcome to the platform and help them, you know, do the development, help them create the content without feeling like they're, you know, not, not empowered to do that.

[00:29:51] Like, um, Naomi who now we west, who, who helps with the parts of marketing before she was working with us on marketing, she was using parcel. And, um, when she found out she had, like, she had sent me a Twitter DM. I was just like, this is awesome. Like, I, I feel comfortable kind of exploring. And I think that the, there was like an intimidation factor in code.

[00:30:15] For folks who don't have a strong technical background. And so that's something I've heard a few times where like people will come into parcel. Kind of more free to explore because it's a tool made for email marketing, those less tooling, thus work to get set up. And it's all kind of there for you. So you're able to jump in and make mistakes and see where the mistakes are and navigate the code more confidently.

[00:30:37] And so like, that's been a big thing is even for folks who don't have that background can come in and get started,

[00:30:44] Matthew Dunn: start learners. Nice. That's that's not an easy thing to do. Either like, so yeah, congrats that actually that speaks volumes right there. Um, that we were talking about this in terms of technical swinging, back and forth, but a different kind of swing back and forth that occurs to me is that is from the, this call it the drag and drop end of, of the pendulum that I sorta will handle all of it invisibly.

[00:31:12] And all you have to do is move blocks or. Which works, but only up to a point because of the underlying constraints of, you know, technology and dumb end point and stuff like that. And then, uh, you know, you can do more, but it's a little more technical or a little more technical. That's a tough balancing act.

[00:31:32] Avi Goldman: Yeah. And I don't actually see those as really competing if that makes, that makes sense. Like they, they serve different audiences and the people who are using different tools for different jobs have reasons, right. They have internal constraints that lead them to make decisions. And so, you know, the decisions they make.

[00:31:50] So, you know, a lot of folks who are coming to use parcel, we're using a drag and drop editor before it's not pulling them away from the high interest. Yeah. Or, or if they work or using it in combination with doing some customization and they might still be using it in combination, they might create their initial template and then do customization.

[00:32:07] They couldn't do, they might be using. Um, parcel to create code. Like they have a base template and they're creating individual blocks that are kind of special. And then going back to the drag and drop editor and throwing it into those custom HTML blocks. So I really see them as complementary problems, um, and complimentary tool sets more than competing because they just, they, they have overlapping use cases, but really.

[00:32:31] You know, I think there are the fundamentals, the reasons that you go one way or another are different.

[00:32:36] Matthew Dunn: And then for the right team, with the right mix of skills using, using both in using both in combination may maybe the best way to get there

[00:32:45] Avi Goldman: drag and drop in visual editor is that amazing thing to have and being able to customize and control is also an amazing thing to have.

[00:32:51] And there's no reason you should be choosing between them.

[00:32:55] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, it just becomes. It becomes a lot to keep track of we, uh, campaign genius, campaign genius. We're, we're lucky enough to be, uh, partners and work with, um, with the guys at B be free, um, terrifically run company growing like a rocket and their editor, their drag and drop editors.

[00:33:17] Like it's just glorious and gorgeous. And. I keep wanting to get under the hood. So he's like, like both, both of them, both of them are. I mean, we're, we're in our, stuff's in, ad-on in BC. So we did have to get under the hood, but going back and forth between those two things like, oh, this is, I look at this amazing, you know, hundreds and thousands of templates and it's all dragging.

[00:33:39] I want to do something that I can't do. Where's the, where's the little carrot symbol. Where's the little hidden switch. So I can get a get under the hood

[00:33:48] Avi Goldman: and do all the little

[00:33:49] Matthew Dunn: things you want to do. Yeah. Tweak it a little bit, which is like, I guess it's a natural swing back and forth. I watch dev tools in the, like in the pure software domain and there's been that same kind of like, are we going to truly go into a no code?

[00:34:05] Are you smoking stuff? No. Never why complexities? Complexity. I don't think you're doing it.

[00:34:12] Avi Goldman: Exactly. So there's, there's just that swing and the finding that balance. Right. And giving people the right tools at the right time.

[00:34:18] Matthew Dunn: Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. Well put right, right. Tool right tools at the right time. Um, does, does parcel do the handoff job via API to various ESL?

[00:34:30] Coming

[00:34:30] Avi Goldman: soon to an academy or you were working on that

[00:34:34] Matthew Dunn: this corner. I've touched a bit of that. And I know exactly what you mean by it's hard because there's no, absolutely no consistency.

[00:34:43] Avi Goldman: Yep. Creating an internal interface, right. In a total API to. Sort of all those different ESPs, the whole thing. So we've done a good job.

[00:34:52] I think of getting like a handful. And now we're looking at the visual side, how do we serve that? You know, that nicely to the user and make it easy for them to, to be confident that this is getting pushed them, that they're not overriding the work they'd already done. If they had made a customization there, you know, are they aware that that's gonna be some override.

[00:35:13] There's just all the concerns that are making sure that you're communicating clearly to the user, helping them make the right decision and giving them an easy enough way to do it. Right. It's a whole game. Okay.

[00:35:25] Matthew Dunn: And you also have that. We had a different product, different company, different project, but we had a, a project, uh, that got us tied into, uh, Facebook's API APIs for awhile and then within a year or so that I really.

[00:35:41] Just the sheer maintenance nightmare of one keeping track of the user's credentials in auth and permissions to do the job on their behalf, to the constant changes and updates. And sorry, you can't do that anymore from Facebook site and point where I finally just said, oh, shoot it right. We're not going to do any of that.

[00:36:05] The maintenance load was abysmal and I just couldn't see it making sense. And it's, it's, it's a, it's a tough thing. You sort of, can I borrow your car keys, right. Authorization, right? Can I borrow your car keys? I'll hang on to them. I'll keep them. Uh,

[00:36:19] Avi Goldman: sure. Yeah. There's a lot of the concern concerning security concern, pretty

[00:36:26] Matthew Dunn: concerns, uh, you know, expiration updates.

[00:36:29] Oh yeah. Fred changed the password. That's why everything broke. They spread.

[00:36:33] Avi Goldman: Yeah. User's API keys are tied to user so often, which makes perfect sense. And that a user gets removed and everything's broken and that's a whole rabbit hole to go down and try to figure. Who, who, who changed? What? And well, you know, so yeah.

[00:36:49] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Like the, that you draw the ecosystem, it's like, oh crikey, I need a bigger whiteboard. Right. Did I hear you mention Firebase by

[00:36:58] Avi Goldman: the way? Yeah. It's Firebase. You're like offsite or Firebase is actually part of the real-time collapse stuff that we're working on right now. Experiments. So, um, we're working on that hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

[00:37:12] Um, if all goes, according to plan, you'll be able to do like Google docs, style editing inside of parcel. So multiple users. Wow. So today, if someone used to turn on the experiment, you can see files, get sinked, renamed moved, all that setting exchanges. And, uh, the last big piece is full feel full real-time collab editing.

[00:37:33] So being able to go in and just make those changes and do all that work together, I could

[00:37:38] Matthew Dunn: see why from what I've worked with Firebase a bit. I can see what. Uh, see why you'd use it for that. It's like a lot, a lot of leverage there that you didn't have to build.

[00:37:50] Avi Goldman: Exactly. If I don't have to maintain the servers, that's a good thing.

[00:37:54] Matthew Dunn: Did, um, is GCP, Google cloud platform, a big piece of the world.

[00:38:00] Avi Goldman: Uh, actually we use, um, a lot of fun, different providers. We, we actually don't use AWS. I am not a fan of just the user experience. I am not a dev ops person. My experience with that is very limited. I am bad. Um, and I'm willing to pay more to have that part of my job more automated and easier, easier to deal with.

[00:38:23] It's the reality of it. So Firebase for the real time stuff. Um, Netlify um, for some serverless functions versus cell for next JS, you know, like the front end hosting, and then there's a company called render.com, which is kind of like. Um, it's a kind of reimagined Horoku, um, and they've got absolutely great tooling, a ton of good security stuff built in, um, automatic database backups, you know, easy deployments, just really, really nice tool.

[00:38:59] So that's where the servers and databases.

[00:39:03] Matthew Dunn: Server. Yeah,

[00:39:06] Avi Goldman: exactly. One

[00:39:07] Matthew Dunn: of the servers campaign genius, very, very Google plow, cloud platform centric, increasing increasing involvement with cloud flair, as I mentioned. Um, and I think we'll stop there. We did one project on AWS and leaving the dev ops is too much work aside.

[00:39:29] My God, the documentation never ends. To do anything. Yeah. Where's the save button, reading pages and pages later still no fricking clue. Right. And I mean, I get it. They've grown so fast and have so many songs, but

[00:39:45] Avi Goldman: we can just permissions figuring out is everything secure? Like have I done the security correctly is just a whole it's days.

[00:39:55] It's days of that.

[00:40:00] Matthew Dunn: Like you said, I'll pay a bit more. There it is. Okay, cool,

[00:40:04] Avi Goldman: great. Yep. A hundred percent, but user experience is definitely worth paying for, give me an easy button to click and I will pay you more money for that.

[00:40:12] Matthew Dunn: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, which is in a sense is what you're doing. You're doing that for your customers in a sense, right.

[00:40:18] Fundamentally, especially with that multi, the multi editor, that's like, whew, that's not easy to do. No, it's not,

[00:40:26] Avi Goldman: it's a fun problem. Yeah. It's also, it's like, it's, it's super useful. And also some, some infrastructure around for future, future feature development and some fun stuff you got coming down after that.

[00:40:40] Um, once, once you've got real time collaboration, there's a lot of interesting things you can start to do and bring people together and you don't really don't see together, um, at least at different stages of the email creation process. So yeah, some fun stuff.

[00:40:55] Matthew Dunn: I read somewhere that the average, you know, whatever, whatever average is the average email, it's like multiple weeks to actually get it done and out the door and a surprising number of people who have to touch it in some way, whether it's yes, or paint that blue or something like almost ridiculous.

[00:41:15] Yeah. How many, how many cooks are in the kitchen holders? Yep. Stakeholders, all that other stuff. And, and you gotta, you gotta, you got to some extent, a lot of them involved, right?

[00:41:27] Avi Goldman: Yep. Yeah. So yeah, looking at all the needs that they have, and trying to say, like, where do we draw lines? And also, how do we, how do we make them more productive?

[00:41:36] How do we help? How do we make the developer's job easier by simplifying the communication? Like, there's just so many. So many things to, to, to work

[00:41:45] Matthew Dunn: on. Yeah. Yeah. W yeah, I would, I, I would think, um, where do you see, where do you see the company and say a couple of years, like, ideally you'd like to see happen.

[00:41:58] Avi Goldman: I think that continuing to work with, you know, marketers, I think we're email is where we're going to be like a Mt. Looking multi-channel or anything like that. Um, yeah. And just making sure. More friendly for everyone on the team to, to, to work on email. Um, and yeah, just, just continuing to hone. Um, there's, there's so much that I would like to do.

[00:42:21] Um, and so many, like just integrations and making it easier to be creative. There's so much, so honestly I've no idea, but I hope that we've done some class that in two years,

[00:42:31] Matthew Dunn: uh, w w I promised we'd armor armrest a little about a little bit. What, what, what's your honest take on amp?

[00:42:44] Avi Goldman: It's a good question. Um, I think that there are a ton of like, it's the same problem. It's infrastructure and a super powerful, it's not too much more work to learn beyond HTML. The use cases are there and the connection points are the sticking points as I see it. Um, so. You know, if you move past like, oh, we care about our open rate or our click through rate and you move towards like, Hey, this is a product email, and we want to make it easier for this person to complete this task.

[00:43:19] And we care about the fewest number of clicks. And so that's our new metric amp is the way to go. Um, I think it's a worthwhile investment and it's also really hard to do well. It's still too hard. And so like, there are some really interesting companies doing some stuff there. So, you know, we keep looking for the promise of app and I think maybe this year, but, uh, until someone makes it really easy to bring HTML and bring your goal, like your, you know, the user experience you want and connect it to your API or to your server, um, to, to, to the rest of your platform, like amp is just going to be, you know, accordions in your inbox.

[00:44:03] Um, that's, that's my house. So we just need some, some more connectors. And then I think we can be there in the same way that, you know, image, you know, generation personalization is a really powerful thing. And if everyone had to build their own infrastructure for that, right, it's not a doable thing. Um, no one would do it, but the fact that there are really amazing tools for it, right.

[00:44:25] Um, means that you can, you can actually take that extra step. So

[00:44:31] Matthew Dunn: my fear for him. Top line one is that apple just put a bullet in it, because if they're not going to, if they're, if they're not going to even allow a pixel to get fricking opened, there's no way they're going to ever allow something with actual compute and communication ability to run.

[00:44:52] Right. It's like, so my biggest worry is that that one. That that alone right there, because we've got this, uh, you know, I just made this up tech cold war thing. Right? You've got to more or less super powers because of the foothold in mobile with very different philosophies, honestly, right. Making their own decisions about what they think is best for their customers and their business and going surprisingly orthogonal directions with a big shared customer base.

[00:45:23] Like. Massive overlap. Right? There's an iPhone sitting here. There's a Gmail back in there. That's just me, but I'm not atypical. And oh, if you sent me an amp email, I'd have one experience here in a different experience there. Um, some of the interesting problems I'd love to see solve with amp in. Are less marketing centric and more function centric.

[00:45:50] Like yeah. Everybody loves going. Yeah. Add to my calendar without having to do that manually, like blow that up and put that on steroids. And you might pull me that direction, but that's not necessarily a marketing function. And, and um, maybe fewer companies could do that. Well, rather than lots of companies having to do that.

[00:46:13] Okay. Which I think is that that's, that's kind of where Martin.

[00:46:20] I think, I think, yeah, you've got to simplify it and a lot. So we end up with carousels, as you said.

[00:46:25] Avi Goldman: Yep. And so, yeah, so the, the, the Google apple, like how to mini right. That split there is interesting with apple though. We do get interacted email, right? So that's. You know, explore to some extent more than I than I've seen with them.

[00:46:46] Right. Um, and if you can, if you can make the decision to go, like if you can make the investment or there's a tool to help do both. Yes. Um, right. That's really, when you hit a really solid percentage of the market, right Tom, between Apple's 50 plus percent and Gmail's 30 and Yahoo and mail dot, are you.

[00:47:10] Like you've got all those folks with some level of the same interactivity and, um, yeah. Then, um, you know, you still got to fire open pixels on interaction in, in apple at least for an hour. And so, um, yeah.

[00:47:27] Matthew Dunn: Yeah. It's. Like, like you said about email broadly, it's like never, never an end to the wait a minute.

[00:47:36] How does that work? I got to learn that. Cool. Interesting. I like challenge stuff. Yeah. There's a, there's always something else. Well, dang. I could probably tie up like the whole day talking with you, but you probably have fun founder of company, uh, stuff to do if, um, If there's a young RV out there, you know, just finishing up in Maryland and thinking, I, ah, I really would like to start my own thing.

[00:48:06] What would you, what would you tell that young person we

[00:48:10] Avi Goldman: work for? Good people first. Um, I had the desire to do this earlier and I'm really glad I got to work with people. I did. Um, yeah, I think that waiting four or five years. To get started on. It was definitely the right decision.

[00:48:29] Matthew Dunn: That's, I'm really glad to hear you say that.

[00:48:31] I, I, I've worked at large companies and it's a real asset to understand how large companies work. Especially if you do anything that's remotely an enterprise play like. Like the PR you got to understand that people talking, you're talking to like very different ballgame when there's a thousand or 2000 or a hundred thousand people, uh, with the same name on their badge, making decisions, you know, it's like, it's like what you said about email, the number of people that way in just on an email message, like,

[00:49:03] Avi Goldman: and it grows.

[00:49:06] Matthew Dunn: And the number of people weighing on a vendor monumental. Yeah.

[00:49:12] Avi Goldman: So I think that's, that's the big

[00:49:14] Matthew Dunn: thing. That's good. That's very good. Advice really is. Cause I, you know, startup and founder sorta, it's like, it's like the rockstar of the decade is like, oh, I'm going to be a startup founders. Like you don't know how hard that is, how thankless it is, how much work it is, how risky it is.

[00:49:34] Like you don't know what you don't know and like giddy up, go give it a try. But yeah, it's a 90 plus percent chance that right.

[00:49:45] Avi Goldman: Cause it's hard. You gotta be willing to accept failure for sure. He's good for that for sure. Also would recommend that that's a great time too.

[00:49:57] Matthew Dunn: Oh yeah, that's good. That's good.

[00:50:01] But at the same time, You know, we're both talking, we're not in an office where we had to drive to commute to get there. It's like the opportunities to try stuff. Now it's a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah. It's there. I, I think, I think side gigs are a healthy thing for everybody, you know? No, it's hard to muster the energy, but you know, everyone's got something they get love and could do and contribute and it's like, okay, turn that into a, a piece of your world.

[00:50:27] Doesn't have to be your whole.

[00:50:28] Avi Goldman: Yeah, yeah. Have some fun with it, for sure. Have some

[00:50:31] Matthew Dunn: fun with it, for sure. Well, cool. So if someone gets all interested in this and says, oh, I want to learn more about parcel. We sent them to Parcel.io, right? Yep.

[00:50:42] Avi Goldman: And email resource site. Email resources, that's email resource, and then dot S so like it's the word, email resources.

[00:50:51] Um, but the dot ESGR on the end is this the expenditures. so.com that's hard to say out loud, but it looks cool when you type it in. That's unrelated to. Um, so it's a resource site with over 400 resources for email marketing creation, analytics, deliverability, like just everything you kind of need in doing email stuff.

[00:51:13] That's all there. So it's a great place to just start to find tools for the job.

[00:51:17] Matthew Dunn: Well, Hey, if you're going to add a podcast section, we'll have your conversation. The first one up there. How's that sound love it. All right. Hey, listen, we'll wrap up. My guest has been Avi Golman founder of Parcel.io.

[00:51:29] Thanks for that. Thank you. Great

[00:51:31] Avi Goldman: shabby. Better. A better, better,

[00:51:32] Matthew Dunn: better

[00:51:33] Avi Goldman: pause.

[00:51:34]