Have you ever thought about packaging up the analytics you can derive from this into a product offering?
The inspiration you mentioned in another comment is the exact impetus that would make for a lucrative offering, particularly on the agency side. Things such as email cadence, offerings, screenshots of the specific emails, etc. Either at an individual brand level, rolled up to a pre-defined category, or allowing individuals to choose their own basket of companies to create benchmarks from. Would be really useful when creating pitches, but also for ongoing digest reports for competitive monitoring.
And that's just based off of re-packaging what you're already showing. There are lots of additional useful opportunities that would only varying levels of effort to unlock.
Great ideas -- thanks! A couple of people have suggested similar, though selling to hedge funds.
Right now, I think the greatest growth is still from adding more brands and making them more accessible (improving search and navigation), to yield more traffic. Spinning up a new product and sales channel might be a distraction, but definitely worth thinking about as the site grows.
You could also repurpose the idea and leverage it as a traffic driver. Run a few high-level queries to get the baseline stats, then post those up on a benchmarks page.
That way you have a draw for those types of needs, yielding more traffic from that niche. And could (but don't have to) leverage it as a passive sales channel and low-effort product by just throwing a blurb at the bottom of that to contact if they're looking for something more specific. Which would be a low-effort product of just tweaking the queries you created to get the data for that page, plus the one time upfront effort of making a splashy Excel/Powerpoint template to drop the bespoke query results into.
That'd end up with a solid, minimal effort traffic driver. A potential passive sales channel with minimal incremental effort. And since the targeting/messaging is open ended in nature and you don't want to focus heavily on a new sales channel and product offering, you can let it sit there and mellow while seeing which potential market segments (hedge funds, agencies, in-house, etc) shake out organically. Giving you some potential insights into which area to focus on if you do eventually want to go from passive to active.
My wife uses your product all the time! She's a copywriter for a cosmetics company, and uses it to research what they've sent out in the past, and also what other brands have been sending.
She finds it super useful, so thanks for building it :)
Thanks for relaying that -- really appreciate it! Marketers, designers, and copywriters are definitely frequent users of Milled, so I'm building some new features for them in the coming months. If she has any ideas or requests, please let her know that she can email me any time: [my hn username]@milled.com
I'm interested in linking to affiliate products with a recipe site project. Can you recommend any resources on learning how to monetize via affiliates? Basically I'm working on a recipe site, and some of them involve the Instant Pot, so I don't think it'd be unfair if I generate a penny a click for linking to their product. Thanks.
There are hundreds of guides out there -- Google for the one that works for you. Though, I don't think you'll find anything that pays per click -- usually they pay on conversion (someone clicks and then buys). Google AdSense might work better for you.
The site was built from day 1 with SEO as the primary user acquisition channel. So most of the engineering effort has been to ensure that the images are saved, all of the text is preserved, and all links are crawled to their final landing page. The last one has been especially challenging, with all kinds of tracking links, blocked crawlers, and bad HTML -- all while trying to avoid click on any unsubscribe link.
I use Skimlinks for monetization. I could rewrite the links, but for now I am just using their drop-in JS script that rewrites any monetizable links automatically. Very easy (though they take a decent cut).
I can't see myself ever using this service, so I'm interested in what makes people want to. Would you be willing to share the sort of search queries that lead people to you?
People aren't searching for the service -- they're searching for the content. It's a very long tail of keywords that brands have used across millions of emails.
The vast majority of brands have no problem with what the site does, and use the site frequently for their own purposes. A handful have asked for the emails to be taken down, usually because they send discount codes that they only want to distribute to their direct mailing list.
I didn't. Instead, I manually subscribed to hundreds of newsletters myself to get started. Eventually thousands. It wasn't until 4 years in that I added the ability for brands to add themselves. Prior to that, they could only request to be added via an email form.
The thing keeping me sane was a lot of work on backend tools to streamline the process. A ranked queue of brands that I had sourced from various places, and automatically-generated email addresses.
I was running email marketing for a brand, and I noticed two things: 1) we spent several days to create each email blast, but the traffic / revenue impact was over in < 24 hours, and 2) I subscribed to dozens of competitor emails for research and I was tired of them.
My hypothesis was that a site that could collect them would be useful, and that it could help extend the lifetime of an email's content effort.
I asked around a little bit, but generally just built it. My hedge, though, was to time-box dev to a few weeks and then show it to more people for feedback before spending additional dev time.
It's a bit all over the place. ELB -> EC2 -> RDS Postgres. S3 for the storage of the emails and images, CDN'd by BunnyCDN. Hetzner for background job servers. Digital Ocean to run headless Chrome (browserless.io) on Kubernetes. Will consolidate a bit next year.
My only thought is, I wonder how well these ecommerce emails perform. The majority of them are very image heavy, which affects deliverability and conversions. Some of them have most or all of their text and buttons directly on the images themselves.
Of course, if you're offering a discount, the email may convert better than average, but since the majority of stores only send this type of ecommerce style emails throughout the year, I'm curious how they perform in general.
It really depends on the brand and the type of email that you're sending (new product, content, abandoned cart, etc), and each email marketer needs to test for themselves. I've seen more textual emails work well when it's a welcome letter from the CEO or founder, but it's not a rule.
Broadly speaking, ecommerce is still a very visual experience at every step. It's really rare for me to see emails without images.
