Wildbit

You might have been one of the “lucky” few that tried to pass a comma separated list of email in the To field of a Postmark message just to get back the “Multiple recipients not supported” error. Or maybe you are one of the guys that have been wondering “How come they don’t support Cc?” [...]

After Ilya presenting pretty-diff gem, this Friday it is my turn to share another gem we chose to extract from Beanstalk.

Shellshot – Deal With System Commands the Right Way

First of all, let me warn you. Issuing system calls is usually the worst way to deal with a certain problem. Executable locations vary from platform to platform. Eventual errors are hard to track. Stuck processes are hard to kill. Parameters should be escaped properly. Chances are someone from the community implemented what you need as a gem. If you really need the performance, drop to C even.

We have been using Hoptoad for our email delivery service , Postmark, and have been extremely happy with it. We are able to get all sorts of feedback on how our app is doing, often being able to fix an issue before a customer actually reports it. At first glance Hoptoad looks [...]

Since we launched Postmark, we’ve been using it for Beanstalk to send our transactional emails. This includes welcome emails, invites, and most notably commit email notifications. I had a look at the volume for January and thought it was interesting.

We’re really excited to have our first round of beta testers using Postmark today. We built Postmark to deliver emails for you, and that is what it will do. On top of email delivery, we are going to provide features to help web apps get the best results from their transactional mail. I wanted to [...]

Since we have moved from Basecamp for task tracking to Lighthouse our workflow has changed significantly. Our workflow improved not just because of using a new task tracking system, but also due to learning from mistakes and figuring out what works best for us. It’s something that did not happen over night. We have made numerous small improvements over time and achieved much better productivity. This article is a small insight in the practices we use.

Our company is all about cool practices of how to make our workflow better and our products stunning. We strive toward a rock solid development workflow, with things like continues integration and dedicated QA staff. We also post release notes weekly for every project to share the insight between team members. We do scrum meetings daily. But we always strive for more…

The Wildbit team recently returned from our 2009 retreat. We try to make it an annual event, as our last retreat was in October of ‘08 in Turkey. This year, we headed off to the mountain resort town of Bansko, Bulgaria. Every time we have a retreat it is more about hanging out than working, but we’re always sure to set goals and spend some time actually working in a room together. For you, our customers, we have a lot planned for 2010, but first let’s take a look back at 2009.

Brief Re-introduction
Some of you may have noticed that I was once running the customer side of Newsberry, our email marketing service. In the last few months, my role at Wildbit has shifted a bit to incorporate more “business development-esque” tasks such as tracking our site performance and customer interaction across all of our products. My [...]

In the past few weeks we’ve been actively using Postmark with Beanstalk as well as a few other initial beta testers. The service is working extremely well and we’re very close to opening it up. At the moment, Beanstalk alone is sending over 20,000 emails per day through the API. We’re also happy to have libraries for Rails, Python, PHP, and Magento almost ready to go.

No, I am not talking about the latest book about marketing on Twitter or Facebook. I’m talking about fundamental business books. The books and authors that our dads read like Peter Drucker, Alfred Sloan, Napolean Hill and Dale Carnegie.

We’re really excited to announce Postmark, our next product, which has been an idea for a long time at Wildbit, but just coming to fruition now. Postmark is an email delivery service for web applications. As with Beanstalk and Newsberry, we aimed at solving our own problems first. Read on to learn more.

There has been a lot of talk recently regarding the freemium business model. A recent article in Entrepreneur interviewed Jason Fried and I regarding our experience. While Jason and I seemed to have different views, the value of free is basically the same. If you have something of value, people will pay for it. In this post, I’ll share some interesting numbers from Beanstalk showing that free doesn’t always work.

The Beanstalk pricing page served us well for almost two years. We decided to give it a fresh look to help improve communication, reassure visitors about the product, and improve conversion rates.

With all of the focus on products these days, we still have some design availability for hire. We’re opening up design iterations on a limited basis. One week at a time, one flat rate.