Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]

15/08/08 How To Beat Toddle At Their Own Game

CHICAGO, UNITED STATES - This week’s Tuesday Push is Toddle, a web app by Alan & Co. at Spoilt Child. I have always loved Spoiltchild’s work since back when it was Alan alone. I’d love to hire them to do my UI work someday.

The Tuesday Push is a chance for the Irish to pump up Apps from Ireland. A little self-reflection on our web-scene. As with the other pushes (see archives), I use it as a chance to flex my brainstorming muscles on the topic and try to answer the question - if I was competing with them, what would I do?

What would I do if I wanted to kill off Toddle?

1. I’d be very different. Toddle do this by focussing on design.
2. I’d have a different price model. I like Toddles charge per design rather than charge per recipient. Email is for intensive purposes FREE. Charging people per recipient is counter-intuitive. Sure, set a cap of a couple thousand and charge extra over that. I may even think that a €30/year all you can eat is good.
3. I have ‘auto-fill’ where it sucks in my RSS feed and lets me choose the stories I want to email. I do this for imagefile.ie, you can see July 2008 newsletter here.
4. I’d add interactivity. The ability to embed polls, forms, search boxes etc. in the html version. I’d speak with Lenny and see what’s being done in the field of email polls. See if a partnership was possible.
5. I’d offer click-through tracking. I’d redirect every link in the email and provide the stats back to the author in an email 12hrs, 24hrs and 72hrs later. What got people’s interest? Did I have too much content?
6. I’d remove all branding. The customer are paying for a design, they don’t want your logo on it.
7. I would connect with Marcus to be able to load images direct from Pix.ie.
8. I’d have in-place editing where I can type into the actual template rather than seperate form fields.
9. I’d find a very niche use of email newsletters and cash in on that with some very exact templates rather than generalising. This niche might be for a specific industry or use-case.
10. I would look into the use of internal emails, where a team-leader or manager wish to send a monthly newsletter on order status or progress and want it to be pretty but not branded.
11. I would look at the services that surround email newsletters. A good example is mailing list tracking. An embeddable widget that let’s people subscribe/unsubscribe to your newsletter. It could be as simple as providing this as a comma separated list of emails back to the user to BCC: so they always have an accurate list.
12. I’d offer distribution too. An entire package including monitoring bounce-backs.

But I’m not starting an email newsletter Alan is, good luck!

Tomorrow San Francisco (there and want a pint?), then Vegas, then back here for 2 days then relocate everything to Dublin.

-Robin.

Tags: alan o'rourke, brainstorm, ireland, irish, toddle, tuesday push

2 Comments

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15/08/08 Alan O'Rourke

Brilliant post Robin thank you.
Some of your points we already do.
Some currently reside in a list of ‘Would be nice to do”.
And some we will never do as we just dont think they are right for the product and its market.

Enjoy San Fran and Vegas.

Alan

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09/11/08 Toddle is a Doddle « Toddle Stuff - Beautifully Simple Email Marketing

[...] I like Toddles charge per design rather than charge per recipient. Email is for intensive purposes FREE. Charging people per recipient is counter-intuitive. Robin Blandford [...]

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