Mailtrap

Mailtrap is an Email Delivery Platform to test, send, and control your email infrastructure, all in one place. Great for dev and marketing teams.

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Mailtrap grew from an internal pet project – a sandbox for email testing. It was developed and maintained by one engineer (without even full-time allocation). During its first years, it was a free tool that grew organically due to the dev community verbal references and recommendations. Eight years later, when the product already acquired a million users, the team felt the need to add email-sending functionality to Mailtrap – Email API/SMTP.

The main challenges we faced:

- The persistent perception of the product as a solution for email testing only.

We launched an extensive long-term marketing program to change the perception of the brand.  

- Choosing proper technologies and solutions.

In the beginning, we were quite hesitant in choosing a tech stack for the goals set. However, by means of experimenting and learning from our mistakes, we managed to come up with the maximum reliable and secure stack choices meeting the needs of our customers.

- Relying solely on our own expertise.

We first thought our own expertise was enough. Later on, we realized that external experts’ opinions extend our professional approaches and contribute greatly to the quality of the Mailtrap product.

Lessons learned

- Remember about the ""wishful thinking"" trap

- Do thorough custdevs

- Involve external expertise

- Focus on priority user groups

- Optimize processes consistently

- And remember that there are no perfect solutions

Currently, we are continuously improving the platform's UX, consistently working on the reliability of the platform and deliverability rates to meet users’ expectations, expanding the tech stack, and have ambitious plans for the future. For example, we recently launched a beta version of an email marketing solution.  We know that Mailtrap is an awesome product because it was built by people who use it and who know what users want, both in terms of functionality, and design.

Mailtrap is a great example of effective collaboration among developers, marketers, PdMs, and designers on a product team. It started as a tool for developers only and evolved into a fully-fledged email platform (1,5M signups, 150k active users monthly, 3M ARR without investments, 30+ team) for both engineers and marketers.