Rian: But switch interviews for us are based on the framework, and particularly there's a model called the product forces, which, are you familiar with that?

Matt: No.

Rian: Okay, let me find a quick link here. Oh. Funny, my blog comes up when I search for it. Nice. So, I'm going to do the total douche move and send you a link to my own site. Apologies.

Matt: No, it's good.

Rian: But I'm going to blame Google. So that diagram there is called a product forces diagram. It basically says when someone changes from existing behavior to new behavior, there's a couple of progress-making forces that works in your favor, and then there's progress hindering forces that work against you. So progress making forces, push the situation, so they're unhappy with something in their current product, and the pull of the new idea, they look at you, and they go, oh that looks nice. But then the hindering forces are, there's allegiance to the current behavior. Like oh there's this thing, I know how this works, I don't know if I should change right now. And their anxiety of the new solution, of saying what will I miss? What will I lose when I go to you.

And switch interviews is about interviewing people who have made the jump from some existing behavior to some near behavior and filling out those forces. Understanding what all four of those forces were. In our case, there's two things that are really important. 1 is people who recently switched to [inaudible 00:01:41 ], because obviously for them the progress-making forces were stronger.But then also people who have switched away from us, to try to understand what was the compelling thing about our competitors that came up.

In our case, what we found was, you're exactly right, there's an allegiance to the current behavior, because people don't understand, the pull of the new idea isn't strong enough. They don't switch until there's a stronger push of the situation they're in, which is that they realize there's a deliverability issue. Because what we found is, and this is where it goes into marketing, is we say on our site best deliverability, all that stuff, but then when I talk to people they tell me, well we just assume deliverability is the same everywhere. Because everyone says deliverability is good.One guy even said they looked at our status page, which showed 100% deliverability, and he's like that can't be right.

So, these guys are full of it. I'm not going to believe them. This is so weird, I'm going to go with the company that promises 97% deliverability, because at least they're being honest about it. It's the weirdest thing, and we made some changes on our status page to be more clear about where does this data come from, can you really trust it, that kind of thing. We learned a great deal from this, and the main thing is that unfortunately, postmark is an excellent 2nd choice, but it's, right now, not a good enough first choice. And the issue for people around not understanding really how deliverability works and that they're going to have issues with deliverability, and also not understanding why we are a little bit more expensive than other providers, and because of that, because I've sent so much time on deliverability.

The switch interviews, they're on going, they're part of this larger jobs to be done, framework that we try to follow, but this diagram is central to my understanding of our product, and how to get people to switch to us, or to prevent them from switching away from us. We obviously need to make sure that we don't push them away, and that they have strong allegiance to our product.

Matt: When one of your main differentiators is deliverability, how do you defend against competitors who either misquote or misrepresent their deliverability. Let's say yours is showing 98% and it's honest and accurate and really good, what if they show higher? Whether or not it's the real case.

We've talked about that a lot. We check deliverability on our competitors as well, so we know what's going on. I mean they're smart put out a web paper, where they just conveniently left us off their comparison, and just compared them with people who were worse than they were. Which is infuriating, but that's the way it goes, this isn't a charity, so I get that. But what we try to do, is to tell people set up, or try, of if they were somewhere else, try us with something small. Try us for your password resetting emails, just switch one email over, and compare it, and then see what happens.

I would say 90% of cases when we talk to switchers, the answer is always there was some kind of catastrophe. Suddenly, something went down, support went nuts, and they couldn't do anything. Support was non-existent, whatever, so there's always this thing that happens and then they frantically look around, and like oh, okay, maybe this. Our new homepage has been super helpful, we get a lot of comments about, okay, seeing that, those inbox metric on the homepage is useful, because a lot of people when they're in the mindset of switching, that is what they're looking for. My email is always delayed by 30 minutes, oh thee guys deliver in 10 seconds or less, okay, that's good.

Rian: Yeah. Were you at Micro-conf.

Matt: I wasn't, no, I missed that.

Rian: When I was there, Natalie, that was back when the old set was live, and Natalie was talking about, in her talk, about the time to inbox metric, and I didn't quite get it. It hadn't been a problem for us, and it wasn't pervasive through all your marketing yet, so the rallying around that metric didn't quite make sense to me, but when the new site rolled out, it makes perfect sense, and it fits in so well with everything else that you guys report on and that you promise.

Matt: Exactly.

Rian: When people switch away from Postmark, I have a pretty good idea of why they might do it, my gut would be that they're, even though it might perform more looking to consolidate marketing and transaction [inaudible 00:07:05 ], normally the are the reasons they switch away.

Matt: That's absolutely right, did you do these interviews for us?

Rian: I'm telling you, is exactly the same-

Matt: That's crazy.

Rian: We'll see people where even though more performant they'll switch to another app, because they have everything in one place and there's one less log-in, which is a pretty good indicator that they're not a volume where performance really matters, but it's still frustrating for us to see people switch, and in our case it's tied directly to revenue. So, start recovering less revenue to have one less log-in.

Matt: Yeah, in our case too, it's frustrating because it's worse for them to be on the single provider, because, like we even tell them, okay, fine you're leaving, that's fine, but please do us this favor, and still send your transaction email from a different sublimate, because you need to send transactional and marketing from different domains, otherwise they're going to share the same reputation, and you don't want that, because your marketing emails aren't going to have the same engagement. That's one of the reasons, we are thinking about how can we do bulk in our own way, which would definitely mean different domain, different IPs, so that we don't mess with what we have. Because it's such a point even if we tell people it's actually a good thing from a a deliverability perspective to split it up, but they still want it under the same account.

Rian: And beyond marketing and transactional being combined, seems like one of the other risk areas is that other postmark competitors like Singrid really push larger sender to be on a dedicated IP, which comes with its own negatives, right?

Matt: It does, and that's why we have such a strong opinion on the value of shared IPs on our platform and why we have a manual approval process for everyone. We were like, no, we want to know your neighbors. I like this phrase, we want to make sure you have good neighbors. I think that's somewhere in our blog post somewhere, and that's what we do. We police the community in a way that's okay, we want to have good senders, because then everyone helps everyone else, and if one of your neighbors gets attacked or spam attack or whatever that's out of their control, the volume is actually such a drop in the bucket against everyone else that it doesn't hurt everyone else, and at the same time they then benefit from everyone else's good behavior around them.

It's kind of like buying insurance, it's like we're all in this together, and we help each other out when needed, whereas we do have dedicated IPS for extremely large senders because there's some benefits to that if you get to a certain volume, but for the most part, and the other thing that's frustrating is they charge extra for that even though it doesn't always guarantee you better deliverability. We just had a switcher that came over from a provider that kept switching them from IP to IP, until they finally said forget it, we're just going to try this out, and now they're really happy.

Rian: So, here's another parallel, it's not just Singrid offering that, if you search google, that dedicated IP, you can see thousands of people wondering where they can get a dedicated IP, so there's demand for it. And in our case, I think the parallel is pre[inaudible 00:10:23 ]. People want to send emails to customers telling them their cards are going to expire, even though Visa and other providers now offer card updater, which fixes m