How we dumped SendGrid, built Mailer and solved our email delivery troubles

At Lendsqr, we provide over 3,500 lenders with a world-class loan management system which helps them to launch and scale their loan business with ease. We sometimes call ourselves the Shopify for lenders. 

Lenders engage with their customers a whole lot and this is primarily via email with SMS and push almost as important. Like every SaaS platform, sending emails for our lenders to their customers is a must do. 

Throughout the customer journey, which includes sign-up, onboarding, loan applications, disbursement, and repayments, customers could typically receive about 50 emails from their lenders in a year. Multiplying this by our lenders’ extensive customer base of 1.7m adds up to approximately 85 million emails sent per year. And that’s why, as simple as emails could be, we just have to get it right. However, it wasn’t all rosy in the beginning.

When we started Lendsqr, like every right thinking startup, we relied on SendGrid, which is well-regarded as one of the top email systems globally. While it served us well, as we grew, we found it didn’t fully meet all our needs and those of our lenders anymore.

Here’s why we dumped SendGrid

Customer service can be better

They were slow to respond, causing challenges in delivering timely assistance to our lenders and their customers.

Unreasonable pricing

Eventually, their rates became excessively high, making it challenging for us and our lenders to afford. As a SaaS fintech serving Africa, cost in USD can escalate quite quickly and destroy unit economics.

Critical features were missing

We found the platform lacked some of the features we needed but achieving this turned out to be quite challenging with SendGrid. For example, creating multilingual email templates (a single email template but that can deliver in different languages) was not available yet our customers speak all the languages in the world.

Non-delivery of emails to Microsoft-controlled platforms

This was the deal breaker right here. This final blow determined our fate. Many of our lenders are either major corporations relying on Microsoft platforms or are lending to professionals (office workers) using Office365. As a result, emails weren’t reaching these corporate clients. This problem extended to users with hotmail.com, outlook.com, and similar domains. And this posed a major snag for us.

Here’s how Mailer came to be

Ultimately, we had to explore other options. Being AWS users, we’ve always known about AWS Simple Email Service (SES) as a potential solution. We thought, “Why not give it a shot?” However, we soon discovered it was purely infrastructure-based, requiring us to build our own UI for it. After weighing the pros and cons, we decided, “Sure, let’s make it happen!” and began building what the world would soon know as Mailer.

We created our email service platform by utilizing AWS SES infrastructure and incorporating features we found useful from SendGrid. What sets ours apart is that we tailored it to our specific needs, filling in the gaps that SendGrid lacked. This includes a user-friendly interface designed for everyone on the team, from beginners to tech-savvy experts. Our goal was to ensure that navigating the Mailer platform was (still is) a breeze for all team members without requiring tech overlords.

So we built, and we shipped, it was such a huge feat for us to be able to build something so functional and remarkable in the early phase of our journey. In fact, it was so good that one of our partners; Assurdly, suggested we open-source Mailer and make it available to the whole world. And this is a conversation that is still being considered — weighing the option of offering it to the public versus turning it into a software service. However, we crunched the numbers and realized it wasn’t a worthwhile pursuit at the time. As a result, we decided to keep it simple and stick to using it as an in-house messaging service. But, you know what, just like Facebook launched React, Netflix launched Nebula, so will Lendsqr, one day open source Mailer.

Core features of Mailer

From a features point of view, Mailer is a mailing service powered by AWS SES. Some key features include:

1. Super fast and reliable
2. Multi-template driven platform that is language aware
3. Define audience based on rules
4. Robust and easy-to-understand interface that caters to all
5. Supports JSON logic for dynamic email construction using templates and data
6. Multilingual capabilities which allow you to create a single template that can send emails in different languages from a single API call
7. Settings customization: When configuring, you have the flexibility to determine recipients for Cc and Bcc. You can also modify the sender’s email address for outgoing emails.

Despite all of these amazing features, we plan to upscale even better and provide even more remarkable features because, at Lendsqr, there’s always room for more improvements. Some of the awesome features we plan to implement include:

SMS capabilities

We’ll be applying the same setup and functionality currently used for sending emails through Mailer to also cover SMS. This expansion allows our lenders to effortlessly connect with millions of customers, catering to those who prefer SMS over emails (we’re aware you might be one of them). We can’t wait to implement this upgrade in lieu with our excellent SMS providers (Vanso, Infobip and Route Mobile).

Push notification

We’ll also be implementing the functionality for push notifications as well. This means, instead of pushing emails, this same Mailer system can drive push notifications natively to mobile apps and web pages. This way, customers who may not regularly check their emails can receive direct push notifications from lenders.

Inbound emails

We’ll also be implementing inbound that will allow receivers to reply to dynamic emails and the content can be sent to another service via a webhook.

You’ve got to eat your dog food to grow 

The impact of Mailer stands out as one of the most impressive behind-the-scenes infrastructures we’ve developed. We’re beyond proud that Mailer is enabling a smoother, more efficient experience for thousands of Lenders and their customers, saving them time and frustration.

This doesn’t mean that SendGrid is bad – quite the opposite. In fact, it remains our top recommendation, and if we could turn back time to the early days of our journey, it’s still the choice we’d go with. But at a certain scale and growth trajectory, you may have to eat some of your own dog food to grow and survive.