Unvalidated Ideas #032

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Here's a fresh idea you can take out there and validate.

DMARC processing SaaS (🗒Raw Notes)

There's an alphabet soup of settings that form the basis of email authentication -- DKIM, SPF and DMARC.

The last one, DMARC, includes an important feature: specifying an address for reporting your email validation results. Setting and monitoring the automated email reports that come through is key for many businesses that rely on email.

There are tons of people out there getting DMARC emails every month. Save them time and provide a dashboard for spotting problems with their emails.

You might think such a niche idea couldn't possibly have many companies pursuing it. Well, there are ton of competitors in this space:

• https://www.valimail.com
• https://www.mimecast.com/products/dmarc-analyzer
• https://dmarcly.com/features
• https://www.barracuda.com/products/sentinel
• https://www.agari.com/dmarc
• https://dmarcian.com/pricing

UPDATE (2022/12/06) Turns out there are even more competitors than I thought. In fact, there's a whole website dedicated to them called dmarcvendors.com

The market is validated. This many competitors means there is a lot of meat on this bone. New companies start sending email every day.

Unfortunately this idea is going to be hard. How could a small startup compete with so many incumbents?

• Better, targeted marketing
• Building a loyal customer base (finding domain name enthusiasts on Twitter, IndieHackers, etc)
• Lower prices
• Smaller but more focused (and hopefully better) product

Here's one way you can expand the feature set in a way that incumbents aren't ready for -- AWS SES requires a dedicated API endpoint for bounce and complaint processing. Know any services that let you set up easy to manage bounce processing for SES in seconds?

NOTE One of the benefits of being late to market is that you can tell by the feature and pricing pages of competitors what really matters to customers.

What was in this week's uncut edition?

Like being teased? I hope so, because here's what was in the uncut edition this week:

Ideas:

• ███████████AmazonPay
• DMARC processing SaaS
• Github████████

Wrapup:

• 🚀 Unvalidated Ideas Community Forum

Don't forget, there's always money in the banana stand 3x more in the uncut edition.

Thanks for reading!

If you liked this letter feel free to criticize, comment on, remix, and share these ideas with your fellow builders and entrepreneurs!

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Check out the archive for access to editions that have been previously released.

Victor (victor@unvalidatedideas.com)

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