The Illustrated Sprout #1 (and my last)

April 2, 2006

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch had a review of Mailroom from Sproutit. I read the review and watched the Demo06 video and liked what I saw. I signed up for their free account and gave it a spin for a day or two with some of our MyHomePoint emails. It didn’t exactly fit our needs since we are still into personalized responses right now. But I did like the product overall. That is, until I received the following newsletter from them.

I’m all for being a little more casual and informal these days, but this thing takes the cake. Here let me give you some highlights:

  • panicked waste of a suicidal robot
  • hand-written in crayon on pieces of bark by super-intelligent sea cucumbers
  • Doong doong doing ding dong.
  • your inbox is not full enough of ads for boner cream
  • We will ram fistful after fistful of gibberish into your computer hole.

I could go on but it looks like I’m copying the majority of the newsletter so far. If I had to guess, they probably got some ridiculous amount of funding, went out to celebrate and then someone slipped back into the office after a few too many glasses of champagne to send this lovely piece of work. This type of thing is exactly why companies have to implement the approval process bureaucracy.

From: “Curt Hopkins”
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 03:17:08 +1000
Subject: The Illustrated Sprout #1

The Illustrated Sprout The Sproutit Newsletter
Vol. 1, No. 1, March, 2006

Contents
· Introduction: Signup
· Sproutit News: New Rate Plan
· Bloggin’ It Old School
· Sproutut Up (new features): MoreAbout

Sign Up for Our Super Ultra Mega Newsletter.

Newsletters make me angry. And you wouldn’t like me angry. Most of the newsletters that are foisted on us are chock-a-block with tainted clams, contrived enthusiasms, transparently false bonhomie and a writing style that smells like the panicked waste of a suicidal robot.

Our newsletter, The Illustrated Sprout, is a tainted clam-free zone and we resent the accusation. The Illustrated Sprout, hand-written in crayon on pieces of bark by super-intelligent sea cucumbers, will have news you might actually use (though probably not). These could include anagrams, encrypted photos of Zbigniew Brzezinski and furious screeds on obscure Welsh verse forms. Any “tips” proffered will be your own doing. Your undoing. Doong doong doing ding dong. Language is fun.

The Illustrated Sprout will be published monthly and on certain select secret occasions.

Below are two links. Click the first one to indicate your irrational desire to read The Illustrated Sprout on a regular basis (i.e., your inbox is not full enough of ads for boner cream and stock offerings from the Island of Dr. Moreau). Click the other link in a vain attempt to decline. We will ram fistful after fistful of gibberish into your computer hole. Come on. I’m kidding. You can opt out anytime you want.

And how!

As if!

Sproutit News: New Rate Plan
We have made some changes to the rate plan for Mailroom. We know how little you care to hear about a Corporation’s anticipated future money woes so we’ll spare you. Just suffice it to say, these cigarette boats don’t gold-plate themselves. I mean: To hell with those fat cats in Washington D.C.!

In April, we are going to change the number of emails per month bundled with each plan to better fit the way people are actually using Mailroom. The new plan will work as follows. (The figures are per month.)

· Free = 500
· Basic = 1000
· Plus = 2000
· Premium = 4000
· Enterprise = 8000

Our current plans allow for a substantially higher number of emails. You can take advantage of that by upgrading before the new levels go into effect. To upgrade your plan, go to the “Accounts” page in Mailroom and choose a new plan. Visit Mailroom to upgrade now.

Bloggin’ It Old School
For more info on this and other super ultra mega Sproutit news, visit our super ultra mega blog, The Big Act. Blogs are the blogs of the future and make goodness come out and flowers and children. Everything is going to be OK now that blogs exist. No more disease or war. Throw your most cherished beliefs into the toilet, get on your knees and sacrifice your common sense, decency and self-respect on the altar of almighty Blog.

Sprouting Up: MoreAbout
On Wednesday, March 22, we rolled out the first version of a new Mailroom feature called MoreAbout. The purpose of MoreAbout is to help you connect with your customers. It won’t wig them out at all.

When you view an incoming email, MoreAbout will show you information about the person who sent it, including their Mailroom history and, when it’s available, a nice little picture. Additionally, if you use Basecamp, you can easily configure it to communicate with your Mailroom account. MoreAbout will then show you the details and progress of any work you are doing with a sender using Basecamp. (I know!)

The picture feature depends on a service called Gravatar. Gravatar, Destroyer of Worlds, is a website where people upload pictures of themselves, usually nude, together with their email address. When you enter your email address online, such as on a blog, that site can automatically contact Gravatar and the Destroyer of Worlds will hunt down a photo of you crying and re-publish it on the site making the request. This will allow viewers to associate a face (or a boob) with a comment. We do this on the Big Act, in fact. Skin crawling yet? No? Well, just you wait.

The Illustrated Sprout is written and emailed once a month and occasionally whenever we have other important news to share, by outerspace aliens from outer space. If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter, you can click here to unsubscribe and we’ll take you off the list.

copyright 2006, Sprout Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General 

Comments

5 Responses to “The Illustrated Sprout #1 (and my last)”

  1. Charles Jolley on April 5th, 2006 5:13 pm

    Hi. Thanks for writing about the newsletter!

    When we started working on the newsletter we thought we would try making something interesting to read instead of just-another-newsletter boring.

    So, we tried something new. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. Although most people told us opted to stay with the newsletter, we don’t want to alienate anyone either so we’ll probably tone it down a bit next time. In the end though, I hope we can still keep it interesting.

    -Charles
    CEO, Sproutit

  2. Curt on April 5th, 2006 6:51 pm

    Hi Matt:

    I’m really sorry to hear that you disliked the newsletter so much. We unsubscribed you when we got your letter a week ago. Fortunately you were in the very small minority of people who chose to unsubscribe and one of only two people who seemed to be upset. We do take your input seriously, though, and will definitely consider it when it comes time for the next newsletter.

    As for your assertions that we are over-funded and work drunk, well, I understand you didn’t like the newsletter, but I don’t see any reason to be personally insulting about it. I don’t claim to be an expert in distinguishing the professional from the unprofessional, but I suspect that personal insults qualify as the latter. For the record, we work quite hard to produce a superior product and none of us are drunks.

    At any rate, thanks for posting about us at such length and with such genuine passion.

  3. Matt on April 5th, 2006 10:52 pm

    Hi Charles and Curt!

    Thanks for taking the time to stop by the site and leave comments. Just a couple thoughts to try to clear the air a little:

    I can definitely understand your desire to liven up a newsletter a little. I think you probably succeeded. If I randomly stumbled on this post and read your newsletter here with my comments, I would probably wonder what my problem is and why I don’t get a sense of humer. However…

    I don’t know that I was upset or offended, as much as I was a little surprised/annoyed that this was coming from someone that is trying to keep/get my business. If this is how they act/talk to the customers, then what kind of show are they running behind the scenes?

    In regards to unsubscribing, yes, the newsletter content did prompt me to unsubscribe with a comment about the newsletter. However, if the newsletter had been boring, I probably would have unsubscribed anyway, but without a comment. Since we aren’t using the site at the moment, I decided to lighten my email load by unsubscribing.

    My comment about funding was probably rooted in a little bit of jealousy. It seems like we are seeing a lot of press releases lately about companies getting VC funding and companies getting bought for products that barely exist. While it is good to see things picking up, I’m a little concerned that we are starting (understatement) to see a bubble again. After missing the first one, I was hoping to take part in the next one with MyHomePoint. We just aren’t there yet so I’m hoping it doesn’t burst quite yet.

    My apologies Curt. I was a little confused why you thought you were personally insulted until I took a closer look and realized that your name was at the top. I know that a newsletter goes through many hands before it sees the light of day and did not mean to imply that you were personally responsible for the content or that you were specifically the drunk one.

    For the record on your behalf, I think you do have a superior product and I don’t think that any of you are drunks. For the record on my behalf, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with drinking or getting lit every now and then (which I think you can do without being considered a ‘drunk’) especially in the celebration context that I was envisioning.

    I really didn’t intend to do your company’s reputation any harm. I was looking for a topic to post on and that email came to mind. Of course, I didn’t expect that it would show up anywhere (much less near the top of Google BlogSearch results as it currently is). The good news is that I don’t get much traffic so hopefully no harm done.

    A couple of follow-up topics:
    I just saw a post on your forums about spam handling (http://forum.sproutit.com/mailroom/feedback/post/27). I would seriously recommend that you (and the original poster) take a look at SpamStopsHere. I pay $125/yr for spam & virus filtering on my family domain and haven’t worried either in 2 years. Of course, if you dig around this site and others, you’ll find other comments by me that make me sound like a shill. It’s just that spam is a non-issue now for myself and my extended family using my domain. It’s easily worth that much to me to not to have to deal with it (but I fortunately don’t foot the whole bill myself as various family members chip in). As an aside, he puts out a top-notch newsletter (albeit standard/boring) which I was probably using as a mental yardstick in comparing yours.

    I read a blurb about you guys going to Eastern Europe to make your vision into reality. Back before this little incident, I had briefly considered touching base with you about that experience and what your impressions were. That really is quite a big leap of faith which I admire. In an effort to move our project a little faster, we tossed around the idea of off-shoring that direction but have no clue how to proceed.

    In retrospect, the newsletter was not that big of a deal and I am definitely ‘for you’ more than I am ‘against you’ and wish you best of luck with your endeavor.

    Regards,
    Matt

  4. AJ on April 13th, 2006 3:55 pm

    Matt,

    Since I primarily read stuff from SproutIt for entertainment (secondarily for information), I found the newsletter quite amusing. Your summary of it, however, was hilarious. Isolating the one-liners beautifully enhances the comic absurdity.

    AJ

  5. Tom Werner on April 21st, 2006 10:36 pm

    Just wanted to say that I’m really glad to see some high profile sites incorporating gravatars! Keep up the good work with the product, and I personally enjoyed the newsletter very much!

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