The 3 Places to Be This Week: Lille, Berlin & Munich

As it often happens, a short period of time condenses an impressive number of very nice events. The prize goes to Berlin, which culminates three startup competitions in only a few days. We can’t be everywhere at once, but nothing will stop us from trying!

Take Off Conf in Lille, a developer’s conference

This great event in English is taking place in north of France. This gathering is aimed at developers. There will be a lot of great names attending, so if you are part of this target audience, you should seriously consider coming. We will be there (we’re sponsors after all!). Don’t hesitate to send us a shout out on Twitter: @Mailjet or @Elie__

Berlin, the 1000 awards city!

It all starts on Tuesday the 15th with The Next Web Awards. The ceremony will take place in a location well known to Berlin clubbers: the Chalet. If you speak French, you should note that there is a French version of this event that you can nominate us for. ;)

On Saturday the 18th, Hy Berlin begins, another competition that will welcome some prestigious guests. Among those present are the founders of YouTube, GigaOm, Reddit, CrunchFund, 500 Startups, etc. Obviously, we aren’t going to miss this one!

And because when it rains, it pours: The Europas will take place on Tuesday the 22nd, sponsored by TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher. We will be there too (@qnickmans, @wiloo, & myself).

The German version of Le Web in Munich

The DLD - Digital Life Design is a huge event devoted to the digital ecosystem. If you are looking for Mailjet there, you will find us personified by Pierre-Simon, who knows us very well and will be representing us on this occasion. Don’t hesitate to reach out to him.

We are available to meet with you!

We have planned to meet the maximum number of people possible during our brief stay in the German capital: we are actually looking for a Dev Evangelist based in Berlin. If you are interested, or simply want to exchange a few words with us, feel free to send us a message via the above mentioned Twitter accounts.

Have a good week and we hope to cross paths soon! (In any case, we are trying our best!)

Case Study: Mailjet & Wizishop

Wizishop is a French eCommerce Platform which chose to integrate Mailjet. They are announcing their first round of funding today: 300K euros with Jaïna Capital and Kima Ventures. As this partnership has been a great success from every angle, it seemed interesting to publish a case study.

This presentation is very interesting, especially if you own a service that could use Mailjet’s technology to create more value and generate new revenues. This case study actually explains how the partnership works, from both a business and a technical point of view. Wizishop is an eCommerce platform, but the same principles could have applied for a CMS, a CRM, or any SaaS. 

[Press Release] “French Startup Mailjet Raises $3,3 million”

This tweet says it all. Beyond this, we had a crazy day at Mailjet. Our service got featured on The Next Web, TechCrunch, Gigaom, Les Échos etc. So you may already have read about it, but in case you are curious here’s the official Press Release with all the details. And yes, pay attention to the last sentence: mailjet is hiring ;-)

Mailjet, the cloud based email platform, has raised $3.3 million from Alven Capital and private investors.

Launched in 2011, the innovative cloud platform enables users to manage the sending and tracking of transactional emails sent by web applications and eCommerce platforms. Mailjet delivers a reliable and high-performance tool avoiding complex and costly-to-maintain internal solutions. The company is also tackling the optimized management of deliverability, aiming to avoid spam flagging of legitimate email (globally, 1 in 5 legitimate emails do not reach their intended recipient).

The intuitive user interface is key to Mailjet’s success. With a simplified approach, Mailjet gives accessibility to functionalities which, with the previous generation of tools, were reserved only for experienced users. The solution fully integrates the users’ business processes. The platform has already attracted over 10,000 active clients of all sizes in only 18 months. 

“The technology we have been working on for 2 years lays the foundations for a robust and scalable platform that will allow us to offer innovative features to our users,” explains Julien Tartarin, CEO and Founder of Mailjet. “Our team is focusing on the user experience. It’s our passion: to provide a simple and intuitive interface. We couple this with a powerful and flexible API, for both developers and large accounts.” 

Quentin Nickmans, co-Founder, adds: “The funds raised will allow us to accelerate our commercial deployment for the next 2 years and to continue structuring the company to support our very strong growth while maintaining a very high level of service. We are also recruiting on an international scale, to be ever closer to our customers, the ISPs and the developers, in Europe and in the rest of world.” 

“The market is huge and is just booming” explains Thibaud Elzière, co-Founder of Mailjet and Founder of Fotolia and eFounders. “There aren’t any more (sensible) startups that launch without a service like Mailjet. The cloud is a long-term trend and deliverability management will only be getting more and more complex in the future….” 

This is Mailjet’s first institutional funding round. Alven Capital invested $3.3 million in this fund-raising, together with Laurent Asscher and eFounders who completed the round. The company previously received $300K from e-Founders, to finance its R&D. 

Raffi Kamber, Investment Director at Alven Capital : “Mailjet demonstrated the relevance of its solution by gaining the loyalty of more than 10,000 clients. The quality of the team and the ambitious nature of the project quickly convinced us. We are very proud to support Mailjet in its growth.” 

Mailjet is hiring across multiple job functions: business development, marketing and engineering. Interested candidates should visit their dedicated job page.

Padiact Helps You To Get More Subscribers

Here’s another great integration! We’re always very excited of these tools that harness the email channel in a smart way. 

What is Padiact about? 

Instead of aggressively asking all your visitors to subscribe to your email lists, ask only the visitors that are most likely to. 

Padiact allows you to target visitors based on type (new visitors vs returning visitors), recency, referrers, time spent on site, number of products viewed or articles read.

How to proceed? 

Connecting PadiAct with Mailjet, couldn’t be easier. All you need is your Mailjet API keys:

Once you have them, just select Mailjet as your email service provider inside PadiAct’s campaign settings and use them to connect to your account and retrieve your lists.

Don’t forget to setup the targeting rules for the segment of your traffic that is most likely to generate leads. Then, just define a custom message for that segment of traffic to get them to offer you their contact details and you’re good to go.

Your leads will fly in directly to your Mailjet account where all is left for you is to setup some juicy email campaigns for your targeted leads.

Padiact is great: try it now!

Two years already, and the best is still to come!

The month of August is traditionally very calm. It is as we approach September that things begin to start up again. For Mailjet during this period, there was a time when things were just getting started for the first time…

Mailjet celebrates its two year anniversary!

If the service was officially launched in February 2011, the first lines of code were written in the summer of 2010. Our founder, Julien Tartarin had quit his job to devote himself full-time to the Mailjet project. The rest of the team took their nights and weekends to work on it. Then, little by little, the number of collaborators grew, along with the number of users!

This is a big thank you to all of our users, to those who are joining us now and to those who turned to us in the beginning of this great adventure.

Where are we now?

We are pretty  proud of our presence in France: people are really starting to get to know us! In the other countries, word of mouth is spreading too… overseas, certainly, but also in Europe: Great Britain, Spain…and Germany.

Preparing the next step: The Berlin Escapade!

A part of our team just returned from Berlin. For the past decade or so, the German capital has been buzzing with life by attracting young Europeans in search of exciting art, music, and nightlife. Today, Berlin is also a center of entrepreneurship: hundreds of startups have been created there in the past few years. Its combination of a dynamic ecosystem and minimal costs has spread across and benefited all of Europe.

The cost of living in Berlin is not that high, so you can get started rather inexpensively. Clearly, Mailjet has an opportunity to take here: so much is happening! At least, that’s what we found at the different events we attended last week.

As anniversaries are also an occasion to look toward the future, here is a quick report: displayed in images!

Campus Party Europe & Tech Open Air Berlin

These two events also occurred while we were there, in true Berlin-style: one at Tempelhof, an iconic former airport, and the other in a space usually used as a nightclub. The result? Something you wouldn’t see anywhere else in the world.

Tens of thousands of developers crammed themselves into tents in a gigantic hangar. 

The result was quite impressive. You can find all of the photos on the event’s Facebook page.

The next day was devoted to Tech Open Air…and we still had the feeling that we were in an offbeat location.

The entire ecosystem of Berlin startups was there…The next day, a series of satellite events continued to amaze us, like our breakfast on the top floor of the Axel Springer tower.

Seeing the liveliness and energy of this ecosystem, it is clear that much remains to be done: thousands of opportunities have emerged for us. Two years is short indeed, but this is just the beginning, given all that’s left for us to do!

Need To Explain Mailjet To Your Friends?

I’ve just finished a nice presentation explaining briefly what we do and where our added-value is. Check it out! It is quite interesting :-) 

Now pay by bank transfer or Paypal!

Here’s the second big news of the week: we are now proposing alternative payment methods. You can fund your account by bank transfer or even by Paypal.

How does it work?

As always, it’s quite simple. Go to the billing section of your account, then click on:

You will arrive at the following screen, which will help guide you through the process.

This improved flexibility should be a hit with our users!

Mailjet’s Official Ruby Gem Is Out!

I believe this big news will make our developer community quite happy! Until now our public API was only relying on a PHP library. But from now on, a whole bunch of new possibilities are put at your disposal, thanks to our powerful Ruby Gem!  

Mailjet’s Ruby Gem: a quick recap of the situation

Until now, to use Ruby with Mailjet, you had to use Mailjetter, a wrapper that was put at your disposal by Aurélien Amilin. The Ruby community appeared to be very interested by this tool. Because of this, Mailjet found it useful to propose an official Gem.

What can you do with the Ruby Gem for Mailjet ?

Until now you could:

- Send via SMTP ;
- Manage a campaign.

Now, on top of that you will be able to:

- Manage events ;
- Win some time, thanks to the packaged methods;
- And rely on an official version disposing of an enriched documentation.

Concrete application example: managing email scenarios

You can now manage your email statuses feedbacks, directly from the application. You will thus be able to follow up the whole sending loop. This allows you to manage some email scenarios, triggered by some specific events.

Who is Mailjet’s Ruby Gem for?

This Gem is for Mailjetter users as well as for all the people who were waiting for some new options in order to integrate Mailjet with Ruby.

Where to find Mailjet’s Ruby Gem?

The documentation and the Gem are available on the Github platform. The Readme file will guide you through all the necessary steps.

Mailjet is listening to your remarks :)

Your feedback is one of the key of our success. So please tell us about what you’re thinking about all this! It can be here, in the comments section, or on our feedback forum. What do you like ? What do you don’t like? In order words: how can we make your work easier?

Some extra good news for our clients: 7 new plugins!

During these last few days, you may have noticed 2 new posts on the blog: one announcing the news for the Contact Management System, and the other one presenting the improvements brought to the Newsletter Tool.

But today we’re very proud to announce you a third important update: 7 plugins are now at your disposal. Some are still being undergoing the third-party validation processes, but they can already be used today!

Most of the plugins are first versions. They will all evolve a lot in the close future.  As usual, we will tune our development to your feedbacks to decide which functionality should be given priority.

Have a quick look at all the Mailjet plugins or click directly on one of the following links, maybe you’ll find what you were dreaming of ;)

If your favorite application isn’t available, please tell us : the objective is to stick to your expectations and needs. 

On our plugin page, you will also find some code examples: you can access to them from the left side menu.

Mailjet has just recruited someone who will take care of the plugins. This means that our plugin offerings will start to evolve much more rapidly from here on in.

This was LeWeb’11: people, ideas & news. What else?

Some journalists already brilliantly covered the big stories that should be remembered and outlined. So very modestly, here’s Mailjet’s point of view on LeWeb’11. Of course, you will quickly understand that our perspective is completly different from the visitors coming as bloggers, journalists, VCs or any other type of activity. We were on the exhibitor side: that means that we didn’t get much of the conferences for example.

The people

If we didn’t go much to the conferences, it’s not because we were not interested. Not at all: in fact, I can tell you that we’ve spent our week-end catching up what we missed during the event, thanks to the podcasts. No, it is simply because the people who were at LeWeb’11 are not podcastable. You can’t meet them later on!

And at least, from the exhibitor’s perspective (and perhaps for anyone…), the best thing to do is actually to use every minute you have to talk to people. Listen to them, ask questions, answer yourself and present what you’re doing. In other words : network! By doing this, you’re not only evangelizing your product, you’re also learning a lot and creating relationships.

So yes, “the people” is the first key element we retain from this event.  

The ideas

As evoked, networking is not a one way conversation: it is all about “sharing”. This means that you get to dive in the ideas and perspectives from everyone. The blogger, the startuper and the investor all have valuable things to say. By paying attention to each point of view, you begin to have new ideas yourself and these ideas can create opportunities if you’re smart enough to put them into action.

The news

Yes, once that you have put your ideas into action, some events will occur! News are about what is effectively happening and LeWeb is a good place to disclose things that matter. Among all the announcements from this huge event, you might have noticed an article in Techcrunch: Mailjet raised 180,000 euros. As a customer, maybe you don’t care. But on our side, we know that it means “more means to make our clients happy”.

What else?

Well, it was intense, rich, productive… What more? Oh, it was fun! Running the Million Credit Baby game was somehow entertaining: for the participants and for us.

The winners received a “Palme d’or”. A “palme” in French is also a “flipper”… So we were giving away “Golden Flippers”… litterally a “palme d’or”. Get it?

Let me reassure you: the winners didn’t only get this stupid “Palme d’or”, they also won various prizes: some Bronze and Silver plans. The luckyest of them all even received a coupon for more than a million emails, for free.

That was LeWeb’11!