kicksend //
12 Comments Are you as excited about the newest iPad as we are? At Kicksend HQ, we’re simply giddy thinking about all the photos, videos and files we can send from those shiny devices. We’re kicking off a contest in conjunction with the friendly folks at Punchtab to give one lucky winner a brand new iPad. Enter today!
Kicksend uses the tried and tested pattern of sending our new users confirmation emails to verify their identity. With that, there will always be emails that aren’t delivered successfully, which we care about a lot.
A bounced confirmation email means that our new user wouldn’t have been able to activate their account. So they’ll either have to either sign up for a new account, or contact us to change their email address. These are steps we don’t want to put any user through.
So we recorded and setup detailed notifications for every email bounce, to make sure that we are always aware of what’s happening (thanks Mailgun!). And we soon started to see patterns.
People would misspell their email addresses and be unaware of it, resulting in a delivery failure and a lost user. And it got even more interesting – most of these invalid email addresses were a result of a misspelled domain; “hotmail.con”, “gnail.com”, “yajoo.com”. A clear opportunity for improvement.
Taking a leaf from Google, we created a quick plugin that suggests the right spelling of misspelled email domains. After launching it, we saw bounces drop by 50%! Little prompts to guide the right user behavior always goes a long way. Give it a try.
And we have open sourced it. Mailcheck.js, the jQuery plugin that powers our spelling suggester, is now available for forking on Github: https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck. Enjoy!
Catch me on Twitter @derrickko.
At Kicksend, we make it incredibly easy to share files with the people you love. But sometimes you want to share files with people you like. Or people you barely know. And you want some assurance that they are getting to the right place. Like all things at Kicksend, we’ve made it super simple – just check a box and indicate that you want us to take special care of your file and we’ll only deliver it to a registered Kicksend account. Think of it like the little “signature required” checkbox when you go to send a FedEx package. We’ll send an email to the recipient and ask them to sign up with Kicksend. Your file will only be delivered after they’ve gone through a sign up process and verified their email address.
We’re super-excited to announce that Muzzammil Zaveri has joined the Kicksend team as a product engineer working on our iOS team. He’ll be working to make our already popular iOS app even more excellent!
Most recently, Muzzammil co-founded a Y Combinator (YC S11) backed startup. At Y Combinator, Muzzammil met Kicksend’s founders, Brendan and Pradeep. He co-published “GuardRails: A Data-Centric Web Application Security Framework” at USENIX WebApps ’11 as an undergrad. He’s an alum of the University of Virginia. In his free time, Muzzammil enjoys skiing, running and playing basketball.
You can follow him on Twitter or check out his (sparse) blog/personal homepage.
