Overdoing is not always bad.

The choice is between which mistake is less costly: underdoing or overdoing

Every week, I write an article to share my learning or discovery during my startup journey. Here is the link to my reasons for penning these articles for myself and many others like me.

This week, I suffered a big panic attack. Few subscribers were trickling through my landing page. They were leaving their email ids, and I used to send a follow-up email to them as soon I got the notification — “You got a new subscriber”. Strangely, I did not hear back from these people after my initial email. I kept on wondering what the reason for this silent treatment could be. Is my message not very clear? Is my mail not setting the proper hook? Are they not interested anymore? Did they leave their email ids just by mistake? All these questions and many others kept bothering me day and night.

One day, I had a vague thought — Are my emails even reaching these people? Straightaway, I sent test emails to two of my email ids from that business account. My worst fear punched me on my face. The emails did not reach my inbox. I froze for a few moments.

Oh My God! Some of my subscribers connected with me one month back. They were still waiting to hear back from me. One month of silence means, there will be no chance now to turn that subscriber into a customer. I was literally on the verge of tears. All the while, I was worried about not getting any response from these subscribers when they were waiting for a response from my side.

I quickly reached out to the customer care department of my domain provider. The customer support person asked to send a test email on his domain account, he received it. I requested him to share a Gmail id, so I can test something on a different domain. He excused himself for long 20 minutes. He came back and shared one Gmail id. I sent an email to this account from my business account. This time also he received an email. I quickly sent a test email again to my accounts. Surprisingly the email reached my inbox this time. By the way in those twenty minutes of waiting for that customer support person, I had already sent another email to all my subscribers from my email account.

Now I was left even more confused as to how come the email are going normally after half an hour. I told the customer support person that they might have corrected something from the backend in those 20 minutes of waiting time. The person however blamed my other email service providers and my ISP. I felt that there was no point in arguing with him. He was doing his job to make his company look invulnerable, where no such issues could ever occur.

But this experience has shaken me to the core. Now before sending any marketing emails, I send a test email to my account to verify if my business account can send emails or not.

The next day, I was checking some consulting jobs on the Upwork site. I saw a job post where a person was facing the same issue. He was receiving emails but not able to send them. Coincidentally his email account is from the same domain provider — GoDaddy. My God, so this seems to be a recurring issue, which others are also facing. I spilled the domain provider name, so if others are also facing the same issue and wondering if there is some issue in their email settings.

In any case, please build a safety net by checking your outbound emails now and then. If you are receiving the emails on your account from that business account or not. Or you can also do a bcc to yourself in all the outbound emails. I know this is overdoing the communication but imagine if the issue is real and you would not even come to know about it. The emails you send are never bounced and they are showing in the sent folder too. I don’t think any startup can afford to drop even a single lead due to a faulty email server.

So it is better to overdo and over-check than to believe in your good karmas.

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