I recently launched LetterPush, a basic email newsletter service [1]. I've been thinking of focusing on adding lots of developer features (robust API, webhooks, etc) to help automate marketing and transactional email processes.
I think that most businesses stop at MailChimp email blasts and "Welcome" emails on user sign up. Having a service that marries MailGun to your CRM/CMS tools would be absolutely brilliant (and quite profitable, I imagine).
I recently launched my first minimum viable product, called LetterPush [0]. Right now LetterPush is a plain vanilla email newsletter service.I imagine there is a growing segment of websites that are created in the hands of a developer and not a designer (or a "desingineer"). With an experienced coder, a hybrid service for handling both newsletter and transactional e-mails might be worth...
I'm hoping that as people sign up and try it out I'll gather feedback and be able to discover niches or problems that the big guys aren't handling well. It will be a slow, iterative process so I might need a few months before having an answer to your question.
I fully intend to move away from a generic "e-mail newsletters for small businesses" to a more specific and addressable niche in the future.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask here or my contact info in my profile.
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiringFrom the profile: This account automatically submits a 'Who is Hiring? (Month YYYY Edition)' post at 8 AM Eastern time on the 1st of every month.According to the submissions page http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring...it looks like there hasn't been a submission for today Thur, Dec 1 2011 as of 10:30AM EST.
I skimmed the video and I noticed this bit: http://i.imgur.com/tLJdT.png
Those bullet points listed under "What Sets Sidekick Apart" could be applied to most CRM products.
A small business owner won't say , "We should go with Sidekick because it's powerful and robust!". You want them to say, "We should go with Sidekick, it has a great reporting tool for opportunities and we can easily assign leads to sales people".
Keep iterating and refining your benefits. Good luck! It looks like you put a ton of work in to it and you should show off what really makes it powerful.
I like the simplicity of the audio player. I can't pinpoint a niche off the top of my head, but I can see the appeal of sending a quick link, "Hey, listen to this". I know a few musicians who might be interested in using FileSlap for that purpose.
While I'm here, may I offer a suggestion for your website? I would keep that slider for view demo/see examples visible by default. I just read that I can view files without downloading them...my next question is how, say, PDFs are going to look on your site. I actually missed your "see some examples" link the first time I scanned the page. (You could then remove the "View demo" button and have a bigger call to action, but I'll leave the details to you)
