"Validate first, build later" is good advice. Until it isn't.
A small change in how I'm building QeakFlow.
At first, I thought I should wait for beta users
before going further.
Get feedback. Find companies. Validate everything.
Then build more.
But you can spend weeks looking for those first users.
Meanwhile, I already had something valuable:
confirmed pain.
I talked to people in email marketing, CRM and e-commerce.
One founder told me he pays €250/month for Mailchimp
and uses exactly one feature: "Send Campaign."
The problems around rising costs, growing contact lists
and loss of control over email infrastructure are real.
So I decided not to wait.
I'm starting to build the frontend now.
Not because everything is validated. It definitely isn't.
But because I have enough evidence that the problem
is worth building for.
Build → show → get feedback → adjust.
That's the version of "build in public"
I want to follow with QeakFlow.
#buildinpublic #indiehacker #saas #emailmarketing
Did the founder paying €250 for Mailchimp say what would make them actually switch? I’d be curious whether price alone is enough, or whether migrating contacts and trusting a new sender is the bigger hurdle. That could help narrow what the first version needs to prove.
Of course, an attractive price alone isn’t enough to make someone migrate. It’s a genuinely difficult switch: moving your existing list and, more importantly, building trust with a new sender.
But there are two important points here.
First, QeakFlow isn’t a sender like Mailchimp. It’s a control plane built around BYO-SMTP.
And that leads to the second point: teams that have been using Mailchimp for a long time probably aren’t going to switch to QeakFlow just because it’s cheaper. That’s not really the target customer.
The target is a more technical team that can easily plug in their own Amazon SES, Postmark, or another email provider and get significantly lower sending costs while keeping control over their data and reputation. The founder I mentioned was simply an example of the “contact tax”