As a small independent team ourselves, we’ve got a special place in our hearts for other independent software developers. The team at Mojang (which I just learned is Swedish for “gadget”) are the creators of the hit game Minecraft. Since it’s launch to beta late last year, they’ve sold over 2 million copies.
With fast growth comes challenges, of course, and we’ve spoken with Tobias Möllstam, the web developer responsible for Mincraft.net, about those challenges.
We know first hand, one of the hardest parts of being a small team is supporting a lot of customers, and that’s exactly the problem Mojang was having on a GRAND scale — in particular, their license order confirmation emails were getting lost:
Before we moved to Postmark we had a dedicated machine for sending e-mails, pretty much stabbing in the dark since we hadn’t done all the tedious work that comes with ensuring e-mail delivery. As our user base grew, much more so did our pile of support tickets for lost purchase confirmations — so something had to change.
When you are literally selling hundreds of copies of your software an hour, time is of the essence.
...probably my favorite part of the service, Postmark took about 3 minutes to get rolling and it has just been chewing away ever since. Now we even have metrics of how our transactional e-mails are doing. We’re back to the future!
Sorry folks, a DeLorean isn’t included in your Postmark account, that only comes after people use your game to build scale replicas of the Starship Enterprise.
A huge thank you to Tobias for taking the time to talk to us - and congratulations on the continued success with Minecraft! We’re big fans of the game ourselves, so its a pleasure being able to improve the experience for them and their customers.
