About PressPulse
PressPulse.ai is an AI-powered PR platform that matches founders and experts with journalist requests, a modern alternative to HARO. Founder Elvis Sun also runs Medialyst.ai, which builds vetted media lists. Every hour of email busywork has a price tag.
A weekly newsletter is one of PressPulse's core channels, repurposed each week from content Elvis already writes.
The problem: 2 hours per issue, every single week
On SendGrid, every issue meant manually reworking the newsletter into the platform. The editor did not support Markdown, was clunky to format in, and made every change harder to trust: the edit view, preview, and sent email were three separate versions. Elvis said it had been that way for years.
That added up to about 2 hours per send, or 8 hours a month at a weekly cadence. And none of it could be handed to an AI agent: SendGrid gives an agent no way to check that its work actually landed, so Elvis had to stay in the loop for every change.
I'm a solo founder, so every hour automated is super valuable.
Elvis Sun, Founder of PressPulse and Medialyst
One thing was non-negotiable. "Deliverability is a main concern," Elvis said back when Sequenzy first launched. Whatever a migration saved him, open rates could not drop.
The migration: two systems, one prompt
Elvis pointed Codex, his coding agent, at Sequenzy's API and let it work.
Codex basically one-shotted the migration for syncing our audience from SendGrid to Sequenzy.
It was more than a list copy. The agent also synced Medialyst's contacts into Sequenzy so those audiences are excluded from PressPulse sends. Two systems migrated in one pass, and Elvis never touched either dashboard.
The migration also exposed an API-key permission air gap that blocked the workflow. Sequenzy fixed it in three days. By the end, Elvis's verdict was simple: Sequenzy had fixed all of his complaints.
Why it worked: agents can verify their own work
Subscribers, lists, segments, campaigns, and delivery stats are all readable through Sequenzy's API, CLI, and MCP server. An agent can set something up, run it, and confirm the outcome on its own. With SendGrid, as Elvis puts it, "there's no way for agents to observe the outcome, so every change would eat my hours."
Setup was never the expensive part. Verification was.
The results
A month in, the side-by-side dashboard comparison settles the deliverability question:
- Delivery rate
- 80.46%98.7%+18.24 pp
- Open rate
- 31.02%37.2%+6.18 pp
- 98.7% deliverability and a 37.2% open rate, up from SendGrid's 80.46% delivery rate and 31.02% open rate. Across 8,124 emails in the last 30 days, PressPulse also recorded a 13.7% click rate and 0.4% unsubscribes. The number-one concern going in, answered.
- 8 hours a month back. Each weekly issue now ships without the 2 hours of manual rework, worth over $4,000 of consulting time every month.
- $45 a month saved by dropping SendGrid.
Audiences stay in sync across both products, exclusions apply automatically, and the whole email stack is something an agent can operate end to end.