Hello fellow Indiehackers,
I'm contemplating the idea of building a simple newsletter tool. I know there is a ton of services in the e-mail space, but I would like to serve an audience for whom MailChimp and other marketer-focused solutions are too complicated. My audience would use the tool to inform, rather than convert. My service would feature basics such as templates and subscriber management and feature a UI that is adapted to my audience's domain while avoiding marketing features such as analytics, automation, etc.
I'm a fairly experienced web app developer and inclined to build this from scratch.
This is in a very early stage and I would be happy to hear your thoughts on this :) Did I overlook existing solutions? Am I underestimating the complexity? Does it make sense? :)
Thanks,
Johannes
Yeah from my point of view it's really saturated market. It would be great to find unique selling points before building it. I would try to talk to people and create some simple LP to check if people want that. There is a lot email marketing platforms and email capture widgets, so I'm not sure if it's easy path if you not differentiate yourself properly.
Thanks for the input. I'm part of three organizations that are still sending e-mails by copying hundreds of addresses into the "to:" field and they are kind of my target customers. But sure, I should talk to more and see if they would also pay in the end :) Thank you!
Something like Buttondown?
Or substack.com, tinyletter.com
Thanks! I wonder how I missed TinyLetter when researching on my own. It's similar in the way it promises a simple writing experience. Now that I've tried it out, I realize that a big part of what I want to propose is a product adapted to my audience's domain.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of Buttondown. This feels like a similar type of project to what I have in mind. Really nice to see that a fellow indie hacker managed to be successful with their own approach to newsletters.