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Advice on building a simple newsletter tool?

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

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    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.

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      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!

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        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.

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      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.

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