How I Built a Custom Newsletter Platform in a Week with Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, and Postmark

Hey Indie Hackers!

I wanted to share the story of how I built a custom newsletter platform in just a week, using Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, and Postmark.

This journey taught me a lot about rapid development and leveraging existing tools to create a functional product quickly.

The Idea:
It all started when users of my car social network, Autohaven, requested a way to document their car-customization journeys.

I then saw an opportunity to expand that into newsletters, inspired by platforms like Substack.

The Tech Stack:
Given my background as a software engineer with 8 years of Rails experience, choosing Ruby on Rails was a no-brainer. I wanted something fast, both in development and performance. Here's what I settled on:
1. Ruby on Rails: For the backend
2. Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus): For dynamic frontend interactions
3. Administrate gem: To rapidly build an admin dashboard
4. Postmark: For reliable email delivery

Here was my build process:

Setting Up the Basics
I set up the models that will store the newsletter content, the controllers that will act on the requests and the views that will display the newsletters.

Admin Dashboard with Administrate
Administrate was a game-changer, probably the best actor in all these. With just a few lines of code, I had a fully functional admin dashboard.

I then used Andrew Kane's Ahoy Matey gem to track email metrics such as number of sent emails, links clicked and click through rates. It's such a helpful library!

Integrating Postmark
I chose Postmark for its deliverability rates. Setting it up was straightforward as the instructions are on their docs.

Newsletter Scheduling and Sending
I plan to implement scheduling newsletters, but at the moment, all I need to do is to go to the admin dashboard, create the different newsletter sections(I must admit, I got this idea from the Indiehackers newsletter and even my design matches it 🤗)

I have a "Test" and a "Publish" button. So before I publish the newsletter, I will click on "Test", which will send an actual email to me. If it looks good, I will then hit publish and it goes out to the world.

I am not yet making any money from this project, so anything that saves the cost without limiting my creativity and costing a lot of time is much welcome!

Lessons Learned:
1. Leverage existing tools: Rails and Administrate saved me days of development.
2. Use what you know: My Rails experience allowed for rapid development.
3. Don't reinvent the wheel: Postmark handled the complex email deliverability issues.
4. It's not too hard. I know a majority will say just use Beehiiv or Convertkit or similar. I started out with these, but ever felt so limited. Also, since I am building a social network, I want the content to remain on the platform to encourage conversations within!

Challenges and Future Plans:
The biggest challenge was balancing feature completeness with time constraints. In the future, I plan to add:
• Newsletter scheduling so I can write many newsletters in a row
• Let other Autohaven accounts be able to publish to their own lists

Questions for the IH Community:
1. Has anyone else built a custom newsletter platform? What challenges did you face?
2. What other features would you consider essential for a newsletter system?
3. How have you handled scaling issues with email sending as your subscriber base grew?
4. This is the last question but perhaps the most important, how do you grow your subscriber list from 0 to 10k? I currently have only 400 :)

I'm excited to hear your thoughts and experiences!