I built a personalized AI morning brief because I was tired of opening five apps before coffee
I used to bounce between markets apps, news sites, sports scores, and weather before I could start the day. None of those tools talked to each other, and none of them knew what I actually cared about.
So I built Daily Dose Briefs: one short morning email you configure yourself. You pick sections (your tickers, geopolitics, local weather, your teams, tech, etc.), set a delivery time, and Claude writes each enabled section from live sources. Section toggles and order stay under the user’s control — that’s the product thesis.
Stack: Flask + APScheduler on Railway, Supabase for users/prefs, Resend for delivery, Claude for writing (Haiku for lighter briefs, Sonnet when someone enables a lot of sections).
Where we are: ~40 active subscribers. The brief engine is solid enough that I’m not polishing content right now — the hard part is acquisition. Landing traffic and trial conversion are the bottlenecks.
Curious what other founders have found works for getting the first few hundred users for a paid daily email product — directories helped a bit; partnerships seem promising; I’m still figuring out the rest.
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Great breakdown. What feedback have you had from early users?
mostly that people want fewer sections they actually use, not more. early users who set tickers/teams and leave prefs alone stick; the ones who never configure ghost during the trial. biggest ask so far is better local news and the deep dives. curious what you'd want in a morning brief
Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?
This is useful. How are you finding your first users so far?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
thanks — figured the acquisition struggle was more useful than a polished win post
At ~40 active, I’d treat the morning brief as a retention product: track delivery → open → click/save by section, then let users prune anything they never use. For the first few hundred, a shareable sample brief or referral after a high-value issue may beat broad acquisition. I built SoftShelf; my free 3-debt snowball mini is here: https://softshelfstudio.gumroad.com/l/fgyrkj?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=first_sale&utm_content=comment_free. If useful, the full Snowball vs Avalanche planner with dashboard is $9.99: https://softshelfstudio.gumroad.com/l/eqdyqi?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=first_sale&utm_content=comment_paid
agreed on retention — I'm starting to look at open/click by section so people can prune what they never read. sample briefs + referral after a strong issue is next on the list. thanks for the SoftShelf note
Helpful post. How did you get your first bit of traction?
early traction was mostly friends/family + a couple newsletter directories (Firsto, Inboxreads, BlogHub). X replies and Indie Hackers are the current push. still early — curious what worked for you at this stage
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
thanks — figured the acquisition struggle was more useful than a polished win post
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
it's paid — $4.49/mo with a 7-day trial. free forever wasn't the plan; the brief costs real model + data to generate per user
Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it for later.
appreciate it — happy to answer anything if you dig in later
With acquisition and trial conversion both constrained, what do trial users consistently do—or fail to do—that reveals whether the brief is becoming part of their daily routine?
best signal so far: they keep section prefs stable and don't churn delivery time. weak signal: open the trial, change nothing, then ghost. next I'm adding clearer first-week “did this replace an app?” prompts so the habit shows up earlier
The stable section prefs are more interesting than the opens. Happy to keep digging into the habit question over email sometime — mine’s hello@beryxa.com.