What do you think of adding newsletters to static sites (Hugo, Gatsby, Jekyll)?
I've been working on this idea to enable static generated sites/blogs to have subscription forms and automated newsletters generated from the blog posts, I'm having trouble finding good keywords to publicize it in Google Ads though, I'm having doubts on wether many people really need it or not, what do you think?
In case you want to try it there is a working MVP: https://postbear.io.
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Very simple and nice solution @messutied
Any plan expands this product to other content platforms?
I'm an email marketing advocate, always looking for new tools. Would love to start a conversation.
Hi Felix, thanks 🙏 I’ve thought about it but I imagine stablished platforms already have working solution, I have to look into it, what platform would interest you for example?
I don't have a specific example at the moment. But I do foresee your product can make newsletter conversion easier.
I'd just thought I'd drop in my side project here, you might find it useful - http://tiiny.host its basically super simple static web hosting. Let me know if you have any thoughts on it
Looks nice! very clean and simple, do you plan to include a Github/Gitlab integration to pull the sites from there? I think it would be nice.
I think prospective customers of yours could be interested in Postbear too, as they're the exact type of users (potentially), perhaps we could work together to offer some kind of bundle package :).
Sorry for the super late reply! But yeah definitely looks like there's some "synergies" here. Would love to collaborate.
I am in the middle of a transition from Wordpress to Jekyll myself. It's cool idea and nice landing too! One advantage of Jekyll site is that I can now host it for free on GitHub pages and cancel the WP hosting. I have Mailchimp account that is free up to 2000 I think? So the main question is how to justify $7/month where only a handful of visitors signed up so far anyway...
I see what you mean, the pricing is of course not final yet, but I was trying to cover my bases on what comes down to mailing costs, which is not cheap, one idea is to let you configure you own email integration (like Mailchimp), in that case I could greatly reduce the prices of Postbear.
Related to your mention of Mailchimp, how would you use it instead of Postbear? would you simply manually write the newsletters or have you tried their RSS-to-Newsletter solution?
The idea of course is that Mailbear would do a much better job, it would save you the time to write the manual newsletter and in the case of the rss-to-newsletter it would allow much higher customization, like having summaries of each post.
Is there a set of features that would persuade you to pay for this service? or a different pricing scheme that you'd find fair?
I think it comes down to audience numbers. If I have let's say 3000 subs and you provide Mailchimp like service but better for the same money, there is no issue with pricing.
I do use Mailchimp by writing my own messages, but not for blog summaries. For that I got too few signups to even start (and that's main issue of paying $7). Right now I will be only collecting more emails and I am in fact thinking whether to stay with Mailchimp or not.
In general it's nice idea, so keep working on it. One nice feature could be that before auto-send users could edit the final message and then click "send". That would be nice. But nothing would make me buy it without any real audience.
I think you need to look at who needs this solution. List out some possible customer segments - people that you think would make good early adopters - and then go talk to them. Figure out how they handle this problem now. Some good questions to ask:
3a) If so, what did you try? (Identify market alternatives)
3b) If not, why not? (Maybe it's not that painful of a problem)
Do this for each possible segment and find the one that responds the best. If you can't find anyone, you need to swallow that and move on, and next time start with customer research instead of finishing with it :)
Best of luck!
Thanks Kevin, great feedback, you're right I should have started with customer research, I only spent a couple of days first, wanted to have something to start whit, I guess is a mistake I keep making due to my technical background.
I do have a one person that's the one that gave me the idea, so he actually wanted something like this and now he'll try it, and I'm posting in relevant forums/subreddits, what other ways of finding and talking to prospect users would you suggest? cold emailing them?
I think most of us with a technical background fall into this category. Was just talking to Arvid Kahl about this on twitter this morning actually.
You have the right idea, go find out where they hang out online and be helpful in that space. I'm a fan of posting in forums, quora, reddit, and writing a few articles and sharing them. Basically just talk to real people and ask for their opinion, people are happy to give their opinion / experience if they don't feel like they are being sold to.
Thanks for the tips! will continue on this path :)
Two things:
I really like your landing! There are things that could be improved like the use of space, but it's overall really clean and informative. Kudos for that!
I feel like, while you've got a great idea, the implementation could be better. As far as I understand how your system work, every time you want to add support for a new SSG (static site generator) you'd need to build an implementation for that SSG. You should try to make it as easy as you can for your future you to increase the area of surface of your app (for example, I built Sitesauce with extensibility in mind so that it could work with any backend-powered website and not just with WordPress sites) If I were to build something like this, I'd use RSS, a standard that has been around for a long time and that every SSG supports.
Just my two cents, good luck with Postbear! :D
Thanks a lot for the great feedback!
About your second point, I understand what you mean perfectly, I also thought about starting with RSS, and it is the next source I will support judging by the feedback I'm getting so far, the idea behind first supporting the SSG themself is explained here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/what-do-you-think-of-adding-newsletters-to-static-sites-hugo-gatsby-jekyll-37af72fcfe?commentId=-LzquUAkpmT0-b1MKHzK.
I integrate a MailChimp embedded form on my blog, and there's really no expectation as to what people will get, but some people have signed up for it. Otherwise hugo at least natively supports RSS and I used to use Feedly, so there's that.
I do agree that email is a great way to reach people though. I got thousands of views every time I posted to a social channel, but it usually burned out within one to two days. Lately, I've been getting a lot of email traffic (not sure from where) and that's much more of a slow burn with higher DAU.
Hi, thanks for the feedback!
And do yo regularly mail those subscribers (that you have acquired through the MailChimp form)? don't you think that automatically mailing them a regular newsletter with your posts could increase the engagement?
Yes, I email them after every post I publish. It's manual right now, and so far I haven't cared enough or published posts at a high enough frequency to set up an automatic publishing pipeline. These stats are for my personal blog, and for me in this context, using Hugo is my way to get away from platformed walled gardens and commoditize my complements. Otherwise, I might just go with Medium or something to maximize user engagement.
I just checked out your landing page, and your product looks really cool! It's kind of in the vein of Forestry.io (CMS for static websites, aim for non-technical users while caring about what the data looks like underneath). I'm working on TinyDevCRM right now, and since ideally I want to automate as much as I can for that, I can see this being useful to me :)
Do you have a free trial available?
Forestry.io looks Interesting, but can't you have the same with NetlifyCMS already?
Thanks for the positive feedback :) currently it's all free, although I placed some pricing just as an intend but it's nothing final nor is billing in place yet, but with latest feedback here I think there will be a free option for a small number of subscribers to get people started, otherwise you'd start paying before even having any subscribers.
Probably, there's plenty of CMSes out there and it's a matter of translating between a client and a (pretty decently specced) format.
Ah, okay, the pricing spooked me and that's why I didn't proceed. I have less than 500 subscribers on my MailChimp and I think that'll probably be the case for the foreseeable future, even if TinyDevCRM actually becomes a thing. If you can tie into {MailChimp, Drip, $EMAIL_PLATFORM} via CI/CD that would be pretty amazing and IMO worth paying for!
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RSS as a source will be supported too, but wanted to start with something more niche and that there is no current solution, pulling the markdown posts straight from the repository gives some advantages too, like having custom fields in the markdown that could be used by Postbear, like summary for example, you might want to have the newsletter email just include custom summary of the post and then link to it, also you could have a "skip_newsletter" field that could allow you to skip some posts, there could be more possibilities like this.
But yeah I should probably add RSS next.
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Hey no worries at all, and the pricing for now is just tentative, there is no billing in place yet so it's free, and with your feedback I get that it makes sense to have a free plan for the first subscribers so that will be a thing, furthermore as part of the first users you'd get a 1-year free coupon :)
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Sorry about that, there was a bug there but it's fixed now :) I forked and tested with your blog, it works now
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Sending custom email would definitively be an option too, maybe even customize the newsletters before they get sent right from Postbear's dashboard, add extra content to it, etc.
Also import/export of subscribers will be possible :) of course you want to own your subscribers.