What sucks about sending email newsletters?
Hey folks,
I’m building Keila, an Open Source email newsletter tool.
Right now, I’m working two new major features: custom data and list segmentation.
I thought this would be a good time to ask the Indie Hackers community: What do you dislike about your current newsletter solutions? I’m particularly interested in any pain-points related to handling data (e.g. tags), segmentation – but I’m also curious about anything else that regularly causes frustration, whether it’s in the UI or in the APIs.
Thanks!
No support for formatting source code blocks in the message editor, which is ironical as newsletter platforms are built by developers who should know better. This effectively prevents creators from publishing newsletters about a popular topic like software development and including source code snippets.
Some platforms support monospace fonts for inline text, but applying it to code blocks formats each line as a separate paragraph with ugly vertical spacing.
I see Keila supports Markdown, which is great.
Thanks for your input! Can you think of an example where code blocks have been done well?
Code blocks look good in Matt Layman's Mailchimp-based Django and Python newsletter. In general, I think Markdown support is the best option for source code.
Tag based lists are great. Serverless is great. Postgres is great. Hooks and APIs are great. Using AWS SES is great.
Subscriptions aren’t great. Setting up a server isn’t great. Scaling prices with growth isn’t great.
Afterthoughts:
Hey there, good question about Elixir! I’ve been working with Elixir for several years now, and I have never had any regrets :-)
And we already have a docker-compose file available in the Keila repository, you can find it here: https://github.com/pentacent/keila/tree/main/ops
Currently using sidemail and postmark, see my post here and scroll down to email transactional and email marketing : https://www.indiehackers.com/post/7-opinionated-tools-i-always-use-to-build-my-saas-and-how-i-go-to-market-faster-c0e93ae84b.
to Answer your question, ive been looking for a tool that integrates with my database, whereby i Don't need to hit your api only to update the contact list from changes made within the database.
This causes a copy of the single source of truth when infat the single source of truth should be my own database. Giving read only access for certain rows/collections would work.
tags, segmentation, automation on multiple levels, as well as the ability to edit flows after automation has started is a good thing to work on. -- its an uphill battle as lots of companies doing this, but none IMO make it very easy.
but the biggest thing would be to use a single source of truth without the need to constantly update your api.
Rishi
Thanks for your input! What’s your view on using a pull-API rather than a push API? – i.e. the newsletter tool pulling data from your app via an API, rather than from your database directly?