An email marketing tool to grow your business.
I wanted an easy way to use my own email provider to send newsletters and connect with my audience. Build my brand and keep my audience updated with the latest features or that new blog post.
My side project now has a side project, that has to get me indie hacker points doesn't it? :D
I have had this idea for a while so decided to give it a proper landing page.
I'll be adding more details to it soon but the idea is to turn any blog into a newsletter.
Hook up your RSS feed, Publish a new blog post and Audience Mailer will send the an email newsletter to your list, using your email provider.
It's a subset of the features in Audience, but fully automated, you won't need to hook up any zaps or automation tools.
Today is the day, I've published the first post on the blog. It's just a bit of background on what Audience is about and why I'm building it.
The blog is a big part of my content marketing strategy the benefits of content is huge but also part of the long game.
The main focus in the next few weeks will be to craft content that can work as how-to guides around using Audience and getting up and running.
This way I can use the blog as a reference going forward if people have issues or questions.
I've added in support for daily and weekly notifications.
In Audience a list will have no notifications, daily or weekly notifications.
At the moment the notifications are very basic, it just shows a list of new subscribers.
I need to do some work on the style and format in the notification emails over the next while, I am thinking I might add a Subscriber / New Subscriber / Unsubscriber count to the notifications.
The other part is showing the email address in the notification, I think this handy for some lists but maybe not for others.
I have this idea that I could use the "Trial Users" list in Audience to track new signups and then use their email to reach out to them with an email to see how they are getting on.
But for the "Newsletter" list I'm not interested in their email address, more in the counts.
I get the "Newsletter" notification weekly but my "Trial User" notification comes in daily.
Monthly notifications I have a whole different plan for and I think it's going to be really cool, also a bit of a show case of features for Audience.
Added a few new features onto the MVP over the last couple of weeks.
You can now create a draft newsletter. It makes it easy to create the newsletter and save it to come back to it later, if you are not ready to send it.
RSS Feeds, you can now add an RSS feed into Audience, you can then take your post and create a new newsletter or add to an existing draft.
It creates a block in the newsletter that shows the title and description from the RSS feed. A simple read more link is from the URL on the RSS Post.
Opens up the possibilities of what comes next for Audience.
I have flipped the switch, Audience is now out of Beta and the MVP is now launched and ready to send your newsletters.
When I started building Audience I made a decision to keep the MVP narrow in scope the core features include.
Connect to your Email Provider
Support for Mailgun, AWS SES, Sendgrid.
Create Mailing lists.
Capture signups with a form.
Add Subscribers to a list.
Send a verification email to the subscriber.
Send a basic newsletter to the mailing list.
I have a confession, I have slipped a few extra features in.
Headers on emails,
Changing the button colours in the "Confirm Email"
Webhook support for Mailgun.
You can read more on my blog announcing the MVP and what comes next.
https://serversncode.com/audience-out-of-beta-and-ready-to-send-your-newsletters/
When creating newsletters in https://startaudience.com you can now use a new creator.
It lets me select the Audience I want to send it to, everyone or a segment of my subscribers.
From here you can set the schedule for when you want the newsletter to go.
Preview - Audience will send you a preview of the newsletter. It will send it exactly like it will on the schedule but you can check it and proofread it, if anything is wrong you can just jump in and edit the newsletter and fix it.
In the newsletter, you can add images, headings.
But also now it supports quotes and code blocks. Since one of the goals of Audience is to send newsletters from my own blog and I sometimes have code samples on my blog. I thought it would be really cool to be able to add code blocks to the newsletter too.
Beta 1 of Audience is now out in the wild. I am now at the stage I can start sending newsletters.
I've sent the first two newsletters the first one was to a smaller "insiders" list.
The second newsletter was to my full wait list. With a blog post I wrote to introduce Audience.
I think creating a newsletter should be a more like writing a blog post, or this milestone right here. I want to create the post and schedule it so the question is why can't sending newsletters be the same?
For most of us indie hacker / maker types we are already using an email provider for our transaction emails, so with Audience you will be able to connect it to your email provider of choice. I'm starting with Mailgun since that's what I use most. But I plan on adding SendGrid and AWS SES.
There are many email marketing tools out there and they make it really easy to get you in and using their platform. They have free plans to get your started but then the prices climb and your charged by the subscribers, by the number of emails sent. Some even keep unsubscribed users on your list and charge you for them. I plan on making Audience's prices simple and easy to follow, with no hidden charges and if your using your own email platform to send the emails it shouldn't become expensive to send emails.
Check out my blog post if your interested in the details https://serversncode.com/let-me-tell-you-about-audience/
Added the wait list to the home page now
This form is fully powered by Audience. When a subscriber joins the wait list, Audience sends the welcome email and asks the user to confirm their subscription. The Email is fully custom, and even the text on the button can be changed.
I've been playing around with the idea of setting up an email newsletter off my blog for a while. I want to be able to build newsletters to be able to update my users of my products. Introducing new features or updates. Plans and what my thinking is around different features.
We all know how important it is to have an audience especially an email list one.
But I've found alot of the tools aren't very good, they are all the same but sending a newsletter just seems difficult with them.
And then there is the pricing. It starts out fine, some are even free to about 2000 subscribers, but after that the price just seems to sky rocket. Why? if it's for a business that just feels like it's a weight around you. if it's for a blog why would you pay the sort of money they want you to?
So with Audience the idea is to keep it low cost and make sending newsletters an enjoyable experience.
I wanted an easy way to use my own email provider to send newsletters and connect with my audience. Build my brand and keep my audience updated with the latest features or that new blog post.