Prelaunching my self-hosted email software

Last weekend, I decided to prelaunch my project, Broadcast (https://sendbroadcast.net).

It started with a single tweet:

https://x.com/geetfun/status/1842798981715296755

However, the journey to build it started about a month before that...

I started building Broadcast in early September just when everyone on X were debating about servers vs serverless providers.

Many businesses, I knew, were tired of high cloud costs.

When launching a recurring software business model, the problem was that no customer ever wakes up thinking to themselves that they wanted to pay for yet another recurring expense. So, I wanted to build something that could be self-hosted and let people break away from high cloud costs.

Email marketing was already an established product category with a proven product market fit. I was a Ruby on Rails developer, and had experience building email-related apps. So, I set about building Broadcast, an email list and automation tool.

Initially I thought it would take about 2 weeks to build. In fact, it's about 95% done at this point and it's 4.5 weeks in as I write this.

I'm expecting an alpha version to be available for my several prelaunch customers (thank you if you are one of them and are reading this).

My goal is to make Broadcast the best self-hostable email marketing software, with an installation and upgrade process as easy as apps like Wordpress.

Let's go!