Mailbrew
Create beautiful, automated newsletters from any source.
We're introducing a new beautiful logo (that you can see above) designed by our friend Jord Riekwel. We spent many weeks iterating and discussing until we found a shape that is simple, yet unique to Mailbrew and our vision.
We've also massively revamped the entire Mailbrew experience to make it easier to read and edit brews. Everything is now simpler and more polished.
Your brews are front and center, and the editing experience is completely rethought.
Check it out → mailbrew.com
Feels amazing to finally hit this goal after a year and a half working on the product.
Looking back at the growth curve that got us here, the biggest accelerators have been shipping new high-value features for customers and being loud about them, launching again and again.
After launching out latest feature, Mailbrew Inbox, we got a few thousands new signups, and this helps us finally hit this new milestone.
It's amazing to know 300+ people have chosen to pay for Mailbrew, the majority of them with yearly billing.
We're now working on the next big features and launches 🚀
After months of hard work we are finally launching our most requested feature: Mailbrew Inbox.
With it, our users will be able to receive newsletters into their Mailbrew email digests. This brings us closer to our vision of THE ONE THING you must read every day to stay on top of your game and I am super excited about it.
Product launches have consistently been our top source of new signups, with over 4k signups with the initial Mailbrew launch last March.
We hope to match (or top!) that number with today's launch.
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Beautiful design!
What's your tech stack for the backend? -
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Really like your landing page! Good stuff
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Congrats on the launch from Slick Inbox! (https://slickinbox.com).
Fierce competition from you guys but always great to see people working on newsletters :)
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Thanks! Yes this is a great space to be working in 🙌
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It's not even one month after launching Mailbrew, and we've crossed the 100 paying subscribers mark ($900 MRR).
The split is almost exactly 50/50 yearly and monthly licenses. We're showing yearly billing by default in our upgrade page, so users see $8/m computer pricing by default.
We also think the no-credit-card trial of 21 days is working nicely, and we might experiment with 30 days soon.
Shoot some questions if you want to know anything!
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This sounds nice, but you said "it's not even a month" and "21 days trial". I would guess the subscriptions will be getting cancelled soon. Are you sure you are not in 900usd mrr with trials?
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We have 0 refund requests so far, and the trial is without credit card so 100% of the users are committing to the subscriptions willingly (no tricks or dark pattern). So I completely trust the MRR Stripe is calculating for us ($970 now) and also revenues are very promising ($4k so far thanks to yearly plan sales).
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Hats off for you not getting card information for trial periods, i hate that in other products. Congratulations then, i think this has a huge potential.
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This sounds great.
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This is awesome! Congrats!
Do you have good referral results? -
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Hey Fabrizio. Love the design of the landing page, and the logo, simple yet elegant! I'll have to look at Gatsby, haven't had the chance to do that yet.
Given your talent, I'd love your feedback on our upcoming landing page: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/would-love-to-hear-your-thoughts-ed343dcca4
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Awesome idea & the marketing copy on home page is very compelling.
Are you worried that the platforms (reddit, twitter etc.) would block you in future if enough people start consuming their content via this model? This is effectively reducing user's time on their site thereby reducing their ad revenue.
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There are countless apps using their APIs in similar ways, and in some cases we had to go through an approval process to increase rate limit, so at this moment we feel that we're safe. That being said, we're trying to diversify services as much as possible, so that if one blocks us it's not going to be a huge problem.
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That's great news, congrats @linuz90
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Wow, awesome work! Beautiful site and great concept. Congrats on the milestone!
I'd love to hear the answers/responses to some of the questions other folks have asked, when you get a chance to respond to them.
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On it!
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Awesome job! Congrats :) Can you compare this experience to your previous products where you went thre "freemium" way?
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We've actually started freemium with this as well, but in the end we weren't seeing concrete advantages. With more network-based products it makes complete sense, but Mailbrew is more targeted for individual use right now and an free plan doesn't create meaningful growth and network effects to justify its costs.
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Congrats Fabrizio!
I love what you did with the screenshot on your landing page, making it scrollable and giving visitors a chance to see what the result looks like. I’d imagine that converts pretty well.-
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Thanks! I can't be sure that helps with conversion, but the idea was indeed to give you a better taste of the product, and hopefully convince you to try it.
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Congrats. What did you use to build the landing page?
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It's built with gatsby js, like all of our sites.
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Awesome stats. I assume you built an audience beforehand. If that's true, can you share a bit on that side (your way to build the audience)?
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Thanks! We've slowly built an audience in years since our original Boxy (the Inbox by Gmail client) launch. Getting emails of people who get your products and want to follow you becomes an essential assets for future launches. We now have 25k+ emails.
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Congrats and well done!
What gave you the idea for Mailbrew?
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It was the natural evolution of unreadit.com. Specifically, we were looking ourselves for a way to follow topics and people and unplug from feeds at the same time, and since we love email we thought about using that for this purpose.
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Congrats! Mailbrew looks awesome :)
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Hey Fabrizio, congratulations on your milestone! I'm 15 and I just launched LoveYourLanding.com, an HTML website theme that helps developers and designers save countless hours of time so they can focus on building products. Would you mind reading my post about my story becoming a self-taught web developer?
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Nice product and design!
Curious to know how this idea came to mind -
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That’s a huge one, congratulations guys 🔥
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Congrats Fabrizio :)
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Congrats Fabrizio!
Quick feedback: I couldn't see the number of trial days mentioned anywhere on the pricing page: https://paste.pics/8G7VX
It's only mentioned AFTER clicking on "Start free trial". Might be more beneficial to mention it upfront :)
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We read seekingalpha ;) But I'd love use Fabrizio's product for some niche staff, boolean search hacks for example, which I am a fan of. Well done, @linuz90. Not sure if you are monetizing free users with ads/sponsored content, I guess there should be potential for that.
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If you give me a couple of specific examples of what we can add on Mailbrew I'll discuss them with my co-founder. Thanks!
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Thanks man! Right now we're seeing 10-15% signups coming from invites, and most of the rest from social shares/word of mouth.
We've also created many landing pages on the site, one for each source. Example: https://mailbrew.com/hacker-news-newsletter
We'll see if they also drive some traffic 🤞
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Right before launching Mailbrew, we've decided to put 2 little vanity metrics on our landing page: how many active digests (we call them "brews") we send, and how many emails we've sent in total.
Today we've crossed two big milestones:
- Our users have 8,000+ active brews
- We've sent a total of 50,000+ emails
Before deciding to completely remove the tracking pixel from our emails, we calculated an open rate of 95%, so one more reason to believe these are quite staggering results.
So far we've had just a couple of minor hiccups (users not receiving their brews for ~1h), but aside from those we're also really happy about how solid the whole infrastructure is.
We've also been able to add a new source to Mailbrew in just one day (the COVID-19 source) and we're working hard on new features right now.
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Seems interesting but why would I sign up for this rather than any other mainstream newsletter services like MailChimp or Substack etc?
The product seems good, but what is the USP of it?
Hey everyone! Can't quite believe this but after 6+ months of work we're finally launching Mailbrew in the wild.
You can now → go ahead and signup, or → join the launch party on Product Hunt.
We're also sharing our learnings during this long beta phase today here.
Thanks everyone in this community for the support you gave us during these months in private beta. 🙏
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Congrats on being #5 on PH! 🎉
Great job on the app! Signed up. Looking forward to the updates.
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I saw this on ProductHunt recently and really like the concept. A couple of comments:
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You have login w/ Twitter. Have you considered login w/ Google? It seems to be the more popular choice these days.
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On the create an account w/ email/pw, you don't ask for pw confirmation. Small, but always a nice touch to make sure people are entering the right password.
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Thanks for the feedback! Regarding Twitter, using it to sign up allows you to quickly setup a Twitter-based brew, so that's why we recommend it to users.
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Looks like its going well, number 2 on PH at the moment. Congrats!
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Nice! Just upvoted here and on Product Hunt 😊
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Congrats on the launch, thanks for sharing the lessons learned!
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This is such a cool product! Just created a bunch of newsletters. Congrats on the release!
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Congrats on the PH feature! 🎉 🎉 🎉
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Congratulations on the launch. I read your learnings, great post.
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Good luck guys, the product looks amazing ✌️
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After working on Mailbrew for the past 5 months and running our private beta we finally hit this important revenue target.
It might not seem much, but considering that the product is not even publicly available yet we are pretty proud of this result.
Here a brief timeline of how we achieved this:
- September 22, 2019: First commit on GitHub ⌨️
- October 11, 2019: Received my first Daily Brew, we are now at issue 123 🤓
- October 21, 2019: We manually onboarded our first user over a Skype call 📞
- November 24, 2019: Launched invite system and start onboarding users from our early access list 💌
- January 2, 2020: Launch monetization and first paying customer 💰
- Today: $100 MRR, ~700 users, ~1500 newsletters and counting, set to launch in just a couple of weeks 🚀
❤️ Thanks a lot to the IndieHackers members supporting us, we have seen quite a few of you creating newsletters and subscribing to the product. It has been awesome sharing this journey with you.
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Cool product! Endorsement from DHH, god himself! 🙇♂️ This is gonna be big
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Very cool idea, I just signed up. It's nice if I can get the few things I like in a summary without all the noise and distraction that comes with normal browsing.
I think I would love that even as app / website as it's essentially a multiple source (not only twitter) feed specifically for me.
Probably, I would also need some filters and muted keywords to only import certain posts from certain sources and not always all.
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Super-useful feedback, thanks! Regarding filtering, we are already considering it as a next feature. Do you think it would be more useful to have it as newsletter setting (filter all content of the newsletter) or for it to be configurable differently for each single source?
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The big dilemma for me is time. I don't say I don't have time as I always have 24h, but I am super conscious about how I spend my time as I have a full time job, side project, want to spend time with family, friends and do sports.
Social media, email newsletters, blogs etc. can easily lead to procrastination and addiction and way too much time spend. One way to solve it is to completely remove it from my life. This comes at the cost that I miss the occasional super useful resource, advice or something else. I also believe in minimalism or the calmness that DHH writes about in the Basecamp books. If I take every piece of content from all sources that sometimes provide very valuable content it's already way to much noise with it.
A concrete example would be DHH and US politics. Instinctively I care about US politics and it grabs my attention. But politics change quickly just like news, I am not a US citizen or anyhow directly involved and I already committed to focus on other things. So to declutter I need to block this. In the end it doesn't help anyone if my attention is spread over many topics. So I see this as a toxic candy with short-term benefits and long-term problems. But when Basecamp released their Shape Up book this was super valuable for me and I saw it via a tweet from DHH.
TLDR: I need a mindful feed of really valuable stuff that doesn't autoplay infinite videos or spams me with targeted ads. It helps me to limit my time spend to avoid procrastination and rabbit holes as well as processing content at my own speed. Quality over quantity.
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I completely agree with you. Thanks for taking the time to read this, we will keep it in mind when building filtering!
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Congratulations, this is a cool product!
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Thanks Anton!
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Congrats! That's a great achievement. I like your design, it feels clean and polished and I think it's clear what your product does.
In your content you have "But it’s increasingly hard to use it without getting addicted to it (the internet), and retaining the fundamental ability to unplug from it" - I can see how you're focusing your news sources into one curated list which is a nice idea, but aren't you still adding to the difficulty in unplugging from it by providing another newsletter? It felt like a contradiction to say it's hard to unplug from the internet, and you're trying to solve it by providing another newsletter.
The focused content is good, but after you've clicked those links it's still not helping with the tempting rabbit holes I get to when I go off to those sites, Twitter being a good example. The problem and solution didn't seem to fit for me.
That said, I do like the idea of more focused newsletters! I just don't think it will solve the difficulty in being able to unplug.
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Thanks a lot Jamie, awesome feedback!
We know for sure that some users are actually using Twitter less, and checking fewer sites, thanks to their brews, so we feel pretty confident keeping the unplug part in.
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Congratulations man! How did you get your first paying customer - Was it through a free trial converting to a paid tier?
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Congrats! Great landing page.
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Congrats!! :)
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Congrats! I'm a beta user and I think Mailbrew is ready to launch, definitely an MLP (minimum lovable product)!
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Congratulations Francesco, well deserved!
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happy paying customer: Mailbrew is amazing and you guys are doing all the right things. Keep up the amazing work!
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I feel this could hit $10kMRR pretty easily.
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Congrats! How did you think of something so innovative?
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Well done guys! Keep up the good work! 💪
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Grazie Andrea 😄
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Cool product! Congrats on the revenue. Subscribed.
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Thanks mate!
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DHH endorsed?! Nice work!
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Thanks Daryl 🙌
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I’ve been working for a few weeks on a complete redesign of mailbrew.com, and I’m excited to finally put it out there.
The bulk of the work has been the rebranding. I’ve tried to create a look and feel that inspires confidence but also piece of mind. The typography makes you think about newspapers, but hopefully the overall styles feels fresh and modern.
What do you think?
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Love the new website! I also love the product itself. Can't wait to try it out
Ok so, every day we're keeping track of many metrics while working on Mailbrew, and we're trying to define what will by our KPIs. A great friend of ours, Ferruccio, suggested that we define 3 key metrics: leading metric like email sent every day, a lagging metric like revenue, and finally a health metric.
Regarding this last metric, we've picked Open Rate. We believe that it's a great measure of how healthy Mailbrew is in general, and it should guide us while developing the private beta.
Well, we're pretty stoked to have 95% open rate with our 120+ active beta users. It's exciting because it means that while we find the right positioning and target market, we know that the rights users fall in love with Mailbrew and read almost every single email they receive.
I think the reason it work it's because once you invest a little time in crafting your own newsletters, from your own sources, you don't want to miss a single issue, while with other newsletters you don't feel as bad about it.
If you have any feedback on what metrics we should keep our eyes on, I'd love to hear it. And happy to answer any questions about our private beta so far.
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95% is amazing, and I love your landing page too!
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your landing page is so good. kudos to you on that.
did you build your own email service or using something else for sending?
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We built our own system that uses Amazon SES for actually sending the emails.
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Wow 95% open rate is amazing. Any tips on crafting effective emails? I.e. any lessons learnt or useful techniques on nailing user engagement with emails?
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Just remember that open rate is not an accurate measure of opens. So when you launch to a wider audience, expect to see it change (and don’t be disheartened when it’s lower).
Open rate is kinda ok to track a trend but not all opens will register (people manually blocking tracking, email clients not loading the tracking pixel).
95% open on your beta is cool 😎
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Signed up!
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Nice product. Just signed up!
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That's a great open rate! And it reminds me I'm supposed to be trialling it out!
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Never heard of Mailbrew, but it sounds and looks awesome.
I immediately signed up for early access! 🙌 Great work!
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Thanks a lot!
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That's really interesting Fabrizio, would be great to hear more about how you got your first users!
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We create a basic landing page and started getting people to signup for early access. This is how our landing page looked back then.
Note also that we used another product of ours (https://unreadit.com) to send the initial traffic to that landing page with the "Create Newsletter" link in the header and the "Powered by Mailbrew" banner in the automated newsletters.
We also started emailing journalists and influential people to give them early access. We used Pigeon for that. The key here is to keep the pitch short and on-point, without using marketing jargon.
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Thanks for mentioning Pigeon!
I've been loving Mailbrew, especially after the launch of Twitter search newsletters :)
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Great to hear Pat :)
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I see, were you specifically targeting tech journalists? How did you gather a list of them? Thanks for the information, looking forward to following more of your journey!
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1 Comment
New logo looks really great. Liking the design changes as well!