Mailing List Hackers
A community for mailing list and newsletters hackers
I've been hacking on newsletters since early 2018, as I started to build a list for bitesized.xyz. Since then, I've wanted a chat-focused community for newsletter builders, and decided to make one myself!
Still working on the MVP launch of Mailing List Hackers! Since my last post, I've been writing a few posts on the site, and here on Indie Hackers, and thinking about how to attract more users to the chat community.
A few years ago, I was working at Product Hunt on the Ship feature, which allowed PH users to create "Upcoming" pages for their projects. I still really like it as a pre-launch tool for attracting subscribers!
I've created an upcoming page for Mailing List Hackers, and if you join from that link, you'll get an invite to the chat community. Super excited to continue hacking on this project, it's a little slow going but I have some stuff in the works for the next few months that I'm really excited about 😁
I sent out the early version of Mailing List Hackers to a few friends, and got my first paid member! Thanks Remy :)
I'm excited to start building out the chat community part of Mailing List Hackers in particular, so with the first paid member milestone under my belt, I got to work last week on getting the Discord server ready for new members, including support for role-based channels (e.g. members who are interested in MailChimp can see a Mailchimp server, etc). More on the chat stuff soon!
Bought the domain for Mailing List Hackers, and got a Ghost blog set up for it!
Since then, I've been publishing some initial content on the site to help set the tone and pace for content on the site.
A great way to generate initial content — write in a very meta sense about what you're working on. While it's slightly off-topic for newsletters technically, I started by writing some guides for getting Ghost set up to send emails (in anticipation for talking about their new + awesome "Memberships" feature), as well as a case study on building a Stratechery-style member-supported newsletter/blog using Ghost:
