SnapNews

Beauty of having personalised newsletter SaaS is that generated newsletter could be used as content for Medium.com

Why?

• it may increase engagement with my site, bring visitors
• SEO, it may rank SnapNews higher in Google results thanks to backlinks

And it costs me nothing, just my time. So that's how I decided to spend this weekend.

I'm new to SEO stuff, still learning som I'm curious if these backlinks will bring me some traffic.

What did I do?

• found solution how to post medium posts
• created MediumClient with calls and handlings
• new call to GPT-4o mini to create Title and Tags for medium post based on newsletter
• created MediumService that appends footer with backlinks to the newsletter

I wasn't fully happy with Perplexity API performance.
It was working. Searching information on given Topic and summarising it into newsletter.
But there's no option to control date of results or to get back references.

If user wants to get fresh news on given Topic (for last day, last week,...) and also to see source references, PPLX is not enough.

So, weekend came and I had 2 days to make my AI search engine.
I used several steps before putting all data together to create final Newsletter.

• GPT-4o mini 👉 understand Topic and create 3 google search queries
• Google Search API 👉 get 10 results per each query in given Interval (frequency)
• Google Search API 👉 query also "negative" results outside Interval to exclude "old" news
• GPT4o mini 👉 review results, pick those relevant to Topic and exclude old news
• Perplexity API 👉 open filtered links and create Newsletter

And of-course, send Newsletter to users email address. That had been implemented few weeks ago.

Ugh, really? When there already is frontend webpage, it should have Landing page, right?
It could at least display users what it does, maybe also increase conversion rate...

Oooook, hold my beer 🍺

Recently I tried Angular framework and I really liked it. More than React. Let's stick with it.
For styling... There's Angular Material UI. I tried it before. But Tailwind has some components that could be useful for landing page and nice styling. Let's give it a try.

I rebuilt whole frontend using Angular+Tailwind.
It turned out to look really good.

Discord integration was new to me, but it wasn't that hard to learn.
But things don't go always as smoothly as we imagine them to be.
Before setting up recurring newsletter, I first want to show users how it would look like.
Some kind of preview. But discord posts have limit of how long they can be.

I need frontend to allow users to preview newsletters.
So frontend for:

• newsletter previews (that are done realtime)
• Stripe pricing table

On backend:

• Authorise and Register discord user to backend
• publish and consume slash commands
• /preview 👉 realtime preview of newsletter
• /create-newsletter 👉 if happy with preview, set-up recurring newsletter
• /manage-newsletters 👉 review or cancel existing newsletters

I also added some other features, like copy button to copy newsletter from other users if user likes it.
In the end Discord is community hub.

When I get back from vacation, I worked on Friday and after working hours, I tried to code prototype using Perplexity API if it's possible.

ExpressJs, PPLX API, 2 hours putting base together and it works. Wasn't that hard.

So, how to build it? Build backend and frontend?
I learned from my first SaaS that it has to be fast.
This time I knew I need to find some easy way.
Maybe I don't even need frontend. I could use Discord server as MidJourney does it.
So let's coooode 👨‍💻

So here we are, me and 2 of my friends, on trip in Sicily, chilling out on vila after long tour on the island and we discuss investing stocks, future, ideas...

I shared my idea to create AI guild that would prepare users on their next trip.
They select destination, departure time (optional, or until canceled) and pick some Topics they are interested about their destination like Food, Politics, Weather, Most common phrases in local language, etc. and AI would send them recurring info on those topics.
Recurring to not overwhelm them with a lot of information all at once.
It should give them useful tips each day until departure to prepare them on what's coming.

Then I slightly modified it to create AI curated newsletters to users needs.
Anyone could choose Topic they desire to be up to date and receive fresh news on it in frequency they want (daily, weekly, monthly...).
They don't have to google for it anymore.