Bluebottle's blog

Creating a newsletter

Or more like "Thinking about creating a newsletter".

My friend messaged me the other day: "do you have time in the next few days/weekend to have proper chat about our newsletter?"

I was taken aback because I thought our previous discussion about it was a casual chat - I'd almost forgotten the conversation. I felt hesitant initially - would I have to write? - do I have anything to say? - but the more I thought about it I felt excited. And I appreciated having a friend that would rope me into a creative project and get the ball rolling.

I'm excited to talk about things that I like and share that with people.

But first, a platform. I immediately started dreaming about what I code and how I could combine this with my interest in small web concepts - I imagined something simple and clean, but quickly lost confidence in my ability to get something up and running by the end of the month, so we went looking for a service to do it for us.

tinyletter seemed perfect, but mailchimp are shutting it down in February.

micro blog isn't a newsletter platform, but looks like a good simple blogging option.

The other options with free tiers mailerlite, beehiiv, mailjat seem to have too many bells and whistles, and I dislike the ai emphasis some of them have.

Maybe substack, my friend's first suggestion, is the goer. I feel like the programmer in me has an in-built resistance to using a platform which hides the implementation from you, but I've never been good at working on and completing personal projects.

(But should I be taking this as an opportunity to start?)

#indie_web #projects