
How We Automated 99% of Our Newsletter Business - chidog12
https://thetechonomics.com/2020/06/03/how-we-automated-99-of-our-newsletter-business/
======
biznickman
I've attempted to build automated news systems in the past and have done so
successfully a couple of times. However this is completely misleading as the
work is not in publishing but instead is in the actual discovery, curation,
and writing of content.

I don't know where the joke is from but if there is one about how engineers
set up a blog it would go like this.

 _Normal person:_

Goes to Medium, Wordpress, or somewhere else, starts writing and clicks
publish.

 _Developer:_

1\. Set up ReactJS for the front end

2\. Set up a build system for automated deployments

3\. Sets up MongoDB to store the articles they'll be writing

4\. Sets up the backend to serve up the various articles

5\. Builds an integration for Wordpress that enables Wordpress to pull and
push (make sure both ways) to the MongoDB system that's storing the
newsletters

6\. Sets up all the integrations required for SEO

7\. Sets up the integration testing framework

8\. Write an article

9\. Clicks publish

~~~
satvikpendem
This is because an engineer's interest is not in the actual writing, but the
creation of such a blog. To such engineers, I'd say that this is fine, but
don't delude yourself into thinking that these are necessary steps to writing
when there are much simpler ways, such as Medium or Wordpress as you say.

~~~
rlayton2
Agree. I think I've made nearly as many personal blog sites as I have actual
blog posts.

------
sideproject
This is something I did with my latest project Newsy
([https://newsy.co](https://newsy.co)) for those who are interested.

We built a tool to aggregate contents from various sources (e.g. news, videos,
reddit posts etc) and then put them on a simple website (something similar to
HN or Reddit).

The website then has a newsletter subscription feature and then latest /
popular contents will be delivered.

~~~
triptych
Was going to try this out but the site looks very broken on my phone. (Green
buttons overlapping)

~~~
sideproject
Will work on that one! Sorry about that.

------
petercooper
I just worked out I've edited and published 3607 newsletter issues over the
past 10 years so I know a little bit about this and.. automating bits and
pieces around the production of a newsletter is certainly time worth spent.
But automating the actual inclusion of content? Maybe for certain types of
content, but you don't build up a tone, a sense of audience, or a long term
narrative this way.. it just becomes a link/data dump. It's not necessarily
bad or unsuitable in every case, but automating curation is in most cases not
a route to a long term, loyal audience IMHO.

------
padraic7a
Did he also somehow automate the writing of that blog post? It reads like a
selection of cut-ups from other posts.

------
nikanj
Automated newsletters is better known as spam.

~~~
sethammons
Not all newsletters are spam, far from it. Additionally, most newsletters that
I subscribe to are likely automated.

~~~
jopsen
Curious, why subscribe to news letters?

My inbox is a queue.. but I read news as a stack, only the latest, discard
stuff I don't make it to.

~~~
sethammons
There are a few products I want to keep up on without actually having to go
follow up on them. There are a few newsletters I enjoy that are things like
"thoughts of the day" type things. A few that are technology based and either
point to updates in, say, AWS or similar. It is not too unlike an RSS feed.

------
cdiamand
I'm in the throes of building a finance newsletter -
[https://topstonks.com](https://topstonks.com)

Building all the tech to aggregate the data is fun. Putting the newsletter
together every day, less so. Newsletter fatigue is a real thing. This was
super inspiring though, thanks for sharing!

~~~
mjcohen
You might enjoy Naked Capitalism:
[https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/)

------
lifeisstillgood
This is "keeping myself informed, whilst possibly having other people pay me"

it's a sensible idea.

I think i have a lot of side projects that with some effort might become
something people would pay for (obvious thing is a auto delete flag like
outlook rules in gmail)

------
swyx
> "If anyone is looking for a space to compete in… Referral Marketing!"

is this not already heavily competitive? have you tried getrewardful.com?

------
tdeck
Perhaps this is frivolous, but why are so many random words capitalized in
this article?

------
binaryfour
I'd be curious what their MRR is for this business.

------
aww_dang
Lost me at "I like WordPress for the ease of SEO"

~~~
milesvp
Yeah, that one confused me too. There’s a checkbox when you setup wordpress
the first time that says something about search engines, maybe that’s what
he’s referring to? Could be a number of plugins that help with some aspects of
SEO that google will soon penalize for.

My experience with high traffic sites is that most of the things that helped
our SEO were things I’d consider basic hygiene along with generally better
than average content. There’s not much wordpress can do for that, in fact it
will actively hurt you with it’s slow page generation if you don’t have a good
caching layer.

~~~
exolymph
WordPress is insanely widely used so Google crawls it thoroughly, is the
theory.

