

Ask HN: Review my just launched email newsletter: WeeklyAndroid.com - metachris

The last two years I've developed apps, games and other projects for Android, and recently got thinking about starting an email newsletter. Several posts on HN and two Mixergy interviews gave me the inspiration to go ahead and just try, and with a couple of friends I started working on "Weekly Android" - a weekly digest of the most interesting news, apps and games about Android.<p>http://www.weeklyandroid.com<p>The last weeks were quite busy with setting up the website and the server backend. We decided not to use a email newsletter service such as MailChimp, because they get too expensive when dealing with a couple of thousand subscribers (as we hope to gain soon :).<p>Today we sent out the first issue to about a hundred subscribers, and thereby practically launched it! Now everything starts and we will try hard to find all the most important news about Android each week. Finally, we wanted to tell HN about the launch, and request your feedback, reviews, thoughts and ideas.<p>[Edit] The feedback got me really thinking about using MailChimp which I forfeited before because of the costs and no roadmap for monetization. Thanks!
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jonknee
> We decided not to use a email newsletter service such as MailChimp, because
> they get too expensive when dealing with a couple of thousand subscribers
> (as we hope to gain soon :).

Good luck, but the odds are stacked against you. When you get a few thousand
subscribers is exactly when you need a service to send the emails for you. You
will be blacklisted if you're not extraordinarily careful and even at best
your deliverability will still be lower than what you'd have through a
professional email service. Spammers have made email hell.

I subscribed, let's hope I get it :). No double opt-in yet...

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metachris
Thanks!

I totally agree - you need to be extraordinary carefully not to land on
blacklists. Nevertheless we think it's doable and give it a try. We try hard
to follow best practices and have implemented basics such as using a dedicated
IP, SPF entries, reverse DNS and basic policies like only emailing user that
explicitly opted in.

Any suggestions for additional precautions are strongly appreciated :)

PS: Thanks for the double opt-in hint, it's on the todo list!

~~~
trustfundbaby
I guess I just don't understand why you would roll your own. What advantages
do you hope to gain in the short run when you have no idea if you'll be around
for the long run?

Don't let the excitement of the moment overwhelm you. Building your own email
sending system (implementing policies to avoid being black listed etc)
complete with analytics is a non-trivial endeavor.

9.9 times out of 10 the smart move is to go with a free mailchimp plan THEN
try to roll your own when it gets too expensive.

be smart.

~~~
metachris
You guys are so right - your feedback made me reconsider the current approach
and choose to go with MailChimp. Often it's so easy to get intrigued by an
idea with interesting code to write ;)

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metachris
Clickable: <http://www.weeklyandroid.com>

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callmeed
If you're not going to use a service like MailChimp, I'd highly recommend
<http://sendgrid.com> to ensure email delivery.

They give you an SMTP server and make it real easy. For $10/month you can send
10,000 emails.

However, if you're gonna be serious about an email newsletter, that means
you'll eventually want analytics. IMO that's the biggest benefit of a service
like MailChimp/MadMimi. Tracking opens and clicks is definitely something you
can roll yourself, but I'm not sure if it's something you want to tackle.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacons>

~~~
metachris
Thanks for the feedback.

For me the real advantages of services like sendgrid and mailchimp are 1)
feedback loops with ISP's and spam indexes, 2) analytics and 3) high
deliverability. We could roll our own analytics and try on the deliverability,
but the feedback loop is totally impossible to get into.

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faramarz
Can you elaborate on the service you did end up using? Congrats on the launch.
I'm preparing to start a newsletter service myself with local content at
first, see if people bite.

I'm studying a dozen of services and any reason to solidify one against
another will help. I'm mostly concerned about filtering/categorizing the
inputs into geographical or zip codes and I can't figure out the best service
with flexibility like that. Campaign monitor is the closest to that.

Also, are you bootstrapping the initial costs alone? server, email splash etc.
and have you registered the business yet? You can probably claim those
expenses.

Too many questions, sorry! :P

~~~
metachris
We are writing our own backend in Python, with the idea of publishing it under
an open source license later on. Perhaps there are other open source solutions
for that too.

Since I have multiple servers running for various projects there are no
additional costs but the time I need to put into each week. The editors are
helping lot too.

As for business registration, the newsletter is just one project of my primary
(umbrella) startup.

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JangoSteve
Alright, I'm in. One question: are you going to have tailored emails based on
the categories I selected to be notified about, or are you just gathering this
info to help you make decisions about what content to include overall?

~~~
metachris
For the first few issues everyone will get the same email, and we use the
categories to make the overall content decisions.

If there is enough content in the future, we have the idea to let the backend
compile the final mail based on your preferred topics (or leave out the
unwanted ones).

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metachris
Update: We've setup a list at MailChimp and updated the signup form on the
main website (<http://www.weeklyandroid.com>) to point to the new home of our
mailing list :)

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barrydahlberg
Mail Chimp is absolutely worth it IMHO. Spend your time on your content.

