

Ask HN: How can I make Hacker Newsletter better? - duck

Last year I doubled the subscriber count for Hacker Newsletter[0] to 14,000 and my goal for 2013 is to double it again. To accomplish that, I have several ideas I'm working on, but thought I would check here as well since the newsletter exists because of this community.<p>If you already are a subscriber, I would love to know how I could make it better and if you're not, is there anything I could do that would make you sign-up and check it out?<p>Thanks!<p>[0]: http://hackernewsletter.com
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tokenadult
Be sure to keep hilarious endorsements like

"Hacker Newsletter is great. It's reduced the time I spend on Hacker News from
several times per hour to several times per hour plus the weekly newsletter."
-Jason Seifer, Founder of Scheduling, Host of The Ruby Show

That's what just convinced me to sign up.

AFTER EDIT: And now that I have signed up, the usability suggestion I have for
the archived issues is to make sure that each issue in the archive links to
the previous issue, and all but the most recent issue in the archive links to
the next issue. That's the expected browsing capability on most permalinks.

VERY IMPORTANT: Style the archives links to distinguish visited from unvisited
links.

<http://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-10-mistakes-web-design/>

~~~
duck
Thanks! I like to add some humor to everything, and Jason probably nailed it
perfectly with that testimonial.

Regarding the archives, yeah, they need some work. They are currently hosted
on MailChimp, but looking to bringing up my own archive so I can control
things like that and maybe add some other features.

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mattjaynes
Kale - this has had fantastic value for me and saves me a lot of time.

I agree with sazary that a line or two editorial about each link (similar to
how Peter Cooper does it) would add even more value. Perhaps not necessary for
all links - that could get overwhelming - but maybe for a few of your top
recommended links.

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orangethirty
Can you ad one article of original content (as in original to the newsletter)?
Something like an email interview from a founder, hacker, or person of
interest. It would be very nice. Also, on my newsletters, I've found that
adding something not related to the subject at hand keeps it fresh. I
sometimes link a funny youtube video, and have even included a lolcat. Makes
people want to see what I'm doing next. If you want to chat about newsletters
and stuff, feel free to email me (on profile). Note: I have been publishing
newsletters since the dawn of time. In fact, dinosaurs knew they were going to
be extinct because my newsletter "News-O-Saurus" told them about the meteor
impact. Too bad those dumb lizards didn't know how to read. :)

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duck
Clickable: <http://hackernewsletter.com/>

You can also check out the last 131 issues from the bottom of that page.

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simba-hiiipower
kale, you seem pretty awesome by the way. and i'd say hacker newsletter is as
well. feels exceptionally well put together and i appreciate you not
cluttering it with ads (though i do enjoy the often cleverly delivered one
that is there); hope the effort’s been paying-off for you.

and i’m hard pressed to come-up with feedback for the content or structure of
the newsletter itself, but (and this, understandably, may be taking things in
a direction your wholly uninterested in) i’ve always thought it’d be nice to
have this content delivered as an app.. in addition to offering an alternative
way to monetize (i’d gladly pay for it), i think it could really enhance the
user experience, particularly on mobile devices. some user-specific benefits i
could see from such an approach:

\- open story links within the app (rather than switching between email and
browser)

\- better comment viewing experience (viewing hn on mobile generally sucks)

\- direct access to all archived issues (would be nice)

thinking about it, and considering all the work that would have to be put in,
it could make for a great mobile hn reader (integrated newsletter for
highlights + mobile-optimized hn access for staying current).

\-------------------------------------------

also just want to add, that your _wayback letter_ [1] is beyond awesome! it’s
really cool being able to step back at various intervals in time and see what
was going on. i find it pretty funny seeing what was in-focus as recent as a
month ago, and actually quite insightful reaching back a few years. as i said,
beyond awesome and very well put together, encourage people to check it out.

[1] <http://www.waybackletter.com/>

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bdcravens
Mine the comments. I typically get more information there, and you'd save
everyone from engaging in "OMG! Someone is WRONG on the Internet!"

Hell, you could have a full newsletter: "Best of patio11 Weekly" :-)

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prawks
For what it's worth I think it serves my purposes very well. I would suggest
being mindful of trying to add features that could ultimately clutter it.

I love the categories you put submissions into; one way to both provide a
helpful feature to subscribers as well as prevent them receiving too much
information that they're not interested in (clutter) would be to select
specific categories you wish to receive a newsletter for when you sign up your
email. Modularization is good.

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talmir
I just signed up, and I gotta give it to you that the look and layout of your
site is very very nice :) Everything is very clear and from my five minutes of
browsing the archives I cant personally find a single thing to criticize.

I read in other comments here that it´d be great to have a summary for each
link. But I imagine that would be tedious and time consuming. Personally I
think the titles of the links do just fine :)

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sazary
it seems that you yourself read articles that are in the email. so i think
writing just a few lines that describes every link is a good idea. Dave Pell
is doing a good job about this in NextDraft.

also points and number of comments are important things to be included in
email, but they may clutter it. personally i prefer them to be there.

and the classics part is really good ;)

~~~
duck
Thanks, and yes, I've gotten several requests for summaries. I tried doing
that before, but I didn't like the results... but I might give that another
try. You can hover over the title to get the points & # of comments.

If you like the classics, you'll probably enjoy my other newsletter as well -
<http://waybackletter.com>.

~~~
ColinDabritz
I'm giving the newsletter a shot. As far as summaries, I can see how it could
clutter the flow, maybe there is a way to put them out of the way of the main
flow? Optional hover? It's a great place to expose a bit more 'curation' value
if it can be done without causing problems.

I would also mention, one huge reason I use hacker news is for the comments.
If the summary could just mention a couple major topics of discussion, e.g.
the 'good stuff' it would make a summary useful to me there as well.

More broadly, I noticed that all your links are the articles, with companion
comments. You do have a few 'ask HN' and similar thread posts, but perhaps
consider highlighting those occasional remarkable discussion threads on their
own, or quoting excellent posts. I've saved more than a few HN comments
myself, and a couple great quotes at the end could be a nice 'wrap-up' and
bring some of the community discussion feel to the format.

~~~
duck
Actually, there usually is a "Ask HN" section... but if there isn't any good
ones or if they end up in other sections then it doesn't show. It is funny, at
the beginning there use to be tons of them and then over the last year those
started to thin out, but that seems to be reversing again here of late (which
is good!).

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tucaz
I just signed for it, so I guess that asking how you can improve it actually
improves it (in a user growth way).

~~~
wikwocket
That would suggest that additionally publicity would help. So I suppose
convenient features to "share this" or "post this to twitter" might help
growth. But it;s already an email (super easy to forward), and that wouldn't
add value to the original recipient.

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yitchelle
Kale - your newsletter really save me time. Personally, I would love to see a
selection of stories that _aren't_ so popular. I commonly comb through the
list of new articles that are a bit outside the box. They usually talk about
human nature, knowledge crossing domains etc.

Keep up the good work!

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tsm
I actually prefer the Wayback Letter (most things I see in HNL I've already
seen on HN proper), but it frequently goes through spurts of not happening. I
realize that you're a busy man and that, for example, having a new child is
more important than sending out the day's Wayback Letter. But it'd be nice to
have some sort of status indicator--if you anticipate an "outage", let us know
ahead of time, or if you don't it'd be great to have an email or website that
just said, "There's stuff going on in my life, expect the next few days to be
canceled."

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127001brewer
Kale - I'm a subscriber and I think it's great in its current format. Outside
of postings on Hacker News, how are you advertising its existence?

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joeyespo
Hey Kale, why don't you put a Gittip[0] button in the newsletter? That could
get you some funding so you can keep doing what you're doing. Pycoders
Weekly[1] is currently doing this too.

[0]: <http://www.gittip.com/>

[1]: <https://www.gittip.com/PycodersWeekly/>

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kordless
What is it written in/how does it work code-wise? Also, would you run another
version/flavor for a subtopic like visualization?

~~~
duck
I wrote a custom Ruby/Sinatra app that helps me build it out each week and use
that to hand-pick each article. The app scraps HN (although I'm about to
convert it over to using the hnsearch api I think) and allows me to filter all
the links each week in various ways. I then use MailChimp (and it's great api)
to send it out each Friday.

I'm working on making the app more generic in terms of the source and I have a
couple other topics that I want to do, but just haven't had the time to finish
yet. Look for another one in a month or so though.

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joeyespo
Just wanted to say thank you for the hacker newsletter! It's a huge time saver
by being able to visit HN less often while shaking that feeling of missing
out.

That said, I still have this compulsion of clicking open more links than I
have time for. Any thoughts on a Hacker Newsletter Lite?

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beeps
Havent thought either of these to implementation: 1\. If you could somehow add
a humorous one line caption to each post. 2\. ranking? ..linux article with
100 votes trumps web article with 400 votes. Adaptive ranking based on my
click through would be boss too.

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spoiledtechie
Since your asking for feedback, I was wondering if I may have my own feedback
being I am a start up as well. You have tons of reviews on your site. Did you
ask for all those reviews or did they just come organically?

Thank you!

~~~
duck
Several of them I got without asking and that prompted me to ask a couple more
folks for them. I think the best advise is to just ask individuals for them.

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bmac27
Did you build the readership organically entirely from HN? Were there other
sources from which folks signed up?

Also have you considered some kind of daily edition? Or might that be
considered overkill?

~~~
wikwocket
I believe at one point he said he got a lot of subscribers from a cross-
promotion with the Now I Know newsletter (<http://nowiknow.com/>). I'm not
sure if he has done this with other newsletters.

For daily content, I recommend <http://dailyhn.com/>. It provides a list of
top daily stories with automatically-generated digests. The digests are of
decent quality, but I just use it as a daily top ten list.

~~~
bmac27
Cool. Thanks for sharing. I'm wrestling with the daily/weekly question myself
as I'm starting to publish my own newsletter. My own instincts run counter to
wanting to receive an e-mail blast daily no matter how relevant it is. But I'm
not sure whether others feel the same. Think I'll ultimately experiment with
both to see if I can find a sweet spot.

~~~
wikwocket
Hard to say: lots of great and popular newsletters use both the daily and
weekly models. You could offer the choice on signup I suppose.

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Tichy
Is there a preview available somewhere? I am looking for a way to read HN on
my Kindle.

Nevermind, found the archive at the very bottom of the page. I guess it won't
work for Kindle, though.

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nanook
An interview with popular HN users will be awesome. I often find myself
looking up profiles of people who've left interesting comments/submissions to
see the stuff they're working on.

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donretag
There's a newsletter?

Seriously, that is my response. Never knew one existed before this post.
Perhaps marketing should be a goal.

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darkhorn
* ability to delete account

* ability to delete comments

* ability to edit comments after a month

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zacharydanger
You can clear the subscribe box on focus rather than just on click.

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rbchv
Do you monetize this in any way, or are you planning to?

~~~
duck
I run a single ad pretty much every issue, mainly served up by the great
people at LaunchBit. That works well, but I'm looking into some other addition
ways to monetize it just so I can fund more projects that I want to do. :)

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lsiebert
Info on upcoming regional HN meetups might be cool

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sideprojectbook
Do you allow advertising?

~~~
duck
Yep, I direct people to <http://lauchbit.com> if they want to advertise.

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DropRob
How many new sign ups did this post get you? :)

