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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614784

by metachris • 16 years ago

18 15 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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.

http://www.weeklyandroid.com

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 :).

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.

[Edit] The feedback got me really thinking about using MailChimp which I forfeited before because of the costs and no roadmap for monetization. Thanks!

metachris7• 16 years ago

Clickable: http://www.weeklyandroid.com

jonknee2• 16 years ago

> 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...

metachris7• 16 years ago

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!

jonknee2• 16 years ago

Well you're not double opting in at the moment, which is pretty much the first rule of email marketing. You should be doing DKIM signing as well. And sign up for all the feedback loops you can.

As for the daily grind, you need to pay attention to every single bounced message. They bounce for different reasons and depending on the reason you need to do different things. Make a mistake and you get blacklisted. Even better, the error codes vary depending on the server software so it's not easy to automate.

There's a lot more to it, but as I said I wouldn't attempt to do it myself.

trustfundbaby• 16 years ago

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.

faramarz• 16 years ago

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

metachris7• 16 years ago

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.

JangoSteve• 16 years ago

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?

metachris7• 16 years ago

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).

callmeed• 16 years ago

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

metachris7• 16 years ago

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.

barrydahlberg• 16 years ago

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

metachris7• 16 years ago

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 :)

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

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