Whenever you're considering a tool for your newsletter, your goal is to balance power and simplicity.
Non-technical people on your team should be able to do as much as possible without help from developers.
E.g. build/publish the email, landing pages, blog posts, etc...
You also want to consider:
Compatibility: Will it work with other tools in your stack?
Flexibility: Can you modify it to suit all your needs?
Popularity: It's easier to hire devs for more popular tools.
Longevity: Will the maker be around long-term for support?
I'll be doing a deeper dive on each tool (with recommendations) in the coming days, but the TL;DR is:
-Your newsletter stack has 5 parts (not 1).
-It's a constant work in progress.
-Focus on balancing power & simplicity.
-You can stick with an all-in-one tool until ~100k subs.
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But as-promised -- recommendations on the best tools for your newsletter stack.
These are based on my opinion as a developer and newsletter operator + research into what's being used at The Hustle, Morning Brew, NYT, and others... 🧵
As a quick reminder, there are 5 key parts to your newsletter's technical stack:
I tried to share a thread today, and didn't realize it got cut off 2 tweets in.
To everyone nice enough to like it anyways, here's the FULL scoop on the newsletter engine
(a model we developed to explain the newsletter business) 🧵...
This is the Newsletter Engine. It shows how money/attention flow through a newsletter business.
What's really cool - when you understand how it works, you can use it to deconstruct any newsletter biz, diagnose problems, and find new opportunities.
Let's break it down.
There are 3 levels to the Newsletter Engine, starting from the foundation and building upward.
The levels are:
1️⃣ Product - What you make
2️⃣ Monetization - How it makes money
3️⃣ Growth - How you get new readers