How I send my newsletter?
Sent on July 27th, 2021
Hi, I’m Aravind Balla and you are reading letter #17 from the Hackletter where I talk about my learnings and give you behind the scenes of things I keep doing for fun.
In this week's letter, lets go meta and talk about how I do this.
It is not straight forward. And if you are looking to start your own, this isn’t probably the advice you should look at.
This is a custom tailored process that I like doing. I like adding a custom flair to the things I make or publish.
Writing ✍️
All the writing happens in Roam Research (or Obsidian as I'm juggling between the two). I add ideas to my daily notes whenever they pop up in my head. With a tag hl-inbox so I can filter them later on a page dedicated to newsletter when I sit to write. The key here is writing down that idea as soon as it pops up.
I set aside time to write scheduled in my calendar, generally 9am to 10am everyday. As of writing this, the time is, 09:18.
Building the email 👨🔧
Then I copy the content over to a markdown file and generate custom HTML email using a framework called maizzlejs.
Nothing fancy, but this adds the fonts and colours I like. Makes it a little responsive. I get to use TailwindCSS for the styles, so its cool.
Sending the email 📮
I use a service called Mailbluster to send out this HTML email to subscribers. What’s cool about this is it uses SES to the send the mails, which means it very cost effective.
Mailbluster lets me manage my subscribers create lists and send campaigns.
It also has an API which I use to collect emails from my website/landing page. One extra cool thing - I send myself a Telegram notification whenever someone signs up. It’s lights up a smile on my face when I see it.
Is all of that required? Heck no. Is it fun? Hell yeah! ⚡️
Do you have an over engineered process like this too? I'd love to know. If you want me to expand on any of the sections above, reply to this mail and let me know. I'll put this write up as a blog post on my website soon.
See you next Tuesday 👋
Thanks for reading. Forward this to your friends if you think they’ll enjoy too.