Absolutely loved reading this. He actually describes the "how" process from Day 1 to Day 7. These kind of posts always make me feel awesome and terrible at the same time. Awesome that it is so possible to build something that people actually want but terrible that people like me are still wondering where to start. Damn I need to start talking to my Patrick Rhones.
I have a "day job". I run another company with a dozen employees. I love creating things, too. I'm like a construction foreman that loves what he does so much that he builds birdhouses on the weekends. Most of the work was done in the morning, over the weekend or at night while watching MasterChef on Hulu with my wife.
I've been following Patrick Rhone for years. He was begging for a letter.ly replacement for a while. Each time he asked, I always thought it was fascinating that no one was taking him up on it.
I built HappyLetter for the fun and sport of it. I saw it as an opportunity to practice some things I need to do more often and better, like writing, sharing, teaching, being transparent, accepting constraints, accepting perfection isn't always necessary, etc. I'm as proud of the HappyLetter blog as I am the product. There are many hard-learned lessons buried in those posts.
I've built many things like HappyLetter that never saw the light of day. Blogging about it forced me to ship.
I really like the idea of "writing through the product dev process". So often I get stuck and the act of "talking it out" helps - I think writing a blog/journal would be even better.
Live-blogging was way more helpful to the development process than I ever imagined it would be.
Even if you don't feel comfortable sharing everything in public, I'd keep a private journal and write through any issues that are stopping you from moving forward.
Great way of thinking and building the product in a very lean fashion !
My biggest issue would be : why would people pay to subscribe to a newsletter ? Do you have specific use cases ? (I guess that letter.ly closed for a reason?)
I'm sure that spending a week to build it and see if people would use it is one of the best ways to answer that question though. I'm just wondering what you, as a developer, think.
There are people out there who love the bloggers/writers they follow and will support them. A newsletter is a great way to trade exclusive access for money.
The kind of newsletters that publishers will use HappyLetter for aren't the marketingy kind you're used to. These publishers probably won't have a different product to sell where a newsletter is part of a lead scoring or funnel process. To them, the newsletter is the product.
Really curious to hear how this works out. I don't recall ever seeing a paid newsletter signup form; most authors/email list owners use email as a free lead gen tool to sell something else (a book, an online course, etc). It'll be interesting to see if people will pay for the email medium itself.
So far after 8 hours, one of HappyLetter's customers has 13 subscribers. They've only announced their letter on Twitter and ADN. Many of the Gruber-inspired school of bloggers try to minimize ads and rely on direct support from their readers. I think newsletters are a (classy) way that their readers can support them.
