Outlines the things left to launch it and start on marketting

The Newsletter Service: Finalizing

am new to this build-in public thing, I did not want to reveal the name at first, because domains were not acquired yet. 

One to point to the backend and frontend i.e. api.***.*** and just the base domain for the frontend.

The other for the custom emails i.e. jane-doe@*****.**
I will not mention the domains in this article, Rua is not quite finished yet, but it's close enough to launch.

 server to use the new domain, and all new emails going forward will use that.

The frontend is hosted on Vercel, a great platform

The backend is hosted on a linux server on AWS, specifically the Lightsail product. I plan to move it to an EC2 instance and cache it using the GraphCDN for faster requests on the client.

What's the current progress on the Saas am working on, the name I gave it and so much more.

The Newsletter Service: The Progress

As mentioned in the previous article, I will outline the feature requirements and tech to build them.

I have started so many projects that I never finished and the main reason was the scope was too huge, I had so many features on the backlog and most of it was on the backend stuff so some I never reached a phase where I saw things coming together. So in this saas, I decided to limit the scope to launch an MVP as fast as possible.

A user should be able to get a custom email address on signup based on their username, which can be Twitter or GitHub or their choice.

A user should be able to get all newsletters received in a week's range.

A user is able to mark an issue as read or programmatically handle that on the client based on scroll events.

A user is able to mark newsletter email as spam which would be saved to avoid future issues received.

A user should be able to highlight sections of a newsletter and save them [not on 

So what about the tech, how am I going to achieve building out this saas app:

is an SMTP server open-source project that enables receiving, sending, and managing emails.

to handle monthly/yearly subscription payments from users. Stripe is not available in my country.

Been using it for a while now and love using it over (used to hate it way back, but I find the developer experience, also the community has matured over the years, with tools such GraphCDN that enable developers to take advantage of Fastly's CDN for fast responses

It's not replacing REST at all but it's a handy tool to actually play around with.

For the backend, I work with Golang, and Node sometimes Python on a day to day but picked Node, just a preference you can use any language or framework "

You can achieve a thin client unlike SPA's

Fast build times, making the developer experience amazing

I can build custom APIs within it and take advantage of Vercel's edge computing.

Those emails need to be stored somewhere and the database isn't one of them, never save HTML stuff on the database for read-performance reasons.

Well all that data from users needs to be saved somewhere and Postgres is the right database for this job because most of the data will be related and Postgresql handles that perfectly, trust me I tried MongoDB it does not work great with relationships[its a whole mess to achieve that might do an article in the future], I think it only has 

And that's it for the requirements side of things, next will be a log of what I have done so far and probably the launch date.

Outlines the system requirements for the newsletter service

The Newsletter Service: The Requirements

So the story is I was going through my email and realized I had like 150 emails received, most of them were:

Transactional emails, e.g. password resets, login alerts, GitHub

Email from products I signed up for but clearly unchecked the "

I want to receive product alerts or news alerts

So going through all these emails was a hustle, and I like reading newsletters my favorites being 

 by Colin & Samir team. At that point I thought of the idea:

What if I could have an app that receives all of my newsletter issues, and I can easily access the app and just go through a week's issues. That would be a step closer to decluttering my inbox.

Are there potential customers for this app?

This is not a new idea, a similar product called Mailbrew aggregates content from Twitter follows, RSS feed, & Email issues to generate a weekly or daily digest tailored to you. They are making money from such a feature, at the time of this writing Mailbrew is making close to $15,000 MRR. 

The other reason is well we are getting too many emails for sure, last year alone close to 320 billion emails were sent and received in 2021, according to Statista.

Every single day there is a newsletter launching from celebrities like Dua Lipa to popular youtube channel TMG. The Substack reader can only do so much, and it's strictly Substack stuff, what about the Mailchimp issues or Buttondownmail issues.

So after knowing the product could potentially get paying customers, I decided to research the core tech of it, and that was receiving emails. 

For me to receive emails I needed 3 things:

Domain name: to generate addresses to emails

Storage: the emails need to be stored somewhere and a database isn't the best place for that. 

I am 80% done, was actually supposed to launch on 10th Feb 2022, but got some hurdles with the domain stuff and a lot of things from my personal life.

A platform that houses all your newsletter issues in one place.

The Newsletter Service: Finalizing

The Newsletter Service: The Progress

The Newsletter Service: The Requirements

The Newsletter Service: The Idea