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I built a daily technology briefing + community because I got pretty tired of the way technology sites work (just a vomit of news stories) and make about $2,200

I built a daily technology briefing + community because I got pretty tired of the way technology sites work (just a vomit of news stories) and make about $2,200/month at this point, so I recently gave up my job to work on it. It's growing fairly steadily, because people really value not being advertised to, and that's been fantastic. I'm also pulling together a bunch of disparate services to make it a great experience, including SSO to the community, paywalled content and a custom emailer that integrates deeply with the CMS. So far, so good, and I basically slammed it all together until it worked over the space of a year -- but the real work was three years of sending a weekly newsletter as well to build up an audience before I even launched this thing. At some point I'm planning to sell the application I wrote that powers it, because there's a distinct lack of 'community in a box' platforms that can solve this problem. First I have to finish it, but that's kinda the end goal. https://char.gd/recharged https://char.gd/recharged if you'd like to try it! The code best-friends gives 25% off for three months.

sixfoot3 9y ago
What are some of the key things you've learned along the way? E.g. More community interaction helped grow the newsletter, etc. I would be curious to know what your roadmap for the "additional features." What are the advantages you've found "slamming together" the system vs. having a custom system built?
- owenwil 9y ago
  Hey! Great questions, thanks! Well, so far: 1) Focus on the community, then the content. I thought the content would be some sort of mish-mash of opinion and really more long form stuff, but people prefer compact, quick takes, in 3-4 paragraphs. Makes sense, but hard to see as a maker! 2) Additional features is a great question! I plan a few different things: - Community integration with the newsletter - Integration with 'real-time chat services' like Discord, as I do think they serve a purpose - Web push for notifying of "big" news outside of the band of the slow newsletters for those that want it - Alternate delivery mechanisms for the newsletters (perhaps as simple, short FB Messenger pieces) - Calendar subscription for events in the industry - A bunch more I've forgotten already :). 3) Technically the system is custom built, I guess I'm referring to how it feels to have done that myself. I tried to hack it all together via existing stuff at first, but it was clearly not going to work, so I built a deep Craft CMS integration with my app to get where we are now. It's a great way to work because it's all built on top of relational content!

sixfoot3 9y ago

What are some of the key things you've learned along the way? E.g. More community interaction helped grow the newsletter, etc. I would be curious to know what your roadmap for the "additional features." What are the advantages you've found "slamming together" the system vs. having a custom system built?

owenwil 9y ago
Hey! Great questions, thanks! Well, so far: 1) Focus on the community, then the content. I thought the content would be some sort of mish-mash of opinion and really more long form stuff, but people prefer compact, quick takes, in 3-4 paragraphs. Makes sense, but hard to see as a maker! 2) Additional features is a great question! I plan a few different things: - Community integration with the newsletter - Integration with 'real-time chat services' like Discord, as I do think they serve a purpose - Web push for notifying of "big" news outside of the band of the slow newsletters for those that want it - Alternate delivery mechanisms for the newsletters (perhaps as simple, short FB Messenger pieces) - Calendar subscription for events in the industry - A bunch more I've forgotten already :). 3) Technically the system is custom built, I guess I'm referring to how it feels to have done that myself. I tried to hack it all together via existing stuff at first, but it was clearly not going to work, so I built a deep Craft CMS integration with my app to get where we are now. It's a great way to work because it's all built on top of relational content!