At Superlinear we have been dancing around the idea of expanding what we did with Unreadit, our network of Reddit-sourced newsletters, to a new product that allows user to create their own newsletters from Reddit itself and many other sources such as RSS, Hacker News, Product Hunt and Twitter. Let's call this product Mailbrew. We are still not sure this will be the final name.
This is one of those ideas that just stuck with us, and it is what we are going to build over the next few months.
This post kicks off a series of blog posts detailing the process of building this product and the reasoning behind every decision.
The idea
The idea is simple. A user can create an automated newsletter and receive it on its own schedule. By picking the sources that populate the newsletter content, the schedule and time of delivery, we think some very interesting newsletters could be created.
Think of a life where you are completely unplugged from the news, no Twitter, no nothing. You just get one weekly digest on Sunday morning with all the news, the tweets, the Reddit posts you deem interesting and you go about your week without the constant distractions.
Another use case I have in mind is a daily email with the weather for your city, your calendar events and the latests from some blogs you follow.
I would pay instantly for a service like this, because it would allow me to more easily unplug from social media and receive information on my own schedule, something I have been trying to do more and more recently.
Why now
We are very well positioned to build this because the standard Unreadit offering (the free weekly newsletters) gives us a distribution and promotional channel to push this service to. Besides that, Boxy Suite is in a good place and we will be able to support the development of this new project with its revenues.
500 people are already on the waiting list to try Mailbrew and get access when we launch the public beta.