Denner's Digest
This was a near weekly email newsletter of interesting links found by Matthew Denner. But it has now been shutdown.To everyone who had subscribed: thank you.
I appreciate you showing support & interest.
Why did this even exist?
As a software engineer I've been curious about all the fuss around no code. I had spent a few weeks tinkering with various tools. Connected a couple of them for experiments.Then some people mentioned they enjoyed reading the links I shared on the company Slack. So I thought I'd use it as an opportunity to build a newsletter in no code.I ended up with this.
How did it work?
Except for the email template, everything was put together using no code tools.During the week I bookmarked interesting articles into Raindrop. I would add my own description and file them in a folder called "Denner's Digest - Next Issue".I connected Make to Raindrop. Every Monday, at 11:00, it created a new newsletter with any bookmarks in that folder. It also shuffled those bookmarks into a matching folder in Raindrop.The newsletter itself was sent using Mailjet. Make built the content and created a draft campaign. That campaign was then scheduled to send at 13:00. The template was been built using MJML.This landing page is built with Carrd.And Make notified me via Slack both for successes and errors.
How much effort?
This cost the grand sum of $19. That was a year's subscription to Carrd, which is well worth it. Everything else ran for free.It took me about 6 hours, over a couple of days, to build end-to-end. Most of the times I struggled it was a case of RTFM.And it took me no time to generate a new newsletter each week. I was always bookmarking these articles because they were interesting to me. I was always writing the description to share it. The automation saved me pulling all that together in an email.
Why close it down?
The primary reason is one of reach (I never met my subscriber goal in the last 12 months) and a sense that I'm not doing it justice.I was pretty pleased with the numbers. 55% average open rate with 25% average click-to-open rate. My best was 2023-01-30 at 72% open with 23% click-to-open. But I also recognise that 86% of subscribers have worked closely with me in the past.In February 2023 the click-to-open dropped into single digits. This aligned with a personal sense that the quality of my efforts has dropped. Where once I was reading with a joy to share, I was not finding as many "interesting" articles.