Curating Email Newsletters Sucked – So We Built Goodbits | Hacker News Reader

Curating Email Newsletters Sucked – So We Built Goodbits

blog.goodbits.io

9 pointschancancode5 comments

This post set off the voting ring detector. We sometimes waive that penalty for good original work. In this case, though, I think it would be better to wait until the product is ready for people to try, not just sign up for. Then it will make a good Show HN post, and those are widely agreed to be the best things on Hacker News.

I'm one of the founders of Goodbits. Thanks for the note on this. We just wanted to share our story with this blog post and agree that it's not the right time to do a 'Show HN'. We didn't expect it to trigger any voting ring detector.

We can't open up to all users right now as we're making sure we don't create a tool for spammers, so we're letting in people slowly and making sure our vetting process works well.

Of course! I just wanted to invite you to submit this as a Show HN when the time is right.

All: because the front page has so few slots, we generally don't allow reposts within a year. It's in your interest to wait until your cool new thing can be posted as a "Show HN"—that is, as something people can play with—rather than when you're at the email-address-gathering (or crowdfunding) stage.

Very cool tool, but I wish this was explained better. Your tagline should read:

"Build your newsletter as you browse the web" or something to that effect. Another might be "Build your newsletter in minutes as you browse the web".

Somewhere after that should be an easy to understand explanation of how you fulfill the value prop. Right now there is a big gap between your opinion of how long newsletters should take "should take minutes..." and how a person could quickly build a newsletter.

I will need this tool soon, but it took me a while to understand what service you were providing.

Sorry to seem overtly critical, but startup copywriting is always frustratingly opaque to me.

Don't apologize! Copy writing is hard and we're still trying to get our messaging right on this product. Being primarily developers we always fall into the trap of talking to other developers, we'll try harder to get better at this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com