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Philip Thomas

Philip Thomas

@philipithomas

Indie maker of products like Postcard and Booklet at Contraption Co.
43
Joined February 2022

Thanks!

Some of the early use case for Booklet have been:

  • Investors connecting their portfolio founders in a network
  • A marketplace building a community of workers to engage them between gigs
  • A Substack newsletter adding a subscriber community
  • Companies replacing Google Groups for internal announcements

My goals is to basically move from hobbyist usage -> non-work communities -> core work tool.

Thanks for catching the broken link - just pushed a fix for it.

Check out Booklet, which is a modern email community. It’s my indie project, and I started it for the same reasons you highlight. Chat is noisy and people don’t pay attention. So, I build it on email - and use AI to make really good summaries and subject lines, so people can stay updates without staying logged in or getting tons of notifications. And, with email there’s nothing to install.

What a cool product! I'll check it out more, it seems to fit perfectly.

You might try posting to Hacker News, because more Stripe folks tend to hang out there.

Besides that, try looking for another payment processor. There are others out there - such as Braintree.

A couple I don't see here yet:

  • Company of One
  • The Artist's Way
  • Small Giants
  • Reality is Broken
  • So Good They Can't Ignore You

Hmm, I'd be concerned about security. Can I give you access to commit messages, without giving you access to code?

Great question. I had a look at GitHub’s API and it’s indeed possible to only give WIP access to git commit messages with the repo:status scope.

Another downside of Intercom is that their unsubscribe logic is basic, so if users unsubscribe from onboarding campaigns - then I think they will not receive broadcast emails.

While building MoonlightWork.com, we built an email digest that auto-sent every week. It read from different feeds - including a headwayapp.co feed, our blog, some internal APIs, and a "custom intro" feed. So, any announcements we included in that weekly email. It worked super well.

I do like HeadwayApp.co, but they don't handle email subscriptions. Perhaps there's an opportunity for a product like that, but with subscriptions?

For #postcard I'm just subscribing everybody to a postcard at updates.postcard.page. My goal is to build personal websites for people, but it's conceivable to update the product for an api-driven updates mailing list. If you're interested in this, I could definitely experiment with it.

No, I do the weekly email - I'll switch to daily.

The main point of a forum for me is non-realtime discussions. Replying via email is secondary for me.

@marc I want one good email summary per day of what's being discussed. That way, info gets pushed to me - but in a calm way, where I don't have to remember to check all the time. I miss web forums, which are close to this. But, they are all so clunky.

The best asynchronous, modern forum I've used is YC bookface. I've been working on a project called #booklet, which is inspired by YC Bookface. If you're interested in testing it out - I'd love to keep developing it for a community like WIP. It's made to be high-polish and realtime, but able to be used over just email with one good summary per day.

The closest I've seen to what I want today is groups.io/ - but it's still pretty clunky.

Do you subscribe to the current daily WIP email?

It only shows todo activity of the people you follow, but there's a lot more we can like you suggest. Include new discussions, recently added projects, etc.

What would you like to see in such a daily email?

I've been building out our own forum software which we're having this conversation in right now. Are you saying you want more of an email interface for this, including the ability to reply to comments, etc?

No, I do the weekly email - I'll switch to daily.

The main point of a forum for me is non-realtime discussions. Replying via email is secondary for me.

I think paying for access to the community makes sense. I just honestly don't like Telegram - it's a blocker to me engaging more with the community. I prefer something more asynchronous.

Yeah people seem quite divided over Telegram. Some people like myself use it all the time with friends etc so it makes sense to also have WIP accessible there.

But if you don't use Telegram already, I can how it's not ideal having to use that for WIP.

Would you mind elaborating on a more asynchronous solution you'd prefer? Is it something where the website could play a role?

@marc I want one good email summary per day of what's being discussed. That way, info gets pushed to me - but in a calm way, where I don't have to remember to check all the time. I miss web forums, which are close to this. But, they are all so clunky.

The best asynchronous, modern forum I've used is YC bookface. I've been working on a project called #booklet, which is inspired by YC Bookface. If you're interested in testing it out - I'd love to keep developing it for a community like WIP. It's made to be high-polish and realtime, but able to be used over just email with one good summary per day.

The closest I've seen to what I want today is groups.io/ - but it's still pretty clunky.

Do you subscribe to the current daily WIP email?

It only shows todo activity of the people you follow, but there's a lot more we can like you suggest. Include new discussions, recently added projects, etc.

What would you like to see in such a daily email?

I've been building out our own forum software which we're having this conversation in right now. Are you saying you want more of an email interface for this, including the ability to reply to comments, etc?

No, I do the weekly email - I'll switch to daily.

The main point of a forum for me is non-realtime discussions. Replying via email is secondary for me.