👋 Hi Reader,
Running a newsletter business is hard. Preparing for infrastructure downtime for any software business (newsletters included) is harder.
Building large-scale products for the last 2 decades has taught me one thing: A healthy amount of paranoia saves a lot of heartburn later down the road :)
We cover Twitter sentiment from the outage below, but if you would not like to be caught unprepared for such scenarios, here's a simple 3 step refresher to prepare for continuity:
Download your email list regularly in a spreadsheet. All the popular ESPs allow you to export your subscriber list.
Stay proactive by monitoring your email deliverability and setting up alerts for downtime. There are numerous free and affordable tools that offer this capability. I will cover this in a detailed guide on the LetterStack site shortly.
Prepare the business to decouple easily from the ESP provider: Yes, we all love Beehiiv. But until you hit critical mass, keep your secondary options handy if you choose to move platforms.
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Beehiiv Infra Outage
On 12th Jun, Aniket Panjwani sparked a conversation on Twitter about uptime issues at Beehiiv.
Over the last few days, @beehiiv had an outage induced by their dependence on @heroku, a cloud platform. Outages happen. Beehiiv's response, however, was atrocious. I'm going to explain how that's the case, why I'm moving off Beehiiv, and whether you should as well 🧵(1/27)
Several newsletter operators were experiencing erratic CTRs, and even reports of subscribers not receiving emails. According to Aniket, Beehiiv’s public response have been vague, but he also provided constructive pointers, if you would like to be resilient in your business.
Takeaways For Creators
Running Beehiiv 'headlessly' with a custom frontend? Aniket says you’ll likely have a better experience with another ESP, since Beehiiv isn’t built for headless CMS use.
Using Beehiiv’s standard website builder? You’re fine for now, but once you cross $100k in annual profit, start comparing alternatives for more control and transparency.
No matter what platform you are on, always track your deliverability and engagement, don’t rely solely on platform-reported metrics.
Takeaways For AdvertisersBe diligent about reported open and click-through rates. Get your tracking in order first before you start putting money into ad networks.
Takeaways For Investors and EngineersThe current set of newsletter-driven ESPs are still young and nascent. So going through a fine-tooth comb for platform choices (I am looking at you, Heroku) would be wise, if you are deciding to invest a lot of talent into building on these platforms.
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Cheers,
The Letterstack Team
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