Over the past couple of months, i've been working on a new project called Roundup Mail. Roundup Mail is a tool for creating collaborative newsletters.
The core idea of Roundup Mail is a simple one. I wanted to be able to create a newsletter from the social updates from people on a remote team. Many newsletter platforms exist, but few make this specific method of collaboration easy. Most email newsletter platforms give you a drag and drop editor to create a newsletter from scratch, but don't make it easy to create a newsletter with the same format but different content each week.
The desire for a collaborative newsletter came from the combination of two personal circumstances: working remotely and being an immigrant/expat. At the Allen Institute, we had a team of ~100 people working in person until March 2020, when suddenly, the pandemic hit. We were forced to work remotely, and we had to find a way to stay connected with each other - particularly as researchers don't always have a naturally social group dynamic!
To fix this, I started writing a weekly newsletter called "AI2 Insider". This featured a mix of work updates, personal updates, and miscellaneous dog/cat photos, along with some slightly sarcastic commentary on people's photos. I wrote this email for a year and a half, and it was extremely popular - people would eagerly await the email every week. The email was designed as a way to stay connected socially. Over time it became a valuable way to stay on top of what everyone was working on as well.
Why can't I do this with social media?
Especially to keep up with friends from home, I use social media a lot to stay connected. However, there are a couple of (quite big) problems. I want to see updates from friends, but I don't want to be bombarded with updates from people I don't know. This is increasingly difficult to achieve on social media today, with the combination of ads, AI generated content and algorithmic feeds. Social media is also a continuous stream of content, which make it easy to miss important updates from friends. Finally, I often find that the things I choose to share with a fixed group of people is different to the things I choose to share with a wider audience.
Roundup Mail lets you get a single email per week with the updates from your friends/coworkers, without the risk of getting sucked into a vortex of bullshit short form video content.
Why can't I do this with mailchimp/hubspot/etc?
You absolutely can do this. If you want more customization and control, you can manually design an email newsletter in Mailchimp (in fact, this is exactly what I did for AI2 Insider). Roundup Mail solves two problems you will encounter with this approach:
- You have to manually compile the newsletter from the individual updates. Over time, this becomes a drag.
- You have to deal with all the admin of pestering people to submit their updates, sending the newsletter etc.
Roundup automatically compiles the newsletter from the individual updates, and sends it to everyone. You can also set schedules for the newsletter, so it is sent automatically on a weekly/monthly basis.
We already have a shared slack channel!
Shared company slack channels work great as a first step, but they have a few specific limitations. Often you will find that only a subset of people will post updates. This happens because of the small social friction that exists when posting in a shared channel - everyone is notified about your specific update, immediately. This means that people will only post updates if they have something significant to share, or if they are naturally extroverted.
One additional benefit of a shared newsletter for companies is work updates. Asking for work updates is a great way to check in with what people are working on. Not only this, but asking for a single update from a full working week also makes it very clear what people think is important. This is a surprising/useful thing to discover!
This sounds great, how do I get started?
Visit RoundupMail and create a new newsletter. RoundupMail is free for a month, and then plans start at $5/month. Let me know if you have any feedback or questions!