Getting email up and running for side projects
This is part of a series about my side project Bashfully, which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach.
Rectifying my previous mistake - not building community by using email engagement - has proved to be a learning experience! Since our investment is minimal (and we have no real users yet!) the tools that we use all come with some constraint/trade-off. This next bit explain this is going to be slightly technical ...
With Heroku it has surfaced as putting in CNAME records in the root of the domain. With register.ly this then stops us adding any other root records, for example mail servers. Cloudfare has a service that will flatten CNAME records for you into A records so everything plays fits together. So a switch of nameservers and 48 hours later we had email in place.
The services that we have chosen for email are Zoho and MailerLite. Zoho has a Office365/GSuite vibe going on and includes a mail list server. This setup not only works for newsletters but also the transactional emails. So we get account welcome, platform updates, and follow up emails as well. As someone who has been creating workflow systems for nearly two decades I am impressed by their automation setup. The main problem has been restricting myself to a very simple MVP. Too tempting to build a baroque workflow straight away! So this gives us the tools to get a connection to users and the app, with community building. I hadn't considered email lists, but have now added that to the roadmap.
As this project is taking shape we are using more of the skills from our professional lives. For example, a lot of the code to integrate these services now lives in a GitLab kanban board. We are creating issues for specific bugs instead of general cards in Trello then pushing code changes to git. Not sure why this is. Could be the launch approaching has caused it to kick in? Or it's getting to grips with DNS has reawaken what it's like to work in an early stage company.
As we are getting ready to launch we have also added a system status page. UptimeRobot has a great system for doing this. It evens includes the obligatory Slack integration for alerting. This didn't use much technical skill, add a DNS record and it worked. It was funny how excited setting this up made me!
I did originally write a whole post on the onboarding process. This fell a little flat as it was missing a lesson or stand out experience. The aim is to have more to share on that next time.
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Photo by Songeunyoung on Unsplash
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With Heroku it has surfaced as putting in CNAME records in the root of the domain. With register.ly this then stops us adding any other root records, for example mail servers. Cloudfare has a service that will flatten CNAME records for you into A records so everything plays fits together. So a switch of nameservers and 48 hours later we had email in place.
The services that we have chosen for email are Zoho and MailerLite. Zoho has a Office365/GSuite vibe going on and includes a mail list server. This setup not only works for newsletters but also the transactional emails. So we get account welcome, platform updates, and follow up emails as well. As someone who has been creating workflow systems for nearly two decades I am impressed by their automation setup. The main problem has been restricting myself to a very simple MVP. Too tempting to build a baroque workflow straight away! So this gives us the tools to get a connection to users and the app, with community building. I hadn't considered email lists, but have now added that to the roadmap.
As this project is taking shape we are using more of the skills from our professional lives. For example, a lot of the code to integrate these services now lives in a GitLab kanban board. We are creating issues for specific bugs instead of general cards in Trello then pushing code changes to git. Not sure why this is. Could be the launch approaching has caused it to kick in? Or it's getting to grips with DNS has reawaken what it's like to work in an early stage company.
As we are getting ready to launch we have also added a system status page. UptimeRobot has a great system for doing this. It evens includes the obligatory Slack integration for alerting. This didn't use much technical skill, add a DNS record and it worked. It was funny how excited setting this up made me!
I did originally write a whole post on the onboarding process. This fell a little flat as it was missing a lesson or stand out experience. The aim is to have more to share on that next time.
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