The loft log

The first draft charged by the send, which sounded fair and turned out to punish the people who write most often. A weekly writer on our list would have paid more than a shop that mails four times a year and sells far more.

The third draft charges by list size with a generous send allowance per plan. It's less clever and it's much easier to explain. Waitlist members get the founding price for as long as they stay.

Our first bounce handler removed anyone who bounced twice. In cohort two that quietly unsubscribed around 140 people across the beta who only had full mailboxes during summer vacation.

Now each bounce is sorted by its reply code and retried on its own schedule. A permanent failure stops at once, and a soft one gets three tries over nine days. Hard bounces across the beta sit at 0.3%.

Nobody got stuck on the file itself. They got stuck on consent columns with names like status_2, and on what to do with people who had unsubscribed from somewhere else.

So the new importer asks one question per unclear column, in plain words, and it always keeps unsubscribes as unsubscribes. The longest move that week took a little over three hours, most of it waiting for DNS.

We got a very polite offer, and we spent a weekend on it. Then we looked at what the money would ask of us: more seats, more features, a larger pricing page, and pressure to push writers into plans they don't need.

We're paying our way through founders' savings and beta subscriptions instead. It means a smaller team and a slower roadmap. It also means the only people we answer to are the ones sending the email.

The most common report wasn't a crash. People couldn't find the plain-text version, because we had hidden it behind a menu we thought was tidy. It now sits beside the HTML, the same size.

The best report came from a yarn shop that had pasted a 40-row table from a spreadsheet into the editor. It broke everything, and it should have worked. Now it does.

We had columns, nested sections and a sidebar with 22 controls. Watching writers use it was painful: they'd type in a text box, then spend ten minutes getting the spacing to behave.

The rewrite starts as a blank page with a blinking cursor. Blocks show up when you type a slash, and the layout rules are ours to worry about. Writers in the test group finished issues 30% faster.

Going from nothing to 20,000 emails in one morning took us about four hours to get throttled and six days to climb back. Now I can show people the graph instead of asking them to trust me.

It's why every Loftwing account gets a warm-up plan sized to the list, and why the first sends go to your most engaged readers. Those readers build your reputation for everyone else.

It was 212 people and one newsletter about race results. It had no editor to speak of, just a text box, a send button and a lot of watching logs from the kitchen table.

Two hundred and nine arrived in the inbox. The other three were old addresses, one of which, we were told, belonged to a man who had retired from pigeons and email in the same year.

My grandfather kept racing pigeons in a loft behind his house on the South Hill. I spent summers cleaning that loft, and I learned that the birds come home because the loft is a good place to be.

Email works the same way. Readers open what they trust. I'd spent eight years running lists for small publishers on tools that treated my readers as leads, so Imre and I started writing the tool we wanted.