I send a weekly email update to our growing list of users. Why? This article explains.

The Email#

You may have noticed an email from me every Friday. Here is today’s if you don’t subscribe.

The email is hand-written. I have never used AI. It takes me 30-60 minutes all in every week to produce. I write the email in markdown using Visual Studio Code. Then, I push the results to GitHub. The team reviews the email as a Pull Request. I’m not typing words into a Gmail draft. The GitHub repository is public, which I discuss later, so if you want the email before it is sent, I’m not trying to hide anything.

After the markdown is reviewed and accepted, James runs it through a markdown-to-HTML converter and puts the results in Mailchimp. He sends a draft email to himself to make sure it looks okay. Then, if it looks good, he schedules it to be sent to the large mailing list. You should receive it somewhere between 10am and 12pm Los Angeles time.

The format of the email is pretty static. It starts with a joke, which Brian insisted on from the beginning. Then, there are three topics, generally pulled from this week’s blog articles. On major release weeks, like Dolt 2.0, there is one topic.

The joke is the hardest part. It is really hard to be funny in a politically correct way every week. Often, the joke degrades into some form of “I hate writing this joke”. So if you read the email for the laughs, prepare to be disappointed.

The Archive#

Since the email is on GitHub, you can see all the emails I’ve ever written going back to July 2022 in the dolthub/weekly-updates repository. One of the reasons I initially put these in a public GitHub repository was for link building, though I’m not sure search engines or LLMs care much about GitHub website links. But now it’s fun to have a history of all the email updates I’ve written.

Why?#

The weekly email is my way of connecting with our users directly. The email reaches almost 10,000 people, and the list keeps growing.

I get feedback like:

I don’t read many marketing emails but I always read yours. There’s always something interesting in there.

I think it is important to directly talk to our users. The email comes from my email address. Users can just reply, and I often encourage it. I get one or two replies per week.

Like and Subscribe#

You want in? Every blog article including this one has an email signup form. If you don’t get the weekly email, scroll to the bottom now and subscribe! If you want to talk to me live, I’m always on our Discord. Enjoy the weekly terrible joke.