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Whew! What a year! – A Message from Lesley
At Newsletter Glue, we really believe in building in public. As such, I wanted to take a look back at everything we accomplished in 2021.
Further down this email, you’ll see highlights of all the big things we shipped this year. But a list of product updates lacks colour. So I thought I’d also share some reflections from building Newsletter Glue this past year.
2021 flew by. I feel like the business and the plugin changed significantly every 3 months. We introduced lots of big features, onboarded many new customers, and surpassed my modest revenue targets. All in all, not a bad first year of business.
Highlights
- Getting featured as WPTavern’s favourite plugin of the year in their year end review.
- Shipping our newsletter editor and patterns. (All thanks to Ahmed!)
- Optimising and reducing our generated email html code by 80%. (Great work again by Ahmed)
- Shipping our website redesign.
- All the love and support we’ve received from the WordPress community in the past year. I could easily spend a thousand words on this but instead, let me just say, thank you to all the fellow plugin owners, to the WordPress community, to Post Status, to everyone that helped get this fledgling plugin off the ground.
- I truly believe this wouldn’t have been possible if not for building in public. I can’t recommend this highly enough!
Lowlights: Building a business is slow work
It wasn’t all smooth sailing this year. I honestly thought we’d be much further along than we are. Maybe I’m impatient and unreasonable, but I’m discovering that hiring, building systems and processes, and managing an increasingly complex plugin is hard and very slow work.
Here are some examples of projects we undertook this year that took a lot longer than anticipated:
Website redesign: I started working on the website redesign in August of 2021 thinking it’ll be shipped by the start of October – we didn’t ship until the end of November.
Content marketing: I thought our marketing operations would be running seamlessly by now, but that is also not the case. The goal was to produce an article a week by Dec. It’s now Jan and we’re still struggling to produce an article a month!
Free trials: I’ve been wanting to make it easier for people to try our plugin and upgrade to paid for awhile now. I recently revisited a brief I wrote about adding a free trial to the pro version of our plugin and realized I wrote it three months ago 🤯. It’s now 2022 and we still aren’t even close to starting that work.
V.2.0: I thought we’d be done with this by December. We’re close, but it doesn’t feel good to go into the new year with such a big project still hanging over our heads.
Looking ahead
I came into the new year tired, exhausted but determined.
As I mentioned above, we’ve been chipping away for some time now on v.2.0, and I’m super excited to get it into your hands.
Version 2 now uses React and Gutenberg components for our admin settings. It also provides a more uniform user interface.
In the short term, these changes make it easier and faster to add new features and provide a more professional UI for our customers.
In the long term, we’ve set a strong, modern foundation that’s in line with the direction of the WordPress ecosystem. And we’re excited that other WordPress business owners are already looking to us and our work for inspiration for their own transition to Gutenberg and React. This stuff is all very new and constantly changing, so we’re just lucky to be small and flexible enough to be at the forefront of those changes.
We’re also building our team. We’ve already got a small team working along side Ahmed and I, for which I’m incredibly grateful.
Having additional hands has freed me up to focus on planning, so that I’m less mired in the day-to-day and am better able to ensure we’re tackling big projects that help the business grow and make our product even better.
I can’t wait to share with you everything we ship this year!
And on that note, I’d like to leave you with some of my favourite posts of 2021.
Best,
Lesley
My favourite posts of 2021
Best of 2021: Product Updates 🚀
Here are some of the major things we launched in 2021:
- Social embeds allow you to paste a Twitter or YouTube link directly into the post editor, formatting automatically on email 📧
- Active Campaign, GetResponse, Sendy, Sendgrid, Mailjet, and Moosend integration! 🎊
- We introduced logo linking, headline links and metadata blocks 🔗
- Major improvements to the User Interface and publishing workflow, which drastically reduced the chance of accidentally sending a newsletter when publishing a post 🙅🏽♀️
- Completely restructured the email template system 🛠
- Improved post-embed block formatting, author byline follow button, block quotes, and back up font families 👩🏻💻
- We reduced the size of our email templates by 50-60%, which means faster load times and decreased risk of clipping in Gmail✂️
- In May, we introduced the Newsletter Editor. This update is the Newsletter Glue you know and love today and empowers NG users to create newsletters completely separate from blog posts 🗞
- Mergetags for Mailchimp, CampaignMonitor, Active Campaign, GetResponse, Sendinblue, Sendy, and MailerLite users 🔁
- Social Follow block was added 🐦
- We released a new onboarding wizard, patterns, and a patterns wizard 🧙🏼
- Klaviyo integration for our Newsroom tier was released in September 📰
- Custom URL slugs and static site URL substitutes 🐌
📋 Check our changelog for a comprehensive look back at everything we’ve shipped this year 🔥
Best of 2021: NG in the News 📰
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That’s it for our first newsletter of the year. Thanks for reading 🧡
Best,
Camber
Built with Newsletter Glue.