A particular “Newsletter Guide” launched on Product Hunt recently and caught our eye. Yes, this newsletter is about to get very meta. 

The Newsletter Guide is a collaboration between email gurus Yellow Brim, The Shorenstein Center and Lenfest Institute. It's not an intro-level newsletter course, but more of a “201”-level toolkit of resources, strategies and open-source templates for people who run newsletters to collaborate on. 

The idea behind the project is to reduce the technical strain behind making a newsletter, and allowing editors to focus more on editorial. Some things the Newsletter Guide covers:

• How to grow your email list
• How to monetize your newsletter
• How to evaluate success metrics
• How to track where subscribers found you
• How to avoid accidentally breaking laws

And soooo much more. 

The Newsletter Guide comes alongside an uptick in products that make it superrr easy for people to launch newsletters without much hassle. Here are a few: 

💌 Substack gives writers a CMS built for publishing paid newsletters 

💌 Revue helps you quickly spin up a personal newsletter

💌 Email Newsletter Checklist helps you send error-free emails 

💌 Good Bits lets you create newsletters from the best links on the web

💌 Send Check It helps you write better email subjects

💌 EmailDrips is like Dribbble for email drip campaigns

Product News! 😻

 

Tesla is selling some *different* merchandise. Ja Rule launched a new startup. Ideas hidden in Apple's HomePod patent include: an emoji version of Siri, LED lights that display the weather and Face ID. A 10-minute 'unsend' window is coming to Facebook Messenger. Skype will now let you blur the background during video calls. Foot Locker invested $100M in sneaker platform GOAT. Substack is getting into podcasts. Apple decided to sell refurbished iPhone X phones for $769. Oh and Postmates is going public. 👀