Justin Duke

And then as I put it online, I saw more and more people were interested.

So I was like, okay, I need to add an auth model.

I need to figure out how to monetize this somehow.

But the original 1.0 was in late 2016.

For sure.

I was using a tool called Tiny Letter, which is owned by MailChimp.

And it was one of those things of, it did a lot of stuff fine, but I'm an engineer at heart.

And one of the worst things an engineer can say to themselves is, I bet I could build a better version of this in a weekend, right?

Because it was just like dumb stuff.

Like it didn't support Markdown.

Sometimes emails were getting dropped.

Like all of these little paper cut things that I was just like, I'm a user of this and I'm getting frustrated.

Like, can I build something that just solves my own problem a little bit better?

And especially for some of the very marketing-heavy tools like ActiveCampaign, like MailChimp, these are designed for folks who are sending out e-commerce blasts to potentially tens of thousands of users.

And that's a very important vertical to handle.

There's also this entirely underserved market of people like me in 2016 who have a newsletter with maybe a couple thousand subscribers.

They're blogging.

They don't have this grand strategy.

They're not trying to track all of these things.

They just want a really seamless, pleasant user experience.