Milled: A search engine for email newsletters

[chaz]

Hey, I built this! Solo founder and profitable. Stack is primarily Amazon SES + Rails, and affiliate monetized. Happy to answer any questions.

[cosmie]

Have you ever thought about packaging up the analytics you can derive from this into a product offering?

The inspiration you mentioned in another comment is the exact impetus that would make for a lucrative offering, particularly on the agency side. Things such as email cadence, offerings, screenshots of the specific emails, etc. Either at an individual brand level, rolled up to a pre-defined category, or allowing individuals to choose their own basket of companies to create benchmarks from. Would be really useful when creating pitches, but also for ongoing digest reports for competitive monitoring.

And that's just based off of re-packaging what you're already showing. There are lots of additional useful opportunities that would only varying levels of effort to unlock.

[vosper]

My wife uses your product all the time! She's a copywriter for a cosmetics company, and uses it to research what they've sent out in the past, and also what other brands have been sending.

She finds it super useful, so thanks for building it :)

[TurkishPoptart]

I'm interested in linking to affiliate products with a recipe site project. Can you recommend any resources on learning how to monetize via affiliates? Basically I'm working on a recipe site, and some of them involve the Instant Pot, so I don't think it'd be unfair if I generate a penny a click for linking to their product. Thanks.

[luadigest]

Congrats on shipping! Would you mind adding https://luadigest.immortalin.com?

[edraferi]

Seems like there’s some duplication where very similar emails are received close together. What do you consider a unique email? How do you duplicate?

[iudqnolq]

FYI at /for-brands you have the text "Create your site to Milled by following the instructions". I think you mean connect?

[iudqnolq]

How does affiliate monetization work? Do you rewrite links in emails? And how did you get users? Paid ads, word of mouth...

[phoenix24]

Congratulations!

You mentioned profitability. - What is the source of revenue? - Why do they pay (they being paid customers)?

[faeyanpiraat]

Have you got into any legal trouble from any of the companies?

[swlkr]

How did you get the first few people to add their newsletters?

[cpach]

Cool! How did you get the inspiration to build it?

[joshdance]

How did you get the idea?

Did you validate it, or just build it?

[jaflo]

What do you run your stack on? Also AWS?

[Ayraa]

Chaz, great work creating this.

My only thought is, I wonder how well these ecommerce emails perform. The majority of them are very image heavy, which affects deliverability and conversions. Some of them have most or all of their text and buttons directly on the images themselves.

Of course, if you're offering a discount, the email may convert better than average, but since the majority of stores only send this type of ecommerce style emails throughout the year, I'm curious how they perform in general.

[chaz]

It really depends on the brand and the type of email that you're sending (new product, content, abandoned cart, etc), and each email marketer needs to test for themselves. I've seen more textual emails work well when it's a welcome letter from the CEO or founder, but it's not a rule.

Broadly speaking, ecommerce is still a very visual experience at every step. It's really rare for me to see emails without images.

[gopi]

Interesting idea. Maybe you should think of extracting text content from the images for more SEO fodder.

[throwaway13000]

Cool project. What is the end goal? A Lifestyle business? Only search by keywords?

[aleks4nder]

Neat site. What sort of money are you making with it?

[redwall_hp]

Needs more RSS.