This last Thursday I was travelling with my University’s Symphonic Band to one of the largest college band conferences in the country. It was a fantastic experience, but while I was away I found myself sitting on a bus for far too long with nothing to do. I had recently read a post about the creator of Daily Coding Problem and I was fascinated.
So what did I do?
I thought about all the different ways that people consume media each day. How many times did I have to click through Reddit or Hacker News or Twitter or Indie Hackers in order to feel like I was informed for the day? Sure, there are mailing lists and newsletters for just about every interest, website, and concept that you could imagine, but why can’t people customize their own?
I knew my time was limited so I got right to work. I used a pre-made template from startbootstrap.com and I was on my way. I used Ruby on Rails and Heroku, and within a few minutes the first mockup was live. Then, I added a pre-made MailChimp form to gauge interest of users that were interested in the product, but didn’t want to subscribe just yet. This way I can send them a brief and non-customizable version of my newsletter every few mornings, so they can get a feel for the product without shelling out any money quite yet.
Next I hooked up my Stripe integrations and used their premade Rails subscription recipe to get up and going from a technical standpoint. I made a custom user page, and with a few hours remaining I…
