Absolutely loved reading this. He actually describes the "how" process from Day 1 to Day 7. These kind of posts always make me feel awesome and terrible at the same time. Awesome that it is so possible to build something that people actually want but terrible that people like me are still wondering where to start. Damn I need to start talking to my Patrick Rhones.
I really like the idea of "writing through the product dev process". So often I get stuck and the act of "talking it out" helps - I think writing a blog/journal would be even better.
Great way of thinking and building the product in a very lean fashion !
My biggest issue would be : why would people pay to subscribe to a newsletter ? Do you have specific use cases ? (I guess that letter.ly closed for a reason?)
I'm sure that spending a week to build it and see if people would use it is one of the best ways to answer that question though. I'm just wondering what you, as a developer, think.
Really curious to hear how this works out. I don't recall ever seeing a paid newsletter signup form; most authors/email list owners use email as a free lead gen tool to sell something <i>else</i> (a book, an online course, etc). It'll be interesting to see if people will pay <i>for</i> the email medium itself.