Back to the Drawing Board
So here's where we left off: zero subscribers, a bunch of rejected Facebook posts, and a half-baked newsletter that even I wouldn't read.
Time to rebuild. Properly this time.
I decided to approach this like a solo entrepreneur should: automation first, human touch second.
The logic is simple. Automation gets you to 80% of the result. That frees you up to focus on the remaining 20%.
The part that actually matters.
The part that's fun.
The part that makes something unique.
Automation builds the foundation. The human in the loop adds the magic sauce.
Building the Stack
I wanted to keep things as simple as possible.
Over the past year, I've fallen in love with Perplexity. It's an AI discovery tool that's basically replaced Google for me. Turns out, it's also pretty great at finding local events. You can set it up to search for events happening in a specific week, and it delivers.
Even better? It has an API.
So I built a small system that runs every weekday:
- Perplexity discovers the events
- My software composes the newsletter
- It sends everything to my email service provider via API
Here's what the first version looked like:
Pardon for the Italian, but overall it's quite simple. It's a list of events with the dates when they take place, the times, and a brief description when available.
As you can notice from the images, it had some empty data here and there. The link at the bottom should bring to a web page with all events which I did not even built. But hey, still better than nothing, right?
The most important thing is: these events were actually happening in the city. I found it useful enough that I started sending it daily to myself and my wife.
Her feedback? "It's good, but it needs more images. More visual stimulation. Right now it's a bit… flat."
Fair point. Let's give it some love.
Good enough
I went back to work and added:
- Basic branding with logo and color scheme
- Personal intro to give a more personal feel, but completely AI generated to get started
- Positive local news (there's too much negative media around!)
Here's how it looked after the changes:
After a few days of sending this automatically to the two of us, I thought: This is good enough.
Actually, it might have been too good. I wasn't embarrassed by it anymore.
The foundation is set. And it's 100% automated.
Was I wrong and it did not need my 20% anymore? Heck, I did not know what was going into the newsletter until receiving it in the morning...which made it kind of exciting!
Now comes the real question: How do we get it into people's hands?
Yeah. Distribution is always the problem. That's gonna be fun.
Keep shipping,
Michele