Fabrizio Rinaldi - October 07, 2019
We care about our time. We're almost obsessed about it, and we want to spend it doing, and consuming, only meaningful things. But in this day and age, it's increasingly hard to unplug from feeds and be free from countless notifications, while also keeping in touch with the content we love.
It's not surprising that our brains take on average 23 minutes to return our focus to what we were working on before an interruption, but even if we know these things, we often fail to act and change our behaviors. At the same time, we're all crazy about meditation apps and mindfulness, and yet we fail to be fully present since we're bombarded by notifications and obsessed about refreshing that Instagram feed. We even panic if we can't find our phones.
It's also increasingly hard to follow people. There are so many platforms to check out, that it's becoming a full-time job just knowing what our favorite creator or artist is up to.
Amid this mess of platforms, feeds, and notification, there's one technology that isn't failing us, and it's proving to be as useful as ever, and better than many alternatives: it's email.
Yes, email. A slow medium, where most actions are deliberate, and the risk of getting addicted, while still present, is lower compared to an Instagram or Twitter feed. It is more human, and it lets you stay in touch with people, and get news, follow creators and stay up to date on your favorite topics.
But email isn't perfect. There isn't one good way of getting always relevant, beautiful emails with the best content from your favorite sources. Well, there wasn't one until now.
A few months ago, we decided to fix our addiction to feeds, and use email to solve this problem, since we know this medium very well and we always fall back to it when other things don't work.
That's why we created Mailbrew — to reclaim our time and attention, by creating beautiful newsletters with the best content on what we’re passionate about.
Mailbrew is very complex under the hood, and we hope to write about it soon, but it's super simple to use by design. Here's how you can brew a beautiful newsletter:
We offer sources for every taste: Product Hunt, Hacker News, RSS Feeds... You name it.
Pick a title, order your sources, customize everything with our powerful editor.
Preview your creation, and receive it daily, weekly, monthly. It’s up to you.
We're letting a few select users try it, and they're all telling us the same things: that they wish they had it sooner; that this app would make them feel more relaxed; that Mailbrew would help them follow their favorite people and topics. And these are all reasons that made us built it.
And we can't wait to know how you will use it.
Here's a first look of the app in its current beta state:
We're putting our souls into this one, but we still need to do a lot of work. You can request access now, and we'll let you know as soon as it's ready.