I'm building a free open-source email marketing tool just for the heck of it.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Starting an email newsletter

Six months ago, I decided to start a newsletter. I began exploring email marketing tools to help me send emails, build a mailing list, and track subscribers. There are tons of options out there: Substack (of course), ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Moosend, Buttondown, and ListMonk.

These tools all have their strengths. But as a developer, I wanted to “own” my email marketing solution. It’s one of those developer quirks—we love building our tools to feel in control.

I was impressed with ConvertKit and Buttondown. And if not for my obsession with “owning” my solution, I’d probably be using one of them. Instead, I temporarily started using Substack—because it was the easiest to get started with—and decided to build my own free, open-source email marketing app, thinking I’d switch to it once it was stable.

But life happened, and my job as a tech lead left me with little time for the project, so I had to stash it away.

Quitting my job and indie hacking

Fast forward to a month ago, I quit my job to pursue indie hacking full-time. After testing a few different ideas, I decided to continue working on Kal.

Yes, I had decided to call my email marketing app “Kal”. Kal is named after one of my favorite fictional characters (from the Stormlight Archive).

I didn’t want to focus on just one project, though. When I quit my job, I wanted to start making “small bets”. “Small Bets” (

Small Bets Newsletter

) means investing your time in multiple small projects at a time to minimize the risk of focusing too much on any one project.

Keeping this in mind, I came up with my Indie Hacker checklist for the next 6 months:

• Build Kal

• Write a book

• Write this newsletter every Friday

The wrong choices with Kal

Kal had a twist: it was going to be CLI-based. Another one of my developer quirks. In hindsight, this was a pretty dumb choice.

I became obsessed with the idea of sending email newsletters through the CLI, thinking it was a unique selling point. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. Email marketing through the just CLI doesn’t work. Sending emails was fun, but tracking and analytics were a nightmare to implement.

I even wrote a quick start guide for Kal, but soon got feedback that it was hard to follow. People also weren’t thrilled that Kal was serverless and ran only on AWS.

The reality finally hit me when I discussed Kal with a close friend and she criticized my idea. She crushed it. I realized how impractical my idea was. I lost hope in the idea. Two weeks of building my CLI went down the drain.

The right kind of stubborn

Then, last week, I came across Paul Graham’s essay “The Right Kind of Stubborn.” It was very relevant to my story. I was too attached to my idea and less focused on understanding the problem and solving it. My purpose had become to prove that my concept of a CLI-based email marketing app worked. What I should have focused on was to make the best email marketing app that is self-hosted, easy to use, and fast.

So, I decided to fully rewrite Kal. From the feedback, the two main pain points that people had with Kal were:

• It was difficult to use because it was CLI only.

• It was difficult to install and self-host because it was AWS + Serverless.

It was time to remove these. Kal needed a UI. But it would still focus on speed, similar to the CLI. It would also have a super simple installation process.

Kal is like a once.com product, but free

Kal will be a self-hosted email marketing app you can easily host on an EC2 or Droplet. It will be fully free, better than rivals like ListMonk, and similar to once.com products.

I’m determined to continue with Kal, but this time I won’t get attached to a specific way of doing things just to prove a point. There’s a lot of competition, but I still think I can make a dent. I’ll use Kal myself and rely on user feedback to decide what features to prioritize.

I’m not commercializing it because I have a good runway right now. I want to focus on building a product people love, getting feedback, iterating, and marketing without worrying about sales and pricing.

I’m licensing it under the FSL, a software license used by Sentry, so people can use it freely, even commercially, but they can’t start a competing service using Kal. While I don’t have a specific plan to commercialize Kal later, and it will always be free for private use, I might consider offering a managed solution later.

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Thanks for reading.

See you next Friday,
Tanay.