I was surprised, coming back to newsletters, how many newsletter platforms don't support RSS-to-newsletter. I've hacked a work-around that I'm not happy with, but I look forward to digging into this.
A lot of devs and PMs under age 30 have never heard of RSS, or if they have it's not something they ever used, and not top-of-mind when it comes to features.
Maybe, but another thought I had while scanning newsletter services is that they haven't really evolved or changed in many years. Substack would suggest email isn't quite dead, but email feels at-risk. That said, I support both newsletters and Substack but I do a lot of manual copy-and-pasting. I also had to hand-code my own Wordpress newsletter content script to generate something that could then be cross-deployed to newsletters.
None of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing creativity or innovation or product development.
> None of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing creativity or innovation or product development.
From my viewpoint, most of the development in email tools over the last decade has been in the data processing realm.
ie, collecting data or improving the quantity and quality of integrations and then allowing newsletter senders to segment and personalise emails based on that. The more advanced tools allow for proper templating languages and ML based data models such as RFM, recommendation systems, etc.
Newsletters feel like a mostly solved problem with very little further product development required, from where I'm seeing things.
Email doesn't support the general markup you can often expect to see in a blog post and email to rss tools to date haven't offered good means of filtering the output to tidy that up, specifically with things like inlining styles which remains important.
Folks who care about sending good emails quickly realised that the tools just aren't good enough so have resorted to sending the emails separately.
There are obviously other factors at play but that was a big one for me when I looked at the tooling a decade ago when I used SFMC (which offered email to rss functionality).
