Muse: Building your own newsletters

Hi all,

I wanted to share a newsletter product that I am working on with a few of my friends in university and also ask a couple of questions regarding newsletters in general.

I have always had issues with the way that we consume news nowadays. It seems like we are getting our news either from opinionated sources on social media or generic news platforms. If I did have any niche topics that I was particularly interested in (eg. semiconductors, Bayern Munich, Amazon conservation), it was always on me to spend the time to find sources that satisfy my tastes and also regularly visit these sites. This is why I was so excited with the rise of Substack, but it is still on me to discover great Substack writers.

My friends and I built Muse to specifically tackle this challenge. We built a hyper-specific news aggregator which allows users to build their own newsletters based on the topics that they are interested in. We are looking for beta users to help test out the product and critique our newsletters before we launch next month. If you do choose to sign up on the waitlist, we will send you an email this week to help complete onboarding and grant full access to our app.

I also had a few questions on newsletters:

• How do you folks gather statistics on opening rate, clicks, etc.? Is this part of the services that you use to serve newsletters, like Substack?
• Any similar products to what I have described above which I could possibly explore?
• Any particular strategies on opening and closing your newsletters? I assumed that this is the same strategy for article/essay writing

Thanks for all the help! Would also appreciate any feedback on our landing page or newsletter strategy.