Co-founder here. We've been running our own newsletter tool for the past year. Around 600 issues across our own newsletters and a handful of clients', 10+ different formats. Opened it up publicly today.

The thing I want to share, because I'd want to know it from the outside, is that I had the bottleneck wrong for most of that year.

I assumed the hard problem was drafting. Getting it to sound like the operator. We spent months on the writer (vocabulary patterns, section rhythm, and the cadence of each format). Drafts got noticeably cleaner. And operators kept giving me the same feedback: "fine, but not me."

I kept thinking we were close. Tightened the writer again. More feedback rounds. Same answer.

What finally clicked: the writing was on style. The story picks weren't. The model chose stories that the operator would never have surfaced in the first place. So a draft would be a competent take on the wrong week, and no amount of prose work fixes that.

We moved the work upstream. Scoring incoming stories per format, against what each writer would actually choose. The editing pattern shifted almost immediately. Less restructuring, more surface polish.

That's the part of the year I'd actually want to talk about if anyone here is building in this shape. Can get into how the scoring works, or what we still don't have a good answer for (publications that intentionally switch tone is one), whatever you want to dig into.

The tool is on Product Hunt today if you want to take a look.

A year of dogfooding our own newsletter tool, and I had the bottleneck wrong the whole time