I Got So Fed Up With Email Marketing, I Built My Own Tool

Posted by George Hartley

I spent most of summer trying to get more people reading books on Obooko. That meant newsletters, subscriber emails, welcome sequences. The usual. And I was using Claude to do most of the writing, which was genuinely great.

The problem was everything around the writing.

I'd ask Claude to draft a newsletter. Brilliant. Then I'd copy it, open Brevo, paste it in, fiddle with the formatting for ten minutes, pick my subscriber list, preview it, realise the preview looked nothing like what I'd written, fix it, and finally hit send. Thirty minutes gone on something that should've taken three.

One morning I was sitting there with my coffee going cold, tabbing between Claude and Brevo for the fourth time that week, and I thought: why can't the AI just send the email too?

What I actually built

nitrosend connects directly to AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. Once it's connected, you manage your entire email marketing from the same conversation where you do everything else.

You type something like "send my March newsletter to all subscribers" and it handles the rest. No dashboard hopping. No paste-and-pray formatting.

I use it for all of Obooko's emails now. Every newsletter, every welcome email, every subscriber update. It's genuinely changed how I work.

For anyone running a book newsletter, an author mailing list or a reading community, I think this will click pretty quickly. Because you got into books to talk about books, not to become an expert in email software.

Here's a quick look at how it works:

What you can do with it

1. Write and send newsletters, all from a conversation
2. Manage your subscribers without touching a spreadsheet
3. Set up automatic welcome emails for new sign-ups
4. Check your open rates and click-through stats

That's it. No 47-feature dashboard you'll never learn. Just the stuff that actually matters when you're trying to stay in touch with your readers.

Looking for early users

nitrosend is in beta. I'm using it for all of Obooko's emails already, and I'd love more people to try it. Especially book people. Authors, bloggers, newsletter writers, anyone who sends emails to readers and wishes it took less effort.

Sign up free at nitrosend.com and let me know what you think.

Here's to spending less time on email admin and more time actually reading.