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Fran Méndez

Why I’m not building another email service

Published about 2 months ago • 1 min read

I’ve been thinking a lot about what Commune should look like. Chatting with Steven Willmott, he suggested something I never thought about: is Commune really a Substack alternative? I mean, Commune doesn’t send the emails. It’s not a competitor to Kit, Mailchimp, Beehiiv, Ghost, and other ESPs. Instead, it integrates all these networks.

Substack is a closed network. That’s a fact. And it’s a fair business model, this is not meant to be a critique. Kit, Mailchimp, Beehiiv, Ghost, Buttondown, and MailerLite are also closed networks but they can be opened because they offer an API. This is what Commune is doing. It’s opening all these networks and glueing them together under a single place.

Not only that. Commune can also become a place where people can come to learn about a given topic. Not just by consuming content but by interacting with the community around it. Becoming part of these communities. In a chat with Mark Boyd the other day, he mentioned it would be great that Commune becomes the place where all tech journalists who write about APIs come to see what’s new and learn about it. I very much agree with this vision. Going forward, it won’t be just about APIs but actually anything. Step by step though.

Starting a network-based business is not easy. You have the well-known problem of the cold start. Or the chicken-egg problem. If there’s no content in the network, why would people join to read? But, if there are no readers, why would I bother to publish my content on the network? You gotta start somewhere. I decided to start with my own network. All these lovely people who are experts in APIs and EDA. You can’t imagine how thankful I am they’ve all joined 💛

The point is that we’re finally breaking down the walls of these closed networks. By using APIs to join everything together, Commune becomes the layer that lets you actually own your audience and your community without being stuck in a single silo. It’s about making the whole thing open and accessible so you can focus on the content and the people, not the tech headaches of where they’re hosted.

Would love to read your point of view.


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Fran Méndez

Creator of AsyncAPI | Empowering Staff+ Engineers & Architects to master Event-Driven Architectures with proven tools, processes, and best practices.

Hey hey! I'm Fran, the creator of the AsyncAPI specification (the industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs). Subscribe to my newsletter —The Weekly Shift— where I share expert advice about building Event-Driven Architecture and share my journey writing my first book, Shift: The Playbook for Event-Driven Architecture Advocacy.

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