I started a newsletter for Kosshi
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A while back I wrote that feedback for Kosshi had started pouring in over email. That hasn't let up, and I've been living in my inbox ever since.
The thing that kept bugging me was simple. I can reply to people one by one, but I had no way to tell everyone using Kosshi, "hey, this is changing."
I keep a release-notes page, and I post the occasional "just shipped this" or "here's where I'm headed" on X and Bluesky. But almost nobody follows that, and posts scroll away within a day. To find out anything, you had to come to the site yourself. I had no way to push something out.
X is big in Japan, but not so much elsewhere, and Kosshi's users are increasingly outside Japan. So saying something on X barely reached the people I most wanted to reach.
So I started a newsletter for Kosshi.
A newsletter is really just email, and honestly, I'd never been much of an email person. Work happens in Slack, and I open my inbox maybe once in a while. Which meant that, roughly once a year, I'd miss something that actually mattered. A note from an old acquaintance, a sign-up deadline, quietly lost in the pile.
That shifted once I started keeping my inbox in order and actually reading it. Unlike X or Slack, email doesn't scroll away, so whatever lands there, I'll see it. When the whole point is to reach someone reliably, it turns out email was the right tool all along.
At launch, Kosshi actually had an email sign-up form, running on Substack. After a handful of sends I realized I'd be writing nearly the same things in two places, the blog and the newsletter, so I stopped keeping it up.
I already have my own blog, so building the newsletter into that made more sense. I wired one up with Resend instead. (There's a sign-up form at the bottom of this post.) It sends a digest of new posts every Sunday, automatically, not written by me each time.
The problem is that this weekly digest isn't the right vehicle for the Kosshi updates I actually want to send.
For one, I try to keep this blog readable even if you don't follow the details, so dropping raw "version X.Y is out" notes into it just becomes noise for blog readers.
And for someone who only wants Kosshi, a feed that also carries original merch, a 3D-modeling tool, and reports from Design Festa (a large art-and-maker fair in Tokyo) is mostly noise too.
So "just bolt a newsletter onto the blog" fell apart, and I redesigned it so each person can choose what they receive.
I wanted a dedicated newsletter for Kosshi, and Resend's Topics feature fit the job best.
Inside one list you can keep separate topics: Blog, Kosshi, Ohaco. Each subscriber switches on the topics they want and off the ones they don't. That's how I split delivery by genre.
Sign-up lives on each product's own site. If you want Kosshi, you sign up on the Kosshi site. You can unsubscribe from topics all in one place, but signing up is per-site. That asymmetry is deliberate: handing someone the genres they actually want beats handing them a single all-in-one box.
Ohaco got one too, over at ohaco.app. It's still in development, but updates will go to that topic.
So now, when I have something to tell people, I can get it to exactly the people who want it. The thing I was stuck on at the start, no way to reach anyone, is finally close to solved.
One more note. The newsletter sign-up first said "a weekly heads-up on new posts, nothing else." Mostly that holds, but in practice things come up that are worth sending even when they don't deserve a full blog post. So I widened it slightly, to leave room for the occasional update from Shirokuma.
Last, a tangent. While testing sends on Resend, I found out that every email has to carry a physical postal address in the footer. That comes from CAN-SPAM, the US anti-spam law, and since Resend is a US service, I'm on the hook for it even though I run all of this from Japan.
The catch is that I'm a solo operator, my "office" is home, and that home isn't even mine. It's family-owned, so I'd rather not make it public. So I rented a virtual office and put that address on the emails instead. Selling physical goods in Japan needs a public business address anyway, so it was worth having.
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Mostly a weekly summary of new posts, sent about once a week.
You can unsubscribe anytime from the link in any email.