PencilBooth is a visual email newsletter platform made specifically for creative types. Redesigned and redeveloped from the ground up, PencilBooth 2.0 answers the question of what a newsletter service could look like if it was led by images and not words.
Around 18 months ago I launched PencilBooth - A simple idea based on a random domain name I bought ten years ago. As a huge fan of TinyLetter, the no-nonsense text-based newsletter service, I wanted to make the equivalent but for visual artists rather than writers. Of course, what started as a simple idea gained a small amount of user interest at which point I got hooked...
Six months into our initial launch I decided I wanted to go all-in and see if PencilBooth could really be a thing. While newsletters continued to gain traction as a medium, they were still very much focussed on servicing writers or content-creators, and were growing in complexity to a dizzying degree. There really hasn't been anything that caters to working professional artists and image makers to simply send their work out their to their clients and fans.
This past Monday we proudly launched PencilBooth 2.0 - Redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up as a visual newsletter service for creative types, and I am forcing everyone who reads this to please have a look at it as I really have spent more time and money than I should have on this, and am mildly freaking out.
Answering the question of what an email newsletter app would look like that prioritised imagery over text, I'm ridiculously happy with what we came up with in response, especially given the limited size of our team. The new PencilBooth homepage aggregates images from everyone's recent issues, plus we have heaps of new features like link-in-bio support, and this new thing we came up with called 'The B-Roll', which is a simple way to share links in a more visual bite-size manner, plus lots of other bells and whistles. We also removed all the previous limitations on images and text and send frequency from the original app.
So after all the hard hard work of building the thing, the hard hard hard work comes next, which is getting people to actually check it out and use it. It's still early days and there's lots more we want to do and fix up, but I can confidently say from being a user of this thing as well, this is something special and I hope you like it. ✨✏️📸
About PencilBooth 2.0 on Product Hunt
“The visual newsletter service for creative types”
PencilBooth 2.0 launched on Product Hunt on March 7th, 2024 and earned 125 upvotes and 8 comments, placing #18 on the daily leaderboard. PencilBooth is a visual email newsletter platform made specifically for creative types. Redesigned and redeveloped from the ground up, PencilBooth 2.0 answers the question of what a newsletter service could look like if it was led by images and not words.
On the analytics side, PencilBooth 2.0 competes within Email, Newsletters and Email Marketing — topics that collectively have 82.1k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how PencilBooth 2.0 performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted PencilBooth 2.0?
PencilBooth 2.0 was hunted by Jeremy Wortsman. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of PencilBooth 2.0 including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Jeremy Wortsman