About Issue Mint
A tool for one job: publishing a curated link newsletter that stays yours.
The problem it was built for
Curated newsletters are one of the few formats on the internet that reliably keep their audience. Somebody with taste reads widely, picks the handful of things that were actually worth the time, and says why. The reader gets an hour of reading compressed into four minutes, from a person whose judgement they have come to trust.
The tooling has never quite matched the format. General email platforms hand you a drag-and-drop editor designed for announcing a product, which means every week you are pasting links into a text box by hand. The tools built specifically for curation solved the assembly problem well, but they all send your email for you, from systems shared with everybody else, priced by subscriber.
Who it is for
Anybody who reads widely enough to be worth following. Design weeklies, local roundups of what is on this week, industry digests, trade newsletters, charity supporter updates, a teacher sharing what worked in the classroom. The format travels across every subject there is, and none of it requires you to be technical: you type, you drag things into the order you want, and the layout looks after itself.
None of it asks anything of you up front. There is nothing to connect and nothing to configure before your first issue: sending is included and it works from the moment you sign up. Past fifteen thousand readers the sending moves into your own hands, which costs nothing extra and which we tell you about long before you get there.
The two decisions everything else follows from
The first is that the tool should understand the format. Links live in a library that fills up through the week. An issue is sections with links inside them. Every link has a title you can fix and a note in your own words. Putting them in a different order means dragging them, not typing it all out again.
The second is that nothing should stand between signing up and sending. We do the sending, it is included, and a new account can put out a real issue the same afternoon. What is unusual is what happens next: when a newsletter grows into a business, you can take the sending into your own hands at no extra cost, so the reputation you spend years building belongs to you rather than to us. Every other platform in this category keeps that for itself.
What it does not do
It does not do paid subscriptions. Every list on Issue Mint is free to read, and revenue, where there is any, comes from sponsorship. If your plan depends on charging readers, Substack and beehiiv do that well and we would rather point you there than sell you the wrong tool.
It does not run an ad network, and it does not take a cut of your sponsorships. It manages the inventory, publishes a calendar sponsors can book against and keeps the enquiries in one place. The invoice goes from you to them.
It does not have a referral programme, a recommendations network or growth mechanics. The archive, the RSS feed and an embeddable signup form are the growth tools, on the theory that a good newsletter that is easy to find and easy to subscribe to does most of the work.
Who is behind it
Issue Mint is built by Mike Griffiths, who has spent about twenty years making software for other people's businesses and wanted a curation tool that did not turn a weekly issue into an evening of admin.
It is a small operation, which has consequences worth being upfront about. Support is a person reading email rather than a rota. The roadmap moves in the order that paying users ask for things. There is no sales team to escalate to. What you get in exchange is that the person who wrote the code answers the email.
Getting in touch
info@issuemint.com reaches a person. Feature requests, help with the setup, and complaints all welcome.