Onboarding, step by step

Setup is five steps, and only the first is required. The rest can be skipped in one click and picked up later from Settings, and whatever you skip is listed on your dashboard afterwards so that skipping does not turn into forgetting.

Nothing in the five steps asks how your issues get sent, because there is nothing to answer. Sending is configured the moment the newsletter exists.

Confirming your email address comes first

Registering sends you an email with a link in it, and confirming that link is what opens the dashboard. Nothing else happens in between.

Confirming also brings a welcome email, and lands you on a dashboard offering one thing: Start setup, which is the wizard. If the confirmation email has not arrived, a missing confirmation email is the page for that.

Step one asks what you are publishing

Step one is the only required step, and it is the one that creates the newsletter. It asks for a name, a web address, an optional short description, a timezone, and how often you plan to publish.

The web address becomes a real hostname, {slug}.issuemint.com, so it accepts lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens and has to be at least three characters. Issue Mint fills it in from the name as you type until you edit it yourself. The description is shown on your website and above your subscribe form, and Markdown is fine in it.

Publishing frequency can be weekly, every two weeks, monthly or no fixed schedule at all, and choosing one of the first three adds a publishing day and a usual send time. Nothing sends on that schedule by itself. It produces the “published every Thursday” line on your website, and it projects the dates your sponsorship calendar offers. Your newsletter’s basics covers every one of these fields in the place they live afterwards.

Pressing Continue creates the newsletter, its website, its sending configuration with your own address as the reply-to, and four starter sections called News, Tools, Articles and Sponsored.

Step two is your logo, colour and type

Step two is branding, and it is skippable. You can upload a logo as PNG, JPG or SVG up to 2 MB, pick a primary colour, and choose one of the offered font pairings.

All three apply to your website and to every issue, and the preview beside the colour field shows a subscribe button in it as you go. If the colour you pick is too light against white to be read comfortably, Issue Mint says so and shows the contrast ratio rather than quietly accepting it. Branding is the same set of controls in Settings.

Step three is your own domain

Step three is your own domain, and it is the same screen as the domain tab in Settings rather than a thinner copy of it. Enter a domain and Issue Mint generates your DNS records immediately, with a copy button on every value.

This is the one step that cannot be finished in a single sitting, because DNS takes its own time. Once the records exist, moving on is not skipping anything: Issue Mint keeps checking on its own, and emails you when your issues start coming from your own address. Skip it entirely and your newsletter stays on its free issuemint.com address, which is a working answer rather than a placeholder. Adding a domain and the records themselves go into the detail.

Step four is your subscribers

Step four offers two real ways to get a list, and a skip. You can upload a CSV of up to 20 MB, one row per person with a column for the email address, and map the columns on the next screen. Readers arriving by import are added as active, with no re-confirmation asked of them.

The other half of the step is your embed snippet, with a copy button, for anybody who has nobody to import yet. Paste it into a site you already run and signups start arriving on their own. Importing a CSV and the script embed are the fuller versions of both.

Step five is the summary

Step five confirms the newsletter is live, links to its website so you can look at it, and repeats the embed snippet. Write your first issue takes you into the composer and marks setup as finished, and Go to dashboard gets there without it.

Why sending never comes up

Sending is set up before you reach step two, so no step asks about it. Creating the newsletter in step one also creates its sending configuration, already verified, already able to send, using your own email address as the reply-to and the newsletter’s name as the from name.

Skipping a step is safe

Skipping is safe because nothing you skip is forgotten. Every step but the first leaves an item on the Finish setting up card on your newsletter’s dashboard, which lists what is outstanding and links to the place each one gets done.

That card is worked out from the newsletter itself rather than from a record of what you skipped, so it cannot get out of step with reality. The setup checklist covers what puts an item on it and what takes one off.