The setup checklist

Finish setting up is a card at the top of a newsletter’s dashboard listing what setup left undone. It holds at most four items, each linking to the place that item gets done, with the number still outstanding beside the heading.

The card is worked out from the newsletter itself every time the dashboard loads, rather than from a record of which wizard steps you skipped. That is why it can be trusted: it describes the newsletter as it is now, not as it was during setup.

The four items, and what marks each one done

Four items can appear, and only the state of your newsletter decides which ones do.

• Add your logo. Done once a logo has been uploaded, in branding or during setup. It appears at the top of every issue and on your website.
• Use your own domain. Optional, and done once a domain has verified. A domain that has been added but is still waiting on DNS is not done yet, and the item says so.
• Bring your subscribers. Done as soon as the newsletter has one subscriber, by any route, including somebody who has signed up and not yet confirmed.
• Send your first issue. Done once one issue has been sent. Its hint is the card’s one word about sending, and it says there is nothing to set up.

What puts an item on the list

An item is listed because the thing it describes is not true of your newsletter yet. There is no stored list of skipped steps anywhere, so there is nothing to get out of step with the newsletter.

The practical consequence is that the card follows the newsletter in both directions. Delete your last subscriber and the subscribers item goes back to outstanding, along with the card if it had already gone. Remove a domain and its item reverts too, though that one cannot bring the card back, because it is the optional one. A checklist that remembered what you once did would keep insisting a thing was finished when it no longer was, which is the more annoying of the two ways to be wrong.

What takes an item off

Doing the thing takes the item off, in whichever way you like. The card links to one route for each item, and none of them is the only route.

The subscribers item is the clearest case: three signups from a form you embedded on your own site clear it exactly as an imported CSV would, because the item asks whether the newsletter has readers rather than how they arrived. Adding one person by hand counts too.

Why the domain item is optional

The domain item is optional because a newsletter on its free {slug}.issuemint.com address is finished rather than half done. Deciding you do not want a custom domain is a valid way to complete that step, and the card does not argue with it.

Optional items are still listed, still tickable and still counted, but they cannot keep the card alive on their own. Once a domain has been added and is waiting on DNS, the item’s hint changes to say that Issue Mint keeps checking, so an unticked domain item never means somebody has to sit and watch it.

Why the card disappears entirely

The card is not rendered at all once nothing required is outstanding. It does not sit there fully ticked, because a completed to-do list is furniture rather than information.

That is also why the optional domain item is excluded from the decision. An account happy on its issuemint.com address would otherwise carry a permanently unfinished card for something it had chosen against. The count beside the heading does include the optional item, so a card can read two of four left with the logo and the domain outstanding, and then vanish the moment the logo is added.

One card per newsletter

The card belongs to a newsletter rather than to your account, and it lives on that newsletter’s dashboard rather than the one listing all of them.

Running two publications means two independent checklists, which is the right answer: a second newsletter has its own logo, its own list and its own first issue to send. Sending, in contrast, is never on either card, because sending is included and configured already from the moment a newsletter is created.