Kit

Why Most SaaS Analytics Dashboards Fail Users

This article argues that many SaaS analytics dashboards undermine activation and retention by overwhelming users, lacking narrative/context, showing poor empty states, and failing to link insights to action. It cites benchmarks (Userpilot: 37.5% activation; Nielsen Norman Group: ~2.3 seconds scan time) and profiles four bootstrapped companies (Plausible, Fathom, Baremetrics, ConvertKit) that prioritize clarity: one clear hero metric, limited primary metrics, designed empty states, and actionable links from insight to task. The piece gives seven actionable takeaways for founders to improve dashboards, including choosing a north-star metric, removing unused metrics, adding comparisons/trends, designing empty states, showing data freshness, and surfacing next steps from analytics.

Developer-Focused Newsletter Platform Comparison

This technical comparison evaluates six newsletter platforms (Beehiiv, Kit, Mailchimp, Substack, Ghost, MailerLite) from a developer perspective. It breaks newsletter platforms into core layers — email delivery, subscriber management, content engine, public website, monetization, and developer surface — and examines API quality, webhooks, DNS/custom domain control, template customization, data portability, and deliverability. The article finds Kit and Ghost offer the best developer APIs, Ghost provides the strongest data portability (open-source and self-hostable), Beehiiv balances power and simplicity, Mailchimp delivers the deepest feature set at the cost of complexity, and Substack prioritizes simplicity but limits API and webhook access. The piece emphasizes verifying exportability of critical datasets, webhook authentication/retry behavior, sender authentication (DKIM/SPF/DMARC), and payment ownership before committing to a platform.

Flodesk Launches Studio — AI Email Design App

Flodesk has launched Flodesk Studio, a standalone AI-powered design application aimed at small businesses and creators to speed up email design while preserving brand distinctiveness. Studio combines a library of designer-built email templates with generative AI and full manual editing controls, allowing users to prompt, drag-and-drop, or edit at the pixel level. The product exports clean HTML to major email platforms and can send natively through Flodesk. Studio is free during beta and is positioned to reduce average email creation time from about two hours to under five minutes. Flodesk frames Studio as a “human-led, AI-accelerated” workflow that starts from professional craft rather than a blank generative prompt, with email generation as the initial capability and forms, web pages and other assets planned next.