Final Stretch.
I’ve just spoken with our engineers, and they say their confidence level is at “8 out of 10” that we’ll be able to launch as scheduled. In fact, we were originally scheduled to launch this Wednesday the 7th, but that happens to be the same day that this little company called “Apple” plans to debut something they call the “iPad 3” which, I am told, may put a damper on all other announcements.
So they’re actually shooting to launch TinyLetter v2 a little early: tomorrow around 2pm(ish).
Here’s what to expect.
Try to avoid sending anything tomorrow. We’ll start backing up data on the old servers some time tomorrow morning, and it could take hours to transfer everything over to our servers. During that window, if you log in and make changes, write letters, or attempt to send anything, all that work could be lost. Don’t worry: we’ll post a roadblock page that prevents you from logging in. Still, we’ve learned with MailChimp that people still somehow manage to get in and lose their work. So just to be safe, don’t send anything tomorrow.
The launch shouldn’t take long, but then again we’ve never acquired a company and moved all its assets over before. Expect delays. Expect goof-ups. Expect turbulence. For a couple days minimum, while we iron out all the wrinkles.
You’ll have to change your password
When the new TinyLetter is live, you’ll see a cool new website that looks something like this:
Yay! But when you try to log in, we’ll stop you and ask you to reset your password. Booooo. Yes, I know we’re being party-poopers, but we need to beef up the security of those passwords.
New concept: usernames
In the old TinyLetter, your email address was your username. In the new TinyLetter, you will have a separate username from that email address. Initially, we’ll derive your username from your signup page URL. So if your signup page was located at tinyletter.com/example, your username would be “example.” Don’t worry–instructions will be in your password reset email. We just want to let you know that usernames will be required from now on, not just email+password.
Signup pages
Once you’ve reset your password, you should check a few things. First, we changed the way that TinyLetter’s signup pages are designed. My own signup page currently looks like this:
But when we launch v2, it’ll be converted to our new format:
Generally, the signup form floats at the top, the fonts are changed, and the background image is going to be aligned differently. This is one of the first things you should check. We tried to map data over from old–>new as closely as possible, but you might need to tweak things a little.
New terms of use and privacy policy
The old TinyLetter didn’t seem to have any terms or policies in place. Hard to blame anybody for that, because that legal stuff can be a real chore. But legal stuff is necessary. So when we launch, you can expect some new terms and a new privacy policy. They’ll be similar to what’s in place at MailChimp, except TinyLetter is an opportunity for us to take a stab at brevity and clarity. If you’re so inclined, here are MailChimp’s terms and privacy policy.
That’s it for now. Just wanted to set your expectations. Look for another email from us (hopefully tomorrow) after we officially launch. Wish us luck?
– Ben
P.S.
We’ve also started setting up this new support center for TinyLetter. It’s a place where you can submit requests, bugs, etc. and we can post screenshots and answers in one central place. Right now, there’s not much content there, but it’ll come in handy after we launch.
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