Introducing IssuePulse: One-Click Feedback for Newsletters

IssuePulse is live at app.issuepulse.io. It does one thing: it tells you what your newsletter readers thought of what you wrote, without asking them to fill in anything.

The problem

If you write a newsletter, you know your open rate and your click rate. Neither tells you whether people liked the issue. Opens say your subject line worked. Clicks say one link was interesting. Replies come from the same three people every week.

So most of us guess. We write more of what we enjoyed writing and hope it was what readers wanted.

How IssuePulse works

1. Create a topic for something you write about, such as “AI tools” or “Growth”.
2. Paste its links into your newsletter footer. You get 3 or 5 links, labelled however you like: “Loved this”, “Too long”, “More on this”.
3. Read the votes. Every click is a vote. Your dashboard shows the breakdown, a trend over time, and comments readers left.

Readers don’t sign up. They click one link, see a thank-you page, and can add a comment if they want to. That’s it.

What’s in v1.0.0

• One-click feedback links with an optional reader comment
• Your own link labels, and a choice of 3 or 5 links per topic
• Four copy formats: Embed, Linked, Markdown and Plain
• Embed open counting, filtered for scanners and de-duplicated over 5 minutes
• A topic page with vote breakdown, trend chart (7, 14, 30, 90 days or all time) and comments
• A searchable topics table that works on your phone

The full list is in the v1.0.0 release notes and on our changelog.

Votes from people, not robots

One thing we cared about from day one: email security scanners click every link in an email before a person reads it. That’s why click rates are inflated, and it would make feedback links useless if we counted those clicks. IssuePulse drops clicks from known scanners and prefetchers before counting anything. We wrote more about this in Why your newsletter click rate is inflated by email scanners.

What it costs

Nothing, for now. Every feature is free during early access, with no card and no trial clock. Paid plans are launching soon and will add features on top.

What’s next

We have no customers to quote yet, so we’re looking for founding creators: people who’ll use IssuePulse in a real issue and tell us what’s missing. In return, you get a direct line to the person building it and a real say in what ships next.

Start free and add feedback links to your next issue.