If I had to guess, I probably found Letterloop on Product Hunt. Product Hunt is a curated list of the best new products.It's been almost a year now, so I can't say for sure.Wherever I found it, I was immediately intrigued by the focus on friends and family; I had no choice but to give them a signup.
This is the first of many reviews about products or services built or adapted for managing relationships and maintaining connections.
I'll review the ones I currently use, those I've considered, and always have my ear to the streets for the next one out.
If you have something I've missed, holler at me!
If I had to guess, I probably found Letterloop on Product Hunt. Product Hunt is a curated list of the best new products.
It's been almost a year since I started using it, so I can't say for sure.
Wherever I found it, I was immediately intrigued by the focus on friends and family; the idea of Letterloop fell right in line with my relationship thesis, and I had no choice but to give them a signup.
According to the team, "Letterloop is a space to connect better — not just more."
That's hard! 😮💨
Letterloop's core functionality is allowing users to create and manage group newsletters.
These newsletters, or letterloops, go out at a customizable cadence with automatic prompts to your group to submit responses to questions.
The questions are unique, reflective and users can even submit custom questions to be asked in issues.
It's like a pen pal service for people you already know well.
Of the products on the market designed for maintaining relationships, the vast majority cater towards professional relationships.
Letterloop is the first I've seen that's built with Grandma and Cousin Jojo in mind.
Being primarily designed for friends and family—along with being an email service when apps are all the rage—sets them apart.
I preach about regularity when it comes to practicing gratitude. The same goes for maintaining relationships.
Letterloop has regularity built-in; issues of your newsletter come at the same time every couple of weeks.
You contribute to and enjoy your newsletter on a cadence.
On top of that, you can customize the interval to be anywhere from weekly to quarterly.
Letterloop intentionally operates solely on email right now.
Email is slow and intentional compared to text, call, or anything built for mobile.
Shifting your communication medium and environment allows you to get free of routines or mindsets you've associated with your phone.
On your phone, you might have a habit of being quick: double-tapping images, dm'ing posts, and sending emojis.
On the other hand, emails force you to move slow; it's called electronic mail for a reason.
Beyond being on email, letterloops are anti-feed. There's a small, set number of people instead of the hundreds you can interact with on the TL. On top of that, the content is likely deeper than what'd you see on the socials.
Letterloop has an excellent, growing repository of thought-provoking questions.
This is great because it reduces the friction of asking deep or difficult questions to our loved ones.
Too often, the monotony, the hustle and bustle of life, and ingrained routines with our closest family and friends prevent us from going deeper.
Here's what someone else said about it:
Letterloop generates topics that you normally don't talk about it day to day group chats, so you can learn things about your friends and family that you never would have known before!
Letterloop is $3 per month for unlimited letterloops + issues.
A simple, perhaps too simple, way to think about the cost is to ask yourself if you would pay $3 to get closer with your family and friends.
You can use whichever spending comparison cliché that hits home for you—1 cup of coffee, 10 days of Netflix, or as my man, Mattiece, would say, "three-fifths of a cookout tray."
Your 3 odds a month also pay for continued product development. The team is really receptive and has added improvements ~monthly since December.
I've been running a letterloop with my dad and brother since December 28th, 2020. By the time this post goes up, we'll have just released issue No.23.
I started with them because they were among the most tech-savvy folks I knew, and I could afford to bug them until they signed up.
It always brightens up my day to see the letterloop pop up on Monday.
Nearly every issue makes me laugh, and I almost always learn something about two folks I've been living down the hall from my whole life.
For this group, email works great. We all have above-average tech-savviness, and so email, as a medium, doesn't pose an issue.
We've experimented with the release date--moved it from Mondays to Fridays-- but overall, we use email enough for this medium to work.
I can confidently say I would have never manually set up an email chain joint on my own, so Letterloop really got me to move on this.
As of now, I don't know of any other products that are doing this.
There are a few things I want to incorporate to take my game to the next level.
First, I want to ramp up how many questions we customize. This will help with getting deeper.
Another is to create some more groups. There are several other pockets of family and friend groups that I want to tap into.
If you're interested in going deeper with your people, Letterlooop is definitely worth a try. For the believers (aka at least medium level), it's a must-cop.
We believe in relationship supremacy here on the blog, so we're pulling that trigger 10 times out of 10.
Letterloop doesn't just sound like a fit, it works. You're nearly guaranteed to learn something new about the people in your group.
You can sign up for free here.
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