Spinal August update: Toolbar formatting options + more notifications

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Depending on your location, summer is in full-swing. ☀️ That might mean this is month 1 of 2 of your vacation. 🤯 For the rest of us: welcome to this month’s update! 😅

There are some great updates this month and a cool beta feature that you can get access to at the end of the email! 😎

About a month ago, just when I sent the last newsletter, updates to the editor were released (I briefly mentioned it as well). This turned into quite a stressful period for (mostly) me. The outputted markdown would break different things, the editor wouldn’t save certain attributes and so on. 😱 As a SaaS founder, you probably care the most about the (your) product, so I’ve scrambled to get things as they were before and worked more hours than I care to admit (I pride building/growing Spinal calmly). ☠️

The storm has weathered and things are looking up again. 🧘‍♀️ In fact, I just checked some numbers in Stripe. Check out this short history of Spinal (launched ~545 days ago):

Spinal isn’t an open startup, but I do give you glimpse of the business from time to time in this newsletter. 🏑 🤫

So, what’s new this time around? Let’s dive in!

🛎️ New email notifications #

You can now also be notified when your content is published or scheduled. This is useful when someone else does the publishing (or scheduling) after something like QA. Want to know when a new member joins your Spinal account? You can now get an email for that too!

💅 Toolbar formatting options #

It’s now possible to toggle certain formatting options in the toolbar. Maybe you don’t need the h1 or the given Content Type doesn’t support bullet- or numbered lists. Disable them! 🙅‍♀️

Above screenshot is from Spinal’s changelog editor. See how few options there are? Great way to lessen any confusion with your team’s authors. ☺️

👀 Talking about the toolbar: there’s now an embed option. Already put to good use to insert YouTube videos to articles at some teams!

♻️ Re-sync content #

Spinal already had two-way sync for existing content. If you were adventurous and made changes to your content outside of Spinal, these changes would be synced back in. Now you can also re-sync all the content like you set it up the first time around. It’s a reset (drafts, scheduled content will be removed).

🐭 Cursor position for snippets #

Add the position where the cursor should be after adding a snippet. Saved minutes of time already for many teams! 🤣

🧐 Miscellanea of interest #

Some other things that might interest you.

• Personal plan price increase. The price for Personal increased from $99 to $149 yesterday (as announced last time). This should help with some costs recouping, plus better match the value (limits were increased last month too!).
• Contributors section in info sidebar. For now it only lists the author of the content (the person who created the content), but will hold a bit more info soon! 🤭
• Following last month’s announcement, legacy GitHub access (via oAuth) will be disabled on 01-09. Please take a few minutes (that’s all it takes!) to move the new GitHub app. Read more here.

From the blog 👓 #

• 5 tips for hiring freelance SaaS writers. Looking for your next freelance SaaS writer? Check these tips. Then check out SaaS Writer Hub, a side project from Spinal.
• Introducing the GitHub App for Spinal. Yes, this was introduced last month, but many dozen customers are still on the legacy GitHub access. Why not switch today? It only takes a few minutes (really!).

👀 Preview: Kanban Workflow (get beta access!) #

If you run a SaaS you probably know that feeling of your vision finally coming alive. This is one of those features that was part of my vision for Spinal before I launched.

And it finally makes sense: more and more bigger teams start using Spinal that often have a workflow in place that goes like this:

• 👩‍💻 Here is a good idea (some long-tail keyword we can target)
• ✍️ I’ll get a draft up
• 📝 Looks good, please fix these typo’s first
• ✍️ Done!
• 📝 Great, I’ll schedule it for end of next week
• ✍️ Thanks!
• 🤖 [REDACTED] (part of future release, don’t tease too much 😝)

But even if your process is less involved, I’ve found with some pre-beta users that just having a dedicated “state” for ideas can already be really helpful (at Spinal I added a 💡 before the title to show it’s an idea).

Show me! Here it is (WIP! 🚧):

Instead of rows of content, you now have columns of content per “stage”. You can of course enable it per Content Type.

This won’t be rolled out to all customers at once, but will be initially in (closed) beta for a dozen customers. Want to try it with your team? Reply! It’s first come, first serve! 🏎️💨

It will be rolled out to all customers the coming weeks.

And that’s it for this time. Anything you’re looking forward too? Something you want me to cover next time? Let me know!

For now: thanks for reading all the way here and until next time! 😊

—Eelco, founder Spinal

Ps. feeling generous? Why not share Spinal with your friends? As a tiny, bootstrapped company all the help is welcome! 🥺