I wish I had known that the writing itself wasn't going to be the hard part, and that even the professionals struggle with the backend aspects of running a newsletter. I could have saved myself a lot of stress if I'd realized that stuff like properly handling caching, Stripe APIs, payment processing and pauses, database deduping, redirects, etc is genuinely awful even when you know what you're doing. I wasted a lot of time and money thinking that learning more about programming -- or hiring professionals -- would be able to solve enough of my problems to be worth the effort. I should have just used the most straightforward methods for hosting possible, gotten something with low technical overhead set up, and left it alone while I focused on writing. -- sent to Dan at the Inbox Collective as part of a blurb.