Guest writer pitches and drafts for newsletters
Guest writer pitches and drafts for newsletters is a SaaS idea for editors of paid and sponsored newsletters that publish outside contributors, priced to test at $29 a month per newsletter. Pitches land in the editor’s inbox mixed with sponsors and replies. With it, newsletters that publish guest writers collect pitches through one form, review them as a team, and track drafts to publication.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Pitches land in the editor’s inbox mixed with sponsors and replies. Writers chase for answers, drafts sit in shared docs nobody owns, and payments to writers get forgotten.
Why now: More newsletters are growing into small publications with several voices, and they need an editor’s workflow, not an inbox.
What do they use today?
Most editors take pitches by email or direct message and answer when they find time. Drafts travel as shared documents, and payments are tracked in a spreadsheet or not at all.
How does it work?
A freelance writer finds the newsletter’s guidelines on its public pitch form and sends in an idea. The editors review it on a shared board, vote and comment, then send an accept or decline email from a saved template. An accepted piece moves through draft stages to published, with its fee and payment status tracked beside it.
What goes in the first version?
- Public pitch form with the newsletter’s guidelines
- Shared review board with votes and comments
- Accept or decline emails from saved templates
- Draft stages from accepted to published
- Fee and payment status for each piece
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Editors of paid and sponsored newsletters that publish outside contributors
- Price to test
- $29 a month per newsletter
Each newsletter has its own guidelines, editors and contributors, so a price per newsletter keeps the cost with the publication that uses it. The whole editing team shares one board, so there are no seats to count.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask ten newsletter editors who take guest pieces how they handle pitches today.
- 2Ask freelance writers how often their newsletter pitches go unanswered and what would help.
- 3Set up a pitch form for one newsletter for a week and count pitches and time saved.
Where to find the first customers
- Newsletter writer communities on Slack and Discord
- Newsletter and freelance writing subreddits
- Newsletter consultants and editors for hire
What are the risks?
- Only some newsletters publish guest writers, so check the market size before building.
- Editors may stick with shared docs; the pitch form must save real time.
How to build it on shipanysaas
4 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Emails
- In-app notifications
- You build
- Public pitch form and review board
- Draft stages and email templates
- Writer fee tracking (payouts happen outside the tool)
See the starting prompt
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Guest writer pitches and drafts for newsletters. Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it. ## The product - What it does: Newsletters that publish guest writers collect pitches through one form, review them as a team, and track drafts to publication. - Who pays: Editors of paid and sponsored newsletters that publish outside contributors - Their problem: Pitches land in the editor’s inbox mixed with sponsors and replies. Writers chase for answers, drafts sit in shared docs nobody owns, and payments to writers get forgotten. - Price to test: $29 a month per newsletter (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. Public pitch form with the newsletter’s guidelines 2. Shared review board with votes and comments 3. Accept or decline emails from saved templates 4. Draft stages from accepted to published 5. Fee and payment status for each piece ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations - Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer - In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app ## New code it needs - Public pitch form and review board - Draft stages and email templates - Writer fee tracking (payouts happen outside the tool) ## How to work 1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK. 2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files. 3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next. ## Rules - Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel. - Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are. Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
Guides for the parts it uses
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