We’re in the final testing phase of our platform (MK1) — it analyzes entire newsletter ecosystems and produces competitor insights automatically.

My CTO has a strong philosophy:

“Doesn’t matter how smart your backend is — if the UI doesn’t make people feel like they’re using something powerful, they won’t.”

And honestly… he’s right.

So before we push this out publicly, I wanted to get some honest feedback on the UI from founders, designers, newsletter operators, and copywriters who care about clean product experiences.

Here are a few screens from the current build:

(You can find 3 screenshots attached)

🔍 Quick context (non-technical explanation):

MK1 basically takes multiple newsletter issues → breaks them down into structured insights → and shows patterns across the entire niche.

The UI’s job is to make all of that complexity feel simple.

Some things the UI needs to communicate clearly:

Tone + intent of each issue
Niche-wide benchmarks
Issue-level metrics
Structure breakdowns (titles, sections, visuals, CTAs, etc.)
Engagement patterns (vs word count, vs structure)
Individual issue summaries
Consistency markers across creators

The backend is… not small.It’s a full distributed pipeline (scraping → TOON compression → issue-level LLM runs → aggregation), but none of that matters if the UI doesn’t let people understand the story instantly.

🧠 What I’m specifically looking for feedback on:

Does it feel intuitive at first glance?
Are the insights easy to digest, or does it feel “dashboard complicated”?
Which parts feel unnecessary or too heavy?
Do the cards/graphs help or distract?
Does this UI make you want to explore deeper?
If you ran a newsletter or content team, would this type of layout actually help you?

We’re still tweaking visual hierarchy, spacing, and how much data to surface at once — so I’m open to brutal honesty.

💬 The bigger question (UI philosophy):

Do you think products like this succeed because of UI,or despite it?

Some founders believe “if the model is good, UI is secondary.”My CTO believes the UI is the major part of a product, and everything else is invisible unless the UI communicates it well.

Curious where you stand.

🚀 We’re planning to roll out access very soon, so any feedback now actually shapes the final version.

If you build dashboards, run newsletters, or design analytics products — I’d genuinely appreciate your thoughts.

4 comments