Well, I am now over my 20 hours limit I set for myself to launch this product. I figured this would be the case but not how fast it would come about.
Today I worked on setting up the campaign emails that the people signing up for updates would receive. I was using Mailchimp to do this, and was fairly straightforward at first.
I already have a few people who signed up to get updates, so I had to be careful not to touch those contacts or accidentally send out emails before I was ready to do so. The first thing I set up was the "thank you for subscribing" page, which would consist of a quick thank you note and mention a few emails you may receive. I found that those emails are called Final Welcome Emails; basically, the last email you receive after opting in. I didn't realize that you could have double opt-in emails, which will send a confirmation email asking the person to confirm that they want to receive emails from the site.
You absolutely do not want this, it gives your people extra steps to get added to the list, and if they forget to do so, you may never get their email. Unfortunately, Mailchimp isn't that clear on how to remove the double opt-in emails, only how to add them, by default; it shows that it isn't activated, but when I test it with my own email, I immediately get the confirmation request and don't get to see my welcome message until I confirm it. I spent a few hours looking around and trying to get this to work but to no avail. My suspicion is there is a bug, and the double opt-in setting should be activated, but it seems to be not connected to anything.
For the time being, I am going to leave the signups as is, and new people that get added to the list won't get any emails right away, but I don't want to push them through the hoops of confirming their subscription, which would dramatically reduce my outreach.
I also learned that depending on what email you use, your campaigns could end up either in the spam folder or promotions folder, neither of which get opened that often and so you could lose those contacts. Sites like Gmail have exceptional filtering systems, making it difficult for spam emails to get through, but when you don't want to be identified as spam, you have to go to extra lengths. One of them is using a site name email address, so instead of example@gmail.com or example@yahoo.com, you would use example@yourdomainname.com, which automatically puts your email above many of the filters built into the system. It gets much more complicated than that going so far as to how long you hover your cursor over the email to define which category it goes in, but I'm not really sure how that all works.
I spent about 2:30:00 hours on this today, which brings my total hours up to 25:00:00, and I still have a ways to go before releasing the product to the public. My rough estimate is that I will be somewhere around 35-40 hours total. I've got such a learning curve on this project where about 80% of the information I didn't know already, so most of the time spent so far has been just learning. I guess that if I were to start this project again from scratch with only the knowledge I know now, I could probably do it in 7-10 hours.