// for people running a Discord worth reading
The best thing said in your Discord this week
— written up, in your voice, in ten minutes.
Every week, your community has a few moments worth sending to an audience: a great thread, a launch, a take. distill reads the week, drafts the email, hands it to you. You edit for ten minutes. You ship to your list — or you start one this week.
One full draft per Discord, no card. If it's any good, the rest is $49/mo. If it isn't, you keep the draft.
# Week of May 12
Quiet week on the surface, loud one underneath. Six people argued about Stripe webhook reliability for three days, someone shipped a CLI tool that picked up 200 stars overnight, and a regular posted the kind of late-night message you screenshot and keep.
## The Stripe webhook thing
It started with one question in #backend. By the third day, the thread had a 90-line code sample and a small consensus: idempotency keys per event, not per request. The folks who disagreed had good reasons. Worth reading the whole thing if you ever take money.
## 200 stars in 11 hours
One link in #show-work. By morning a member's side project was at the top of Hacker News and they were getting their first contributor PRs. We've linked the repo below.
*What to watch next week: a handful of people testing a Postgres extension someone in #db wrote on Sunday.*
what arrives in your dashboard every Sunday morning
// the actual problem
You didn't run out of subscribers.
You ran out of Sundays.
The community is the easy part. The community is doing fine. You opened the editor again last weekend. Here's how that went:
I should send the email this week.
Honestly I should have sent it three weeks ago.
What do I even say. Nothing happened. Wait, something did, but I can't remember what.
I'll scroll the Discord later and write something good.
It's 11pm Sunday. I'll send it next week.
11 weeks
since your last email. Open rates are about to fall off a cliff — that's the part of the inbox where Gmail starts deciding you might be spam. The longer you wait, the more it costs to come back.
You don't need to write a better newsletter. You need a newsletter to already be written when you sit down. That's the whole product.
// how it works
Three steps. None of them is "sit down and write a newsletter."
Add the bot to your Discord
Pick the channels worth reading. Two minutes. The bot can only see what you point it at — announcements and support stay out.
Sunday morning, a draft appears
Distill reads the week — every message in every channel you picked — and finds the six things worth saying. Then it writes them up in plain prose. No bullet-vomit, no LinkedIn voice, no em-dash maximalism.
Ten minutes of edits. Hit send.
Open the editor. Cut what doesn't fit, rewrite the intro in your voice, add a personal note. One click to Beehiiv, ConvertKit, or Ghost. Done before coffee.
// what you actually get
A first draft so good you only have to be the editor.
Reads your week, not a summary of it
Two-pass writer. First pass scans every message and finds the six conversations worth telling. Second pass writes them in prose, not bullets. The result reads like something a person wrote — because the people in your Discord did.
Members can opt out, instantly
Anyone in your Discord types /distill optout and their messages are gone — never read, never quoted, never stored. We anonymize everyone by default. Nobody gets named in the email unless you put their name in yourself.
Markdown in, markdown out
The draft is a text file. Edit it like one. We don't lock you into a WYSIWYG that fights you. Cut a section, rewrite the intro, paste it anywhere. The dashboard has a live preview, but you don't have to use it.
Publishes where you already are
Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Ghost. One API key per platform, set it once. The publish button does the rest. Substack doesn't have a public API — when they ship one, we'll be there.
// the obvious objection
"I could just write it myself in 30 minutes."
You could. You haven't. That's the disconnect.
The fantasy version
Sunday morning, coffee, you scroll the week's Discord, get inspired, write a 600-word email in 30 minutes, hit send by 11. Inbox happy, list growing, churn falling.
What actually happens
You open the editor, stare at the cursor, think "nothing interesting happened", scroll Discord for 20 minutes, realize a lot happened but you can't structure it, write half a paragraph, hate it, close the tab. Next Sunday: same.
The bottleneck isn't the writing. It's the empty page. Distill removes the empty page. Once you're editing instead of writing, you finish. Every time. That's the whole trick.
// pricing
One Sunday saved pays for the year.
You can cancel any time. We'll still keep your drafts if you do.
Free
One full draft on your real Discord. If we get the voice right, you'll know on draft one.
- One full draft, on us, no card required
- Same editor, same markdown, same preview
- Members opt out the same way
- Keep the draft forever — yours either way
Pro
A draft every Sunday, plus on-demand any other day. Publish straight to your platform.
- A new draft every Sunday morning
- Generate any time — for any week, on demand
- Publish straight to Beehiiv, ConvertKit, or Ghost
- Connect every Discord you own
- Members opt out with one slash command
- Two-pass writer — finds the story, then writes it
Math: at $49/mo, Distill costs $588/year. A community owner's hour costs more than that. We save you 30+ hours of writing block per year. The annoying part is that this is the truth.
// the things you'd ask before you'd sign up
Seven honest answers.
Because we don't write the email — your community does. The draft is built from what people in your Discord actually said this week. The voice is theirs (paraphrased, anonymized), threaded through a short prose structure. You then spend ten minutes editing in your own voice. Most creators report it sounds like them on the second send.
Then we won't fake it. The writer is tuned to cut weak material. A slow week produces a short, honest email — 'here's the one good thread, see you next week' — not a forced thousand words. The worst output is a draft you choose not to send. The cost is zero either way.
The bot reads only the channels you point it at. Messages flow through a two-stage writer that paraphrases everything and anonymizes by default — nobody's name appears in the draft unless you put it there. Raw messages are automatically deleted within 30 days. Anyone in your Discord can type /distill optout and their words are permanently excluded — and any messages of theirs we already collected are deleted right away.
You're trusting it for the first draft, not the final send. You're still the one hitting publish. The product makes the empty page go away. The 'is this me' check is still yours. Most users edit 15-30% of the draft on a typical week and ship the rest as-is.
You can. The reason most people don't, week after week: pasting a busy week is hours of scrolling, copying, stripping noise across channels. distill collects the 1,000+ messages, ranks them, drops the weak ones, and hands you a draft on Sunday morning before you're awake — that's the part that's hard to replicate with a chat box. There's also what you can promise your members: /distill optout removes someone permanently, names are anonymized by default, raw messages are deleted within 30 days. "I paste your conversations into ChatGPT every week" is not a promise anyone wants to hear from their server owner. The writing is good either way. The product around the writing is the thing you'd otherwise be building yourself.
Beehiiv, ConvertKit, and Ghost — one click each, you set up the API key once. Substack doesn't expose a public API; the moment they do, we'll be there. If you publish somewhere else, the markdown is yours to copy-paste anywhere.
One draft per Discord server, ever. We key it on the guild ID, so new accounts or re-adding the bot don't reset it. The catch is honest: it's a one-shot taste of the product. If it nails your voice, you'll know on draft one. If it doesn't, we don't deserve $49 a month from you.
Your subscribers are still there.
They've been there the whole time.
Try one draft. If we don't nail your community's voice on the first try, you walk away with a free file and nothing else. If we do — well, you already know what Sunday morning is going to look like.