Digging around more thoroughly into the development phase of my digital product building & launching, I made a paper prototype. It started when I was doing some deep thinking about Substack and how I can help those that don’t have my level of experience with email marketing.

I started with the market research to find some viable product options, created pitch decks for the three products, and am now in phase one of making the digital product.

Paper prototyping

Classic of me to start with paper prototyping, we’ve been here before haven’t we? But this was the first way I could think of to visualize my concept before refining it.

Below is a first rendition of the newsletter template that I thought of based on my experience.

Obviously this is a very rough sketch of what I’ve been thinking of for a newsletter template. This version is also not for Substack, but for more customizable newsletter applications. After doing some digging in the backend of Substack, I was able to refine this paper prototype into another one. I incorporated features that exist in Substack already, and found examples of newsletters I subscribe to so I could create the most realistic low-fidelity prototype.

My initial assumption that a Substack newsletter could be transferred to another application was correct, but it will be a very simplistic newsletter. Depending on the brand, it could be a good thing!

Helpful tutorial found

In my Substack reading deep-dive, I did find a helpful post: Everything You Need to Know About Posting on Substack in 6 minutes (2025) by Sarah Fay. In this article/video/audio recording, Fay goes into the different types of posts that contributors can do on Substack, how to style and format posts, how to attach differnt file types, the sharing and engagement features, and the business admin things such as analytics, SEO, A/B Testing, and much more. She even includes a pre-publication checklist to make sure folks are getting everything they can out of the application.

Part of the issue with this post is that a lot of writers might not know the first thing about these marketing strategies. That’s when someone like me can come in and help break it down into easier steps and provide templates.

Next steps

The next step for me is to create the template and finalize how I will be selling it. I will also be conducting user testing on three people to see if this product is easy to follow and implement, and then I will using that feedback to refine the product and make it ready for market.