Our Very First Customer

About this episode

Christine Trac was Magic Pages' very first customer, back in 2023. And now, for the podcast's first in-person recording, she joins Jannis in Bad Ischl. They retrace how they met on Twitter, the trial-and-error of moving her first site from Wix to Ghost, her path from a master's in kinesiology to the creator economy, and her recent move from Canada to Austria.

The second half digs into the technical side: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, why a sending domain is different from the email address your readers see (more on that in Understanding email sending domains at Magic Pages), and the tools Magic Pages has built to take the DNS-record headache off of publishers.

Chapters

• 0:00 — Welcome
• 1:13 — How we met on Twitter
• 6:08 — Discovering Ghost
• 9:14 — Christine's path from kinesiology
• 12:45 — Reviving the personal blog
• 14:45 — Moving from Canada to Vienna
• 22:33 — Christine's freelance work
• 23:12 — Email deliverability basics — SPF, DKIM, DMARC
• 25:43 — Custom sending domains at Magic Pages
• 31:10 — Open-sourcing the SPF lookup tool
• 33:46 — Tips for senders & creators
• 38:57 — Closing thoughts

Links & mentions

• christinetrac.net: Christine's site and writing
• yourkinesmentor.com: Christine's Kinesiology blog
• Understanding email sending domains at Magic Pages: the blog post Jannis references on why a sending domain is separate from the address your readers see
• Episode 1: What is Magic Pages?

Transcript

Jannis: Hi and welcome to the Magic Pages podcast, a new podcast where we sit down with the people building, hosting, and publishing on Ghost. My name is Jannis, I am the founder of Magic Pages, and I am here today with, well, our very first customer that goes all the way back to 2023 with Christine. Hello.

Christine: Yeah, so I'm a freelancer who also works for a agency that helps with email deliverability. And I basically help a wide variety of companies from creators to e-commerce with making sure that their emails are out of spam and making sure that we provide good practices so that subscribers feel safe and we ensure that they're not scammy.

Jannis: I mean in today's world, [that's] something that the world can definitely need. I want to take the listeners and the two of us a little bit back, actually further back than before Magic Pages existed to the year of 2022. When we met, can you tell your side of the story? Do you remember how we met, how that happened?

Christine: Yeah, so back in 2022, we had both taken a course. And in that course, we all had different projects. And we both focused on projects providing value on Twitter. Like some colleagues would focus on "I need to sell products", but both of our projects were free. And we just wanted to provide value, which I think really helped us bond. And you introduced me to your wife, Mariia. And then when we jumped on the call, I laughed so much that I thought I needed to go to the hospital.

Jannis: Yeah, I remember that. And in the beginning, we didn't know whether you were serious or not. It's the best way to get to know each other. But yeah, so we met on Twitter. Twitter doesn't exist anymore. It's now called X. We're both not on Twitter slash X anymore. Yet, that was the place where Magic Pages was essentially born. It wasn't as part of the course you mentioned, I've done a couple of other projects from there.

Specifically, I've designed templates for a service called Carrd. And then at some point, I started talking about this new thing, which didn't really have a name back then. But it turned out to be Magic Pages. I started talking about the fact that it will be based on Ghost, that it will evolve around Ghost. And you immediately showed interest, because you've already worked with Ghost before. What made you say, yes, I want to try this? What did you think about the project back then?

Christine: There were a couple of reasons why I was interested. One being I was also... I purchased one of your card templates. And I was thinking, wow, like there was just so much quality in those templates. I remember your templates were definitely different. And they were more aligned with what I was doing, which was being a service provider, and trying to get people to book a call or email me. So I remember just being amazed. And anytime I needed any tweaks, you were so willing to help me. And so I remember us chatting. And when you were building this platform, a lot of things actually stood out for that. Like my previous experience with other platforms was... if you're a small creator, you don't have that many subscribers, you're kind of limited because sometimes that plan doesn't give you the option to add a custom theme.

And that was something that I wanted to include. And then if I wanted to, I would have to pay more. And then I tried many different Ghost providers. And not being very technical back then, it became a bit of a challenge because some people were telling me, oh, you need to learn how to code and all these different things. And I remember when you had helped me previously with projects like on Carrd or Ghost, you were able to do it without making me feel like a tech dino. You actually guided me and were just so willing.

So when you were telling me that you were creating it, I already knew that it was going to stand out. One being because the quality of your work is very thorough. And you always make sure that there are no errors and also that people can come to you, like I could come to you for any support. So those were some of the things that stood out.

Jannis: Well, thank you. I'm wondering, can you quickly walk us through what other platforms you have used before? Was it WordPress? Was it something else that you've tried before for your website?

Christine: Before getting into marketing, I was also a fitness coach who was also a creator, and I tried many different platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix. And the very first site I created back in 2018 was just very complicated for someone who started out with like zero dollars. It was like, oh, you need an SSL, you need a domain. Oh, actually you need another inbox. And by the time like I finally had my website published, it took six months and a thousand dollars on all these different things that I learned you don't actually need. So if I had learned about Ghost back then with magic pages, it would have been so much better.

Jannis: Specifically about Ghost itself. It's been quite some time, but do you remember how you learned about Ghost and what made you want to try that even before Magic Pages? Do you remember how that happened? How you found out about Ghost?

Christine: Yeah, so it was from a friend. He already had his Ghost site running and he had sent emails and I just remember, wow, it's so clean and polished. And he like said that he didn't need to like do all these crazy setups like WordPress. It was already nicely set up. And I remember him telling me the design part. He didn't have to do things like other platforms where you have to adjust every single block for every single color design and all that. It was very simple. And so when he told me, I was like, oh wow.

And then I tried a plan on Ghost and I was like, wow, I really like this. It's very simple. You can get it up and running and it looks very clean and easy to read.

Jannis: I also remember a very distinct moment, which was the weeks leading up to me actually, let's say pre-launching Magic Pages about telling the world what it is and giving people a way to sign up. And I remember that every couple of days you would text me and he would say, please take my money. Where can I put my credit card? Can I pay already? And honestly, for me back then, that was the nicest thing somebody could have ever done, not because of the actual money that you paid them, but it showed to me an incredible support that somebody believed in the thing that I did back when I think I didn't even believe in it myself.

So for me, that was extremely helpful. But the question that always stood out to me was essentially, why did you trust somebody so blindly? You bought the very first lifetime plan magic pages ever sold. There was no product. There was nothing that you could actually look at and you were willing to put 249 US dollars down back then. Why was that?

Christine: One being like, we definitely built a really strong friendship at that point. And I knew that I could trust you. If something were to happen to the site, I knew that the value was there. And I think even if we weren't friends or if I was to be really objective here, I think that was a couple years membership on another ghost platform. I was like, oh, if I even have this website running for a couple years, it's already worth it. And I already knew that the support would definitely be pretty high quality. And yeah, when you did it, when you started it, I was like, okay, well, I know Jannis and I know he's going to do good work. I've had other friends that said they were going to do it.

And I was like, okay, I'm just going to keep bugging him until he actually ships it because this could be something. And it's a crazy full circle moment to see where it is now.

Jannis: Yeah, I will be forever grateful for pushing me like that, for pushing the development further as well, because you were also one of the first that actually then set up the ghost website. Because I'm not sure if you remember, but there was like a gap of, I think three months or so between when I opened the presale and actually people actually being able to use their first Magic Pages site. And you were also one of the first people that then tried that and set up their site and told me like, "there's a bug here. I cannot press on this button and this doesn't work and this doesn't work".

Christine: And then I deleted my site.

Jannis: I don't think you ever deleted your site, but there were definitely challenges to getting that set up. And that constant feedback, even now, like whenever you use your current ghost site, you actually reach out and you give feedback. And that has been incredibly helpful. A couple of months after that first site launch, you actually came back and you asked if you could buy another lifetime plan for a second project of yours. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Christine: So the second blog that I created on Magic Pages is called Your Kines Mentor. Something that I value a lot in my life and my career is having mentors and people that are a couple of steps ahead of you. I have a master's in kinesiology, and when I did my master's, I had so many people that were so willing to help me — a lot of alumni older than me. They were very generous, they never asked for anything in return. And I remember asking one of them, like, how can I repay you? And he was like, you don't repay me, you help the next generation. At that time I had already left the kinesiology field to go into email marketing.

So I thought, okay, what can I do that can be timeless, that can provide value not just in Canada but maybe internationally? I talked to my colleagues in my master's program, and a few of them agreed to join forces and to share their knowledge and connections through a blog. We thought a blog would be great because it's a place where people can Google it and read it. We tailored the posts to read like a letter — a letter to our younger self. Some of my colleagues during my master's didn't have mentors and wished they had one, so the goal of the blog is to feel like one — the reader feels like, oh, I have a mentor. We don't ask for any money, you can jump on a call with us, you can email us.

Some people still reach out to this day. We haven't really created any new posts in the past couple of years, but sometimes people still reach out. It's pretty rewarding. Originally we had it on Wix, which was an interesting process. It was only one colour, and when you set up a website on Wix, each box auto-defaults to purple. I remember spending so many hours switching the default purple to our brand colour, which took forever. I reached out to Jannis to ask if we could do another plan, and within less than 30 minutes I was able to migrate all the previous blogs and the design — everything — into Magic Pages. Super easy.

Jannis: To be fair, that's Ghost's job. They're doing a really great job at making this start as easy as possible, I think. The one thing I remember from that is that Wix doesn't have any proper export functionality, which was one of the big disadvantages from migrating from Wix to any Ghost site. From WordPress, for example, you have automated migration tools — you just point Ghost at your WordPress site and in the background your Ghost site pulls in all the content. For Wix, that doesn't exist.

So I remember we had long evenings where you copied everything over and you asked, oh, is that correct? In the end I think the site looks a lot better now, just because it's a lot more structured. But hey, I'm glad we ended up where we are now and we can laugh about it. Can you also tell us a little bit about your personal blog? Because that has changed over the years. I remember in the beginning you used it in a similar way to how you used Carrd, where you told people about email marketing and the services you can provide. Then you actually hid it for, I think, years now behind a private flag. And now you are starting to use it again. What's the thinking behind that?

Christine: When I started, the website was tied to when we were building personal brands on Twitter / X. During that time I was heavily focused on talking about email marketing. But my newsletter was almost like a personal journal entry, just talking about career, growing up, being in my 20s, living in Canada. And it was great. But social media has pros and cons, and towards the end — maybe similar to you — it just wasn't the same place anymore. Everyone was trying to sell you something. I didn't really sell on my newsletter. I shared the silliest things, and sometimes a potential client would reach out because of a silly email about my dog and world domination or something.

And I kind of wanted to just end that chapter because it didn't feel the same anymore. The people who were joining were also doing the reverse thing — they were like, hey, let's jump on a call, and then they tried to sell me something. I didn't really like that anymore. So I kind of took a step back. Mentally I wasn't in the right spot, so I decided to become a ghost. I deleted my Twitter account and I just hid myself, because some people were kind of using my credibility — I didn't really want people to associate my credibility with them winning.

So for me, I just took a break. And then recently, it's kind of a funny full-circle moment, because back in 2023 we joked about maybe meeting one day, and you guys had moved to Austria. I was like, oh, I have family in Austria. We kept talking, and then I decided, okay, I want to go visit Europe. You guys showed me around Europe last year and I was like, wow, I really love Europe. And then in September I visited you again and I was like, wow, I think I could really live here.

Jannis: Just to interject there — you did not just visit us. You visited people you had met on the internet, flew all across the Atlantic to meet us, and then [did] a six-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre road trip through Europe with us. That is generally something I would not advise. But I'm glad it turned out the way it did. And yeah, then you came back in September for a second time, which again started as a joke, because we said, oh, Christine, come on, we're busy in October, but you could still come over in September. And then in September you were here. And I remember you saying, yeah, I could live here.

Christine: Yeah, for context: I never really left North America. A couple of years ago I'd never really travelled or made any big plans. So moving here to Austria was definitely a big leap. I'm turning 30 this year, and I wanted to make sure that I kept the promise to my younger self that I would do something adventurous. Thinking about my younger self and writing to my younger self — I was like, I definitely should be documenting this. The way I'm able to actually live in Austria is that in Canada we have a working-holiday visa that allows people roughly under 30 to travel and live in countries for a year. When I started sharing about that online with friends and colleagues, they were like, oh, I never even knew about that, I wish I knew about that.

So it made me realise that I should probably document it. But there was an obstacle to using my Ghost site, because of DNS record issues. I was on a — how do we call it — a provider that was hosting my domain.

Jannis: The domain registrar. Yes. Do you mind if we spill the beans on who it was? In the end it turned out to be Squarespace. But I think you actually registered your domain with Google Domains in the very beginning, right? And then Google didn't want to host domains anymore, for whatever reason, and they sold it to Squarespace — who weren't a domain registrar at all. They were a content management system. And all of a sudden they inherited a ton of domains from Google Domains.

Christine: Yeah. So even getting that news from Squarespace randomly reaching out to me after so many years was confusing — I was like, why is Squarespace emailing me? And then Google [was] updating: we've basically given your domain — or transferred it — to Squarespace. There were some DNS record issues. If I wanted to change anything, it would forward to an inbox that I no longer had — an email inbox, yeah, from my domain. Which doesn't seem like too much of an issue, but when you're trying to change a DNS record in Squarespace, it will ask for an authentication code that they sent to that email inbox.

So no matter what I tried to change — and when I talked to customer support, I talked to them multiple times across a week — no one was really giving me an answer. They were like, oh, we're sorry, you need to talk to my manager. And then the manager would be like, oh, please fill out this ticket. And then the next manager was like, please fill out this ticket. It became a hamster wheel of tickets that went nowhere. And then I was like, okay, you know what, I'm going to go to Jannis. And I just went across the apartment and was like, I need your help.

Jannis: Yes — because you're now our neighbour, so that works as well. You live here for a year now, so we can have some live support sessions. Basically what we did was hack the system a little bit — not literally, but: they wanted you to have an email inbox where they had the DNS records set, but you couldn't change that. I think it was pointing to Gmail still, but you didn't have that Gmail account anymore. So you also couldn't sign up for Gmail another time, because you wouldn't receive the confirmation code they wanted. And you couldn't change it on Squarespace, because Squarespace sends a confirmation code to the actual email that we wanted to change — where we wanted to change the MX records.

In short, what we did was add a second second-factor, after nearly an hour of trying to figure it out. We figured, oh, we can just add a second second-factor — basically just an authenticator app — which then let us change the DNS records. We then moved your domain to Cloudflare, with lots of other hoops to jump through. But finally you were able to connect things again, and then also log in to your Ghost site, because Ghost now also sends a second factor to the email you've registered with. So, long story short, we have rescued you from hell. You can now use Ghost again. And all of that because of a transfer where Google said, we don't want to host domains anymore. But now you have your Ghost site back. What are you going to do with that?

Christine: Yeah, so now — well, right now it's just kind of a funny post, but it's going to be more about documenting the year. Sharing more — definitely. I've had friends ask, what's the difference between living in Canada and living in Austria?

Jannis: What is the biggest difference? I remember the first time we went to a grocery store and you were very surprised about one particular thing.

Christine: Yeah, so in Canada — or maybe I'm unaware — most toilet paper you buy is single-ply or double-ply. I usually buy double-ply, and triple-ply is like the premium stuff. And then I learned here that triple-ply is not enough — three-times-four-to-five-ply is the good stuff. I picked up a triple-ply recycled one and thought, this seems decent. And then I learned it's actually for…

Jannis: …this is the kind of toilet paper that your employer buys when they don't like you.

Christine: Yeah, so that was very fascinating. It's amazing how different things are. And also, because of my fitness background, I'm just very intrigued with ingredients. The EU is very strict with ingredients — there are fewer processed or random things, like food colouring being a separate ingredient here.

Jannis: Yeah. I mean, on the other hand, we have lots of what we call E numbers — where the colour red as an ingredient turns into an E number. But yeah, I also remember us cooking one day and you looking at the pasta and being very confused how the only two ingredients were water and flour. You also said in the beginning, you're in email marketing. I think at some point you used the term email deliverability manager. Is that still correct?

So you basically make sure that businesses end up in the actual inbox, right? What does that usually look like? What's the most common thing that people mess up?

Christine: So I think there are two routes to this. There are certain things that I can help with, and then there are certain things — like the platform, for example Magic Pages — that I would communicate with my client about, or with the platform. There are kind of two streams. If you're a solopreneur or creator, you don't need to go as far as these eight-figure businesses that I'm working with. But for both, there are things to take into account when it comes to getting out of spam and making sure that the inbox is right. So maybe we can focus more on the creator side, with Magic Pages.

Jannis: That would be helpful. What is the most common issue that you see smaller senders basically do? Let's say they set up a new email sending domain — what is the most common issue you see with that?

Christine: Actually, this reminds me of when I had to put in my new DNS records into Magic Pages: making sure that the right DNS records are properly authenticated. I know we're kind of getting technical here, but there are things you need to put in to make sure that your emails are properly sending. Otherwise service providers like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft will automatically put your emails in spam, or it won't even send because your records aren't in.

Jannis: I think we can actually be technical, because most people are running their own website — and worst case I will also link one of our blog posts in the show notes. (There's still a sentence I need to get used to: the links are in the show notes, where we explain it a little bit more.) Essentially — and you correct me if I'm wrong — we have three technical areas to look at. The first one is SPF, which basically says: these are the sources that are allowed to send for me. Then we have DKIM, which is more like a signing algorithm that says: yes, this email actually comes from the right source. Is that correct?

And then we have DMARC, which is basically saying: if something is fishy about this, then deal with it in this certain way. Is that correct?

Christine: Yeah, I think that was way better than what I would say. Those are the three things that we definitely look for. And the common error that happens is that people will have multiple SPF records — especially if they're adding in a new platform, like maybe they were sending from one platform and now they're sending from Magic Pages. So there are multiple SPF records for their domain. For example, my domain — christinetrac.net — I'm only allowed one SPF record, so it should only be one row.

But often when people are sending from a new platform, the new platform will be like, oh, add an SPF record — and you add another one, and then all of a sudden, potentially, all of your emails are going to spam. And that's when clients come to me. What I like about Magic Pages is that when I was setting up my DNS records, it actually alerts you as to where your DNS records are — like GoDaddy, Squarespace, all that. And it also tells you if you need to update your current SPF record or if you need to add a new one, which saves a lot of time. Otherwise clients come to me and they're like, wow, everything's failing, I don't know where to start.

That's the number-one error — and I've worked with eight-figure businesses for whom that was the reason they were having spam problems.

Jannis: Interesting. So, the background of why I've built it this way: as I said before, DNS records are literally the number-one reason for support requests we've had. There are two sides to that — two places where, on Magic Pages, you can or you will have to deal with DNS records. The first is your custom domain itself, so that your blog is reachable at — in your case — christinetrac.net. The second is the sending part, where you send email newsletters. Technically you can send through our sending domain, which is mymagic.page. It will work, it is monitored, we are sending a couple of hundred thousand emails through that domain every single month — but it has the disadvantage that your emails will be branded with that sending domain, and some people don't want that.

So this is where they set up a custom sending domain. And this is the second part where you have to deal with DNS records: you need to add SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and some other stuff that we show you. I realised that there were a lot of support requests coming in specifically for the DNS setup, and it was always the same. I couldn't blame people, because honestly, for you and me — we touch DNS records all the time. We know what they do, what an MX record is, what a CNAME does.

But for most people who just want to have their own personal corner on the internet, they might touch DNS records once. Maybe they touch them once every two to three years, when they move platforms. For them, DNS records are this really black hole, where you tell them, well, go to your domain registrar — that's already the first term they have never heard about. Set your DNS records — the second one — to a CNAME — the third one — with the host of this and the value of that. From a service provider's perspective, that's completely right to explain it that way.

But from a customer's perspective, they just tell you: what the hell? What am I supposed to do with that? And then earlier this year we built a widget of sorts that essentially looks up which domain registrar a domain is on. That can be Squarespace. That can be — in your case now — Cloudflare. It can be GoDaddy, Namecheap, whatever it is. We have, I think, 60 to 70 different domain registrars in there, where we just looked at the data: what are people actually using on Magic Pages? Then we created step-by-step guides for those registrars specifically. Because honestly, we didn't know most of them. 60 to 70 domain registrars — that's just so many that you don't know all of them.

I can tell you how to set DNS records on Cloudflare. I can tell you how to do that on GoDaddy, Namecheap, maybe Squarespace now that I looked at it with you. But I had no idea how to do that on a small niche provider like NameSilo, for example — never heard of that before I looked into it. And there are people who host their domain on it. So what we did was point an LLM at this list and say: please look at the documentation those domain providers have out there, and figure out what the steps are. We still manually went through it and double-checked. We also signed up for accounts with some of them to confirm whether the steps were actually correct.

Now we have a widget that is a little bit of magic, I think. You say, I want to connect this domain — or this custom sending domain. It automatically knows from our configuration which DNS records we need. It then looks up which domain registrar you're on. And then it tells you not just the list of records that you need to put in, but it tells you the exact terms — what the columns are that you need to put what part in, and how you get to those columns. All you need to do is click one button and wait for it to verify. All of that basically came out of the need that it was one of the biggest support requests we had. I wanted to take some of that support burden off us — that's the honest answer from our side.

It was a lot of support requests, and we cut them down by a lot. Just to give perspective: in December, before I hired Sviatoslav, who now does support, I think we got 20 to 30 support requests per day. I was doing all of those alone. Then Sviatoslav started in February, and in mid-February we added the widget. And now we have days where we don't get a single request — which is scary. It is so scary that at some point I sent test requests to our email and to our chatbot to double-check whether that actually works. That was the impact of making DNS records — and sending domains — understandable for people.

Christine: That is honestly a game changer. I wish more software did that.

Jannis: I think one of the next steps that I want to do is to actually open-source that solution. There is a very gated solution that can do that for you that costs 250 US dollars per month starting price — but the underlying technology is openly available. Anybody with a little bit of programming knowledge can look up where a domain is hosted. We've now tested it for, I think, four months, and one of the next things during the summer is to just open-source that solution and give it to other software companies and service providers out there. It has saved us, personally at Magic Pages, a lot of time answering messages.

But on the flip side, what I'd rather look at is that our customers were just unable to do that themselves. Having spoken to some of them, that is a very empowering feeling — if you don't previously know how to do that. But we came at it from a completely different angle.

Jannis: I just stole your show.

Christine: No, no, that was great. I think that's very insightful. Like, I remember doing it for the first time and being very proud — I was like, wow. So I'm looking forward to hearing more about those updates.

Jannis: Yeah, I think you did that yourself one evening. And then the next day you came over to our apartment because, you know, we just have drinks, tea, whatever, together. And you basically said, oh yeah, I just connected my custom sending domain. That was the moment where I also felt like, yeah, I'm honestly glad that this worked so smoothly. Christine said before: you should only have one SPF record. And then she plugged into our tool. And our tool does exactly that, because it also knows those rules. It knows you should only have one SPF record, so it checks specifically whether you already have one. If you do, it shows you the adapted version of it — because you can add multiple sources to one SPF record, but you cannot have multiple SPF records.

That is the entire magic. Apart from having only a single SPF record, is there anything else you would want a newsletter sender — sending maybe a couple of hundred emails per month, maybe a couple of thousand to their subscribers — to keep in mind? Anything where you say, that is maybe overrated advice in the email deliverability space, or that is underrated and you wish more people knew about it?

Christine: I really liked that question, because back when I was on Twitter, I remember sending all these tips — but I think it may have done more harm than good, because people got overwhelmed to the point where they couldn't really be creative. They were like, oh, I'm worried I'm going to have too many links or too many images. At the end of the day, what's even worse is if you don't send that email at all — if you only send one email every six years or something, it's going to be hard to really improve your deliverability long-term. You'll probably see online that people will say, oh, limit your links and images. For creators specifically, I would say: be more consistent.

If you notice your open rates do drop below 20% — especially as Magic Pages users — reach out to Jannis and see, okay, what's happening? Could it be a Microsoft issue, a Yahoo issue? What I like about Magic Pages is that you guys have dedicated IP addresses.

Jannis: Yes, we use a pool of IPs that we expand when we see the need for it. And we also balance bigger customers with smaller customers, so that the IPs themselves are balanced by what they send. Some of the people on that IP might send tens of thousands of emails every month, and others might just send a couple of dozen. And what I've seen is that this balances pretty well by the end of the month — if you look at the deliverability rate.

Christine: Okay, yeah, that's perfect. Because I remember Ghost, at one point, could only show opens and clicks — and things like bounce rates

Jannis: I don't think you can see on Ghost yet. You cannot — but if anybody ever wants to know their bounce rate, I can get that out of Mailgun. Mailgun is the email backend that Ghost uses, which is completely managed for you, so you don't need to know about it. But if you want to know what your bounce rate is, or the reasons for bounces, then just reach out and I'll be happy to share that.

Christine: Perfect. Yeah, that's really good. So I would say, the biggest thing is: as long as your open rates are consistent and you don't see a huge drop, then there are no huge issues. Usually a huge drop can indicate a delivery error or possibly emails going to spam — and that's when I would say, talk to Magic Pages or whoever your provider is to look into it further. But for most creators starting out: as long as you have the DNS records in place, my biggest piece of feedback is, don't let these tactics of 'oh, use these certain words to get out of promo times' be your main concern. It really isn't going to be a huge thing — unless it's a big company that really heavily relies on it.

For creators: if people are a fan of you, they will look for your emails. They'll go looking for them in the inbox and they'll reply to them. I wouldn't worry too much about the nitty-gritty.

Jannis: I actually really love that — just have consistency, and just regularly send emails, rather than focusing on how many links, how many images. And also, just from a creator's perspective, I think it also matters because you take away one of the barriers — where you think, okay, how can I further optimise that, rather than just sending what you want to send? Just taking that step and sharing your thoughts, sharing your thinking, rather than getting stuck in all the technical details — because over time I think they will iron themselves out. Yeah, love that. Thank you, Christine. Last question: is there anything that I did not ask you that I should have asked?

Christine: I think we covered everything in terms of how we met, and seeing Magic Pages get to where it is now. I just want to share more about my experience with Magic Pages. I've used all the different providers — Ghost and different platforms. And what I can say is that — well, I have some insider insight — I like how Magic Pages is becoming more of a community. You don't feel like it's just another software where you're talking to a developer or an IT person in support, where they make you feel like they're belittling you because you don't know how to do DNS records. It's really important to have someone who can assist you without making you feel like you don't know anything — like you're back in school, scared to ask questions because you have a teacher who won't let you ask questions.

But I'm really glad to be on the sidelines and to see where Magic Pages is growing. The reason why I usually recommend it — especially Magic Pages and Ghost — is that a lot of my friends and colleagues, especially in fitness, ask me, where should I build a website? And they're like, oh, don't I need to send emails too? Those are the two common things that coaches and creators need: their own website, because people ask, well, couldn't I use Substack or something else? And I would say, yeah, but they could kick you out for any reason. You don't own it — something could happen to it.

So progressing to something more technical, it was nice to be able to recommend Magic Pages, because it takes five minutes to set up. You don't need all these SSL certificates and all that stuff. You have a website and the ability to send emails to subscribers, all in one — and you can protect your data and privacy, and know that it's not going to be sold somewhere. Well, that's my assumption — like, [with] Magic Pages. And I think that's really important as time goes on. With all this technology, I think it's really important to find a platform that you can trust long-term. I've had to move my site so many times, and I don't think I'll be moving away from Magic Pages, hopefully.

The other thing is being able to message and say, hey, if I needed something tweaked or something — it's just so easy to do. So that is the one thing I wanted to highlight, especially for coaches and creators: use Magic Pages.

Jannis: Well, thank you very much. Honestly, I don't know what to say. Thank you for also trusting us with your website, for always having our backs, for sharing about Magic Pages and talking about Magic Pages to people. Thank you for coming over from your apartment to our home office / podcast studio for taking the time.

Christine: A long commute.

Jannis: It definitely was, yes. For being the first external guest, for being the first in-person guest — because even last week, with Sviatoslav not being in Austria, we had to do a remote recording. So this is the first in-person recording, which is also new. We'll see how it's going to sound. So thank you for taking the time. If people want to find you online — where is the best place to look?

Christine: Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm super honoured. And I would say: check out christinetrac.net.

Jannis: Perfect. Last time, in episode one, I learned that you end the podcast episode by saying thank you. So: thank you to you, Christine. Thank you to everybody listening. And have a lovely rest of your day. Goodbye.

Christine: Bye!