Welcome to Distill
The Distill Team
Every professional services firm knows they should be sending a newsletter. Ask any realtor, financial advisor, or management consultant and they'll tell you the same thing: staying top-of-mind with clients is one of the most reliable ways to keep a pipeline warm, earn referrals, and build the kind of trust that turns a one-time engagement into a decades-long relationship.
Most of them still aren't doing it. Not because they don't believe in it — they do. The problem is everything that happens between "I should send a newsletter" and "the newsletter is sent."
The Problem
Newsletters sound simple. In practice, they aren't.
You need to find good content to share — articles, market updates, regulatory changes, trends your clients actually care about. Then you need to read that content well enough to explain it. Then you need to write something coherent and useful, format it, review it, and send it to the right list at the right time. Do that every week or every month, indefinitely, while also running your business.
Most professionals try once or twice, then quietly stop. The ROI is real but the effort-to-output ratio is brutal, especially if you're producing content from scratch every time.
The tools don't help either. Email platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact are built for marketing teams with designers and copywriters on staff. They're not built for a solo financial advisor who wants to send a curated roundup to 200 clients every Monday morning.
We've watched this pattern repeat across industries. The problem isn't motivation — it's leverage. Professionals need a way to produce high-quality newsletters without spending hours doing it.
Our Approach
Distill takes a different angle: instead of making the writing easier, we make the research and summarization automatic.
The core insight is that most professional newsletters aren't original reporting. They're curation. A realtor shares market stats and mortgage rate commentary. A financial advisor links to Fed announcements and economic forecasts. A consultant rounds up the latest thinking in their industry. The value they add is the selection — knowing what matters to their specific clients — not the raw production of content.
So we built a tool around that workflow. You collect links to things worth sharing. Distill reads them, extracts the key points, and writes a usable summary. You review, edit as needed, and send. The hard part — turning a 3,000-word article into two paragraphs your clients will actually read — is handled for you.
We made two deliberate choices in how we built this:
- Keep the human in the loop. AI drafts summaries, but you review and edit everything before it goes out. Your clients are getting your voice and your judgment, not a generic bot.
- Build for professional services specifically. That means multi-workspace support for agencies and advisors managing multiple brands, clean email templates that look professional without requiring design skills, and sending infrastructure that handles compliance and deliverability out of the box.
How Distill Works
The workflow is straightforward once you're set up.
Workspaces are where you manage your sending brand — the domain your emails come from, your subscriber list, and your newsletter templates. If you're an advisor at a firm, your workspace is your practice. If you run an agency, each client gets their own workspace.
Issues are individual editions of a newsletter. You start a new issue, add links to anything worth covering that week or month, and let Distill process them. The AI pulls out the core message from each link and drafts a summary. You get a structured draft: a headline for each item, a two-to-three sentence summary, and a link back to the source.
From there, you review the draft in a clean editor. You can rewrite individual summaries, reorder sections, add your own commentary, or remove anything that doesn't fit. When it looks right, you pick your subscriber list, set a send time, and you're done.
Subscriber lists live inside each workspace. You can import existing contacts, add them manually, or use a signup form on your website. Distill handles unsubscribes, bounce tracking, and the compliance scaffolding that makes sure you're following CAN-SPAM and GDPR requirements.
Under the hood, we use AWS SES for email delivery — the same infrastructure that handles billions of emails a day for some of the world's largest companies. Your sending domain gets proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records configured automatically so your emails don't end up in spam folders.
What's Next
We launched with the core workflow intentionally lean. Right now Distill does one thing well: takes a pile of links, turns them into a readable newsletter, and sends it to your clients.
Over the next few months, we're building out:
- Template customization — more control over layout, colors, and typography so your newsletter matches your brand
- Analytics — open rates, click rates, and subscriber trends so you can see what's resonating
- Scheduling — set a recurring send day and Distill will remind you when it's time to add links for the next issue
- Integrations — connect your existing tools (CRMs, RSS feeds, social bookmarking apps) so links flow in automatically
If you're a professional services firm that's been meaning to get a newsletter going for the last two years, Distill is built for you. Sign up for free and send your first issue this week. The research is already done — you just have to add the links.