Building a Beehiiv Newsletter Search Bot: From Idea to Implementation

This idea started when I was once again aimlessly browsing YouTube. I thought to myself, my own curation exceeds the algorithm. Why am I not leveraging that?

Then I recalled ippsec's site where you can search titles and descriptions of his videos. That's awesome, but not quite what I want. A few moments later it came to me: A Discord bot for the Hive Five!

Table of Contents

• The Vision

• Technical Journey

• Challenges and Solutions

• Current Implementation

• Technical Stack

• Lessons Learned

• The Power of Curation

• 🔥 Learned something?

The Vision

What I wanted was simple yet powerful: give my community instant access to years of curated security and tech content. Instead of scrolling through newsletters or relying on memory, they could simply type a query and get relevant results immediately.

Technical Journey

The execution was mainly me and Claude going back and forth. Partially because I'm still on the road with the entire family, but also because AI is a great augmenter. Here's how we broke it down:

1. Data Structure: Each newsletter is a rich collection of curated links, organized by sections like Tools, Resources, Career advice, and more.

2. Storage Solution: MongoDB Atlas emerged as the perfect fit:

   • Native support for full-text search

   • Flexible schema for newsletter content

   • Easy to scale as the archive grows

   • Cloud-hosted, so no infrastructure headaches

3. Discord Integration:

   • Built with discord.js

   • Implemented slash commands for intuitive interaction

   • Added pagination for browsing through results

   • Made results public to encourage community discussion

4. Deployment:

   • Hosted on a Digital Ocean droplet

   • Using PM2 for process management

   • Continuous operation with automatic restarts

Challenges and Solutions

1. Message Length: Discord's 2000-character limit forced me to implement pagination. We turned this limitation into a feature by adding interactive navigation buttons.

2. Link Previews: Discord's automatic link previews were cluttering the output. We solved this by wrapping URLs in angle brackets.

3. Search Relevance: MongoDB's text search capabilities helped surface the most relevant results first.

4. User Experience: Made the bot's responses public to foster community engagement while restricting navigation controls to the command initiator.

Current Implementation

It's now up and running for all premium Hive Five members in the Discord. A quick /search query will give you direct access to years of curated content. The bot supports:

• Full-text search across all newsletters (and other content)

• Latest entries view (WIP)

• Interactive navigation

• Direct links to sources

• Clean, formatted output

Technical Stack

• Beehiiv for the newsletter

• Node.js for the runtime

• MongoDB Atlas for storage

• Discord.js for bot functionality

• PM2 for process management

• Digital Ocean for hosting

Lessons Learned

1. AI as an Accelerator: Using Claude as a programming partner significantly sped up development while maintaining code quality.

2. Community First: Making search results public rather than private enhanced the community aspect of the bot.

3. Simple > Complex: Starting with basic functionality and iterating based on user feedback proved more effective than trying to build everything at once.

The Power of Curation

The bot is more than just a search tool - it's a gateway to discovering and rediscovering valuable content that might otherwise be lost in the newsletter archives.

If you're a premium Hive Five member, hop into Discord and try it out! Just type /search followed by your query, and explore the wealth of security and tech knowledge I've accumulated over the years.

Remember, the best tools often come from scratching your own itch. What started as a simple idea while browsing YouTube has turned into a valuable resource for our entire community.

What tools have you built to solve your own problems? I'd love to hear about them!

🔥 Learned something?