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Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

upstart.me

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Re: Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

#31

Post by danenania »

garysieling wrote: post #24
danenania wrote: post #10

Good idea... I signed up and I'm looking forward to seeing how it works. I'm working on a tool for developers (secrets management -- https://www.envkey.com ), that is currently available for two languages, Ruby and Node.js. How likely is it that I'll be able to find newsletters that cater to my niche through your service? On that note, it would be nice if I could specify some parameters when I sign up to be sure the…

For what this is worth, I've been getting email subscribers through HN and other programming forums for https://www.findlectures.com . At least anecdotally there seem to be a lot of programmers joining, despite not being necessarily being a programmer focused list.

Thanks! I'll check it out.

Re: Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

#32

Post by danenania »

tyingq wrote: post #17
danenania wrote: post #10

Good idea... I signed up and I'm looking forward to seeing how it works. I'm working on a tool for developers (secrets management -- https://www.envkey.com ), that is currently available for two languages, Ruby and Node.js. How likely is it that I'll be able to find newsletters that cater to my niche through your service? On that note, it would be nice if I could specify some parameters when I sign up to be sure the…

Not newsletters, and more labor intensive, but finding discussions/forums/etc talking about secret management and tastefully commenting on them might be fruitful. Smartystreets.com does a relatively good job with this. They find discussions, and try to give good advice that doesn't depend on their product, with a VERY light pointer to their site. It's somewhat tricky to add value to the discussion without sounding li…

Yeah, it's a delicate balance but I agree it can work really well when done right.

Re: Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

#33

Post by danenania »

pixelfeeder wrote: post #11
danenania wrote: post #10

Good idea... I signed up and I'm looking forward to seeing how it works. I'm working on a tool for developers (secrets management -- https://www.envkey.com ), that is currently available for two languages, Ruby and Node.js. How likely is it that I'll be able to find newsletters that cater to my niche through your service? On that note, it would be nice if I could specify some parameters when I sign up to be sure the…

Looks great. There are actually a bunch of developer focussed newsletters in our database. So yes. Great idea on the parameters. Noted and will find a way to have it in the product.

Great! Looking forward to the first batch.

Re: Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

#34

Post by pixelfeeder »

folli wrote: post #29

Cool idea! Would it perhaps make sense to somehow use categories related to the product/newsletter? This would narrow down the possibly huge space of newsletters.

makes total sense and you'll totally see that being available very soonish.

Re: Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

#38

Post by pixelfeeder »

theprop wrote: post #36

I wish you'd just write out (at least some of) the newsletters, reach/audience, and pricing. I'm hesitant to give you my email address without knowing any of that.

at the moment it's all free. I'll be sharing more details on the newsletters in the coming week(s) as I organise all the data in a meaningful way

Re: Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

#39

Post by estreeper »

pixelfeeder wrote: post #3

Maker here. Side note: Took all the feedback from HN on my previous demo. Still working hard on a searchable database with a ton of curated newsletters. My goal is to make it easier for fellow creators to share their startup & side projects with thousands of potential customers. And to have newsletter owners monetise their emails. Creating a win-win situation for both sides.

> Still working hard on a searchable database

This would be very valuable for us, because as far as I know there is essentially no systematic way to locate these. We have a product which is meant to be of use to many niche audiences, making them difficult to find. We are very early stage, and are just now getting some initial partners to work with and looking for ways to market the service to initial customers (in the thousands).

I would most prefer a marketplace where I would know up front how much it would cost to sponsor a newsletter. Without that, my concern would be friction in dealing with lots of small organizations directly, though we would still be willing to do this at our stage. If payments are happening through the site perhaps you would just take a cut, but alternately if this worked reasonably well and had a fair amount of newsletters for us to find, I would probably pay $10-15/month to use it.

Re: Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

#40

Post by lprubin »

pixelfeeder wrote: post #30
lprubin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still interested in knowing how they're going to do it even at the beginning. Are they going to request access to people's newsletter software for verification or are they just going to take people's word for it?

Right now, it'll be a lot of manual effort, but you can imagine the data we'll be collecting along the way and eventually being able to rank newsletters and data based on a number of stuff. Including the experience of ad-buyers. With a variety of datapoints + an algorithm to make sense of it, we could eventually (hopefully) rank newsletters based on effectiveness. But I'm no were near that point, so first things firs…

Thanks for the response. What does "manual effort" mean? Are you going to get access to their email software to verify? Or maybe they'll send you screenshots?
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