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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

#41

Post by lprubin »

sah2ed wrote: post #28
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?

I would think that Upstart will evolve into a marketplace type of business where the onus is on the business (buyer) to do their due diligence before shelling out money to a newsletter (seller) in the hope of increasing their reach. Of course if the feature of showing metrics (subscribers, open rates etc) proves to be popular enough they might consider ways to rank newsletters using metrics that are publicly verifiab…

I'd be curious to know how one could do "due diligence" on the size and activity of a private email list. Does that mean contacting people who have advertised in that newsletter before and hoping they share with you their results?

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

#42

Post by petercooper »

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…

Ruby and Node.js. How likely is it that I'll be able to find newsletters that cater to my niche through your service?

We have http://rubyweekly.com/ and http://nodeweekly.com/ if that helps specifically ;-) There is also http://greenruby.org/ and https://nodejs.libhunt.com/newsletter.

To be fair, just Googling "[topic] newsletter" tends to give the best results in my experience.

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

#43

Post by jchin »

I used to be in this space.

My company was LaunchBit https://www.launchbit.com/, which was acquired by BuySellAds. We helped people buy/sell advertising space in newsletters. After a while, newsletters were getting hard to find so we also created a newsletter directory. http://www.newsletterdirectory.co/

It's been several years now and I haven't kept up with how they are both being maintained. Anyway, you may find it helpful.

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

#44

Post by petercooper »

ryanx435 wrote: post #14

This is a great idea! The hardest part of advertising some of my smaller projects has been figuring out where to advertise! Also, there are times where I would love to get news specifically about various niche topics, but I can't find a good place to do so. I would love this to also function as a sort of yellow pages for finding interesting newsletters

various niche topics

What sort of niche topics? I'm intrigued how specific you mean because I'm in this space :-)

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

#45

Post by pixelfeeder »

jchin wrote: post #43

I used to be in this space. My company was LaunchBit https://www.launchbit.com/ , which was acquired by BuySellAds. We helped people buy/sell advertising space in newsletters. After a while, newsletters were getting hard to find so we also created a newsletter directory. http://www.newsletterdirectory.co/ It's been several years now and I haven't kept up with how they are both being maintained. Anyway, you may find i…

tnx for sharing! Upstart.me will be more accessible budget-wise than launchbit. Will have a good look at that directory.

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

#46

Post by sah2ed »

lprubin wrote: post #41
sah2ed wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that Upstart will evolve into a marketplace type of business where the onus is on the business (buyer) to do their due diligence before shelling out money to a newsletter (seller) in the hope of increasing their reach. Of course if the feature of showing metrics (subscribers, open rates etc) proves to be popular enough they might consider ways to rank newsletters using metrics that are publicly verifiab…

I'd be curious to know how one could do "due diligence" on the size and activity of a private email list. Does that mean contacting people who have advertised in that newsletter before and hoping they share with you their results?

Yes, emailing third parties for social proof is one way to go about it.

Then there's contacting the newsletter directly for proof of their actual numbers by making available current and previous month's screen shots of MailChimp campaign reports, for instance.

And as pixelfeeder mentioned, they'll also gather their own internal analytics based on how money changes hands on Upstart.

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

#47

Post by wolfgang42 »

jchin wrote: post #43

I used to be in this space. My company was LaunchBit https://www.launchbit.com/ , which was acquired by BuySellAds. We helped people buy/sell advertising space in newsletters. After a while, newsletters were getting hard to find so we also created a newsletter directory. http://www.newsletterdirectory.co/ It's been several years now and I haven't kept up with how they are both being maintained. Anyway, you may find i…

> It's been several years now and I haven't kept up with how they are both being maintained.

Not very well, it seems. The directory seems to be broken, and I can't actually view any of the newsletter profiles.

Some poking around leads me to believe that nothing on the server has been touched since the company was acquired in 2014. The server is running Ubuntu 14.04 (end of life April 2015), the About LaunchBit page still lists you as CTO, and the last press release is a TechCrunch article about the acquisition.

These sorts of 'ghost' sites always make me wonder--who is hosting this server? Has it just been lost in the depths of a datacenter and the fine details of a budget? Will anything I build linger on like this, barely surviving, somehow, long after I've moved on? I'm sure if I actually found the answers to these vaguely existential questions they'd turn out to be a lot more mundane than I expect.

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

#48

Post by erikig »

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.

I'm also not likely to submit my email unless the form requests some info on the categories of audience I'd be targeting - e.g music, gaming, startups etc.

I'd rather receive one or two newsletters every couple of months that match my audience interests rather than 3 ever week that don't.

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

#49

Post by jstandard »

EternalData wrote: post #26

Great idea! Email newsletter have such great ROI, it's just a pain to find out who owns them and getting into contact with people who are looking for sponsors.

I've considered marketing to email newsletters. What is your source for "email newsletters having a great ROI"?

It's been hard to come across meaningful data here.

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

#50

Post by bluetwo »

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.

I think it's a nice idea. No doubt people need help with marketing here.

I'm a little fuzzy on the mechanics. If you focus on a couple quality offerings every week, won't those particular newsletters get inundated with requests?

Also, how do you plan on generating revenue?

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