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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

#11

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.

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

#12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you validate active subscriber numbers so new buyers can ascertain the value of a particular newsletter?

Getting data (Open rate, CTR etc.) from a recent email campaign, should already give a good indication of the level of engagement each newsletter has.

How are you going to get and verify that data on an ongoing basis at scale?

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

#13
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promoting newsletter sponsorships as a vehicle for side project growth is a great idea. I think using an email newsletter itself is not the right format but looking forward to a searchable database.

The searchable database is the real product, but to protect myself from procrastinating on this I forced myself to launch quickly. Hence the v0.5 solution.

So awesome. I was about to say the same about the searchable database, but I love this launch quickly / minimal viable approach. (I think I remember your previous iteration.) Still eager to follow this one!

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

#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

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

#15

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

did not think of the 'yellow pages for newsletter' approach, but that sounds pretty neat!

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

#17

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 like an obvious sales pitch.

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

#19

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.

Newsletters about compliance type stuff might be a good fit too. PCI, Sarbanes Oxley, etc.

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

#20
post #16

Cool idea. You have no input validation on your email capture forms. I was able to submit an empty value for email.

Input validation for email addresses is usually an anti-feature. foo+yoursite@gmail.com is a perfectly valid email but almost all email validation will reject it.

Maybe don't accept an empty email address though.

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