Why I left Substack and the Email Renaissance

Ghost.org has membership features and email integration.

Could use the substation theme: https://substation.rdnthemes.com

You should charge through another platform! There's nothing exclusive about the relationship that we want to have with writers. As long as you're producing any content that is a) freely available and b) worth reading we want it surfaced to our community of readers and we want to compensate you on a per-read basis for it.

The writer compensation is both a value prop for our users (it's the #1 reason that users say they would want to pay for a Readup subscription) and a growth mechanism for us since some writers will have an incentive to tell their readers to read them on Readup. We think that initially writers who have a non-existent or small subscription base would be most inclined to want to promote Readup to their readers but that should scale up as we grow.

Note: do not attempt to use something a low-level as SES to send newsletters unless you understand all the plumbing that has to be built around it (unsubscribe/opt-out, bounce handling, click tracking, IP pools, DKIM/SPF, etc). This especially applies if your list is low-quality or old.

Thanks for the reply and glad the feedback is of some value.

Re extension: I'm not clear on why an extension is needed for reading on readup.com (as opposed to on publishers' sites). Seems to me you can do all the tracking just fine with regular sandboxed JavaScript running on the web page? To be clear, when I'm not logged in or on an unsupported browser, I'm presented with two options: "Read it on Readup" (with a "Get Started" button) and "Continue to publisher's site", the former apparently being the recommended path; when I'm logged in there's only the "To read on Readup, add the Chrome extension" modal, but if I understood what you track correctly, reading on Readup shouldn't require any extra capabilities, whereas reading on publisher's site should. So in theory a user should be able to read everything on readup.com without using an extension, just like they would on instapaper.com or feedly.com (but with some added tracking). Is that not the case simply because you haven't had the time to develop native tracking, or did I miss some fundamental limitations?

Re timer: 500-600 wpm is pretty fast on average but I can certainly beat that when reading information-sparse content (e.g. most digital magazines) or when I consciously try to read fast, and I know people who read way faster than me... Also note that some people can maintain a high comprehension level even at high speed while others struggle to comprehend even when reading word by word. I guess your compromise may be okay, but it's certainly rather crude (not that I have a better idea).

Btw, Safari 14 is adding WebExtension API support.[1] (You're probably already aware of this but doesn't hurt to share.)

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf... (documentation is crap though, at a glance)

> That doesn't feel great. Telling creators that people are paying you for their work but they have to create an account to get paid feels shady.

I get that, but isn't it better than paying for a utility like Pocket or Instapaper that strips ads from writers' articles and doesn't offer them any compensation? Those companies aren't asking writers to opt-in to that. We're trying to do the right thing in a financially sustainable way.

Also just to be clear, writers won't be required to sign up for a paid Readup subscription in order to collect their revenue share. If they don't want to use the platform they can just verify with us via email.

> Do you make it clear when something I read is from a creator who has signed up and therefore will be paid?

Yes! There will absolutely be some sort of "blue checkmark" verification indicator. (To be clear we have not yet started charging users. We're still in the building stage!)

> If one of your users were to read something I published, would they see it exactly as they would if they visited directly? Same ads, same layout? Will the reader look any different to me as far as my analytics go?

On the browser: Initially yes, before activating the extension which will strip ads and enter the "reader mode" layout.

On mobile: No, javascript and stylesheets are not executed while rendering the article.

For your analytics: It depends. If you're looking at server logs then everything will look the same. If you're relying on client-side javascript for analytics then you don't see it at all for our mobile users and the results might be different for browser users depending on how your scripts are interacting with the page.

> Also, how do you manage abiding by all the crazy terms and conditions on different sites? For example, on your homepage is a link to an Atlantic article and their terms and conditions prohibit the use of their RSS feed for commercial reasons or selling access to their site. Do you have a deal with the Atlantic? Have they signed up with you?

We don't crawl any publisher websites or use their RSS feeds. All article curation on our site is crowdsourced from our users - 100% organic human spidering. We just track their reading progress and use that data to rank the articles so that everyone can find the best content. We'd love to eventually partner with publishers but especially larger ones probably won't want to talk to us until we have millions of paying users and can offer them a significant revenue share.