Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects | Hacker News Reader

Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

upstart.me

204 pointspixelfeeder56 comments

This is not a Show HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

"Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with"

"Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can't be tried out, so they can't be Show HNs."

Yeah, in this case I think we have to agree with you. An email list isn't really "something you've made that other people can play with".

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.

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

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.

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?

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!

Yes, I agree with that; MVPs and fast iteration!

It is a good way to get newsletter owners to fill out their information

How do you plan to differentiate yourself against competitors like Paved? They already have a searchable database of newsletetters with open rates, CTR, etc.

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?

Not the OP, but how I'd do it: for a v1 there could be some manual outreach and take their word for it, v2 hook into the APIs any ESP provides (probably 2/3 of the big players for this should have outbound reporting APIs), and then the v3 would be a custom pixel that newsletter owners would integrate to be "featured" on the platform.

v4 could then offer manually created ad units, and v5 could be self serve.

Scale is a nice problem to have but I think it is premature to be asking about that now when the business is just trying to get off the ground.

The project was previously featured under the name Mailman on HN [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14107063

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 verifiable or internal metrics from running Upstart after several months (that cannot be easily be gamed).

Hopefully @pixelfeeder will respond.

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.

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 first.

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?

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.

> 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.

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

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 newsletters I'm getting notified about are relevant.

Good luck!

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.

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.

Great! Looking forward to the first batch.

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.

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

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.

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 :-)

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

Hey @pixelffeder,

I'm working on a similar product. It would be great to meet you and talk about more. Can you pls reach me at: sercan [thesign] sercanyilmaz.com ?

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.

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.

My company makes a product for developers (https://buttercms.com) and we've had mixed results with newsletter sponsorships. There doesn't seem to be a predictable correlation between the newsletter size and the amount of clickthroughs or signups we get from them. Will your database help with this?

the name is the same/similar to an existing loan company.

Actually I was thinking upstart in Linux.

I was thinking the same thing. "Is this startup part up upstart.com?" I'd make sure you project is not causing confusing in the market place.

Smart idea and I think the opportunity of centralizing newsletters and categorizing each would increase make upstart super valuable. I signed up and look forward to next wednesday.

How will you know who my product is geared towards? I signed up for fun but I know the suggestions will be terrible for my niche product.

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.

I typically call `.+@.+\..+` good enough.

Neat acquisition channel possibility.

www.advertiise.com - let's monetize these newsletters asap.

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