Show HN: Upstart.me – Find newsletters to promote your startup or side projects | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Upstart.me – Find newsletters to promote your startup or side projects

upstart.me

168 pointspixelfeeder29 comments

Last time, I posted the pre-launch (V 0.5) of this service, which basically was a weekly newsletter that featured 3 newsletters that you could sponsor. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14445239)

The feedback was fantastic, and today I'm finally launching the searchable database.

Browse through a growing feed of newsletters and support influencers by advertising in their newsletters. Get your product in front of their thousands of targeted and engaged subscribers.

Play around with it and let me know what you think.

Do you have a way to update the number of subscribers on our lists?

Msg me

Posting this multiple times to try and get more upvotes is pretty spammy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14595667

It's actually the 7th time this has been submitted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=upstart.me

In all fairness, if you read through the comments, you'll see that each time was a new version being launched. This time it's the full product. The previous time there was a landing page. The time before was a prototype. And the stuff before that seems to be a completely different service with a URL belonging to someone else (sold perhaps?)

Some feedback:

Some searches, like 'deep learning', 'venture capital', and 'NLP' don't display any results. Not sure if this is a problem with the search functionality or with your database (probably the former). Some searches display a lack of context - for example, searching 'AI' returns a top result of "Air travelers" because the string "ai" is in "air".

You might consider checking out a product like Algolia to scale your search.

Awesome concept though! Excited to see it grow

Tnx for the feedback! There are a bunch of newsletters in the log, still needed to be added. Going through them manually and checking/verifying as much as I can. So every week, more stuff will be added and the search will improve.

This is a great idea for both people looking to promote their startups and people running newsletters. I'll be trying it out from both angles to promote my startup[0] and my Email Marketing Weekly newsletter[1].

I am curious to know the monetization strategy? Your site reads "won't charge you anything for it nor will we take a percentage of your sponsorship deals", so what is your angle?

[0] http://newsmaker.io - build your own curated newsletter [1] http://emailmarketing.newsmaker.io/

Typo on your page "Produce a newletter full of content" just missing an s in newsletter

Currently, I'm monetising the tools & services section, there's the option for paid listing there. But there are a few ideas I'm playing around with. For now, I'm just trying to fill the database with as much newsletters as I possibly can.

> "Upstart.me let's you support influencers"

Typo: delete the apostrophe!

I like the look of the GIF on the front page (http://upstart.me/img/preview.gif) but it’s 3.3MB — I believe you could cut that down significantly. I have a similar GIF on Citationsy’s frontpage (https://citationsy.com/) and it’s only 1.1MB.

Apart from that (and the unnecessary social media logos on the left) I really like the way the website looks. Fun animation on the Try it button!

Why GIF at all? There are crossbrowser compressed video formats out there.

For me, it was mainly that the GIF would autoplay (so to speak) on mobile, whereas video would not. I’m also adding the top part of the window as an SVG and the shadow in CSS, and the whitespace left and right of the content in the window varies based on screen size, that seemed easier to do with a GIF.

I wonder if this can be considered a Show HN.

It only offers an "Enter Your Email" field which looks like it's mandatory to use the "Try it" button below. Which I think does make this a sign-up page which is explicitely not a Show HN.

On the other hand, the button works no matter if and what you put in that box.

I think this pattern is in place now because the last time this page was submitted, it was considered not a Show HN.

I am undecided. Implementing a (dark?) pattern like this to get into Show HN and collect emails feels spammy. What do others think?

you can simply skip it by clicking the link underneath the try it now button. No need to enter your email.

That's what I said. "On the other hand, the button works no matter if and what you put in that box.". You make it seem like one has to put something into the email box though.

This is very useful for marketers and biz dev folk. My suggestion would be that there be an example of how someone can get a lot of value on the homepage.

Not related but I stumbled into something similar not long ago: https://newsletter.city

Some companies in here: http://www.loopinsight.com/2017/05/16/apple-videos-highlight...

Small piece of feedback: I thought the "Enter your email" on the homepage was a second button. Took me longer than it should have to realise it wasn't.

How can we get our newsletter listed? I run one with about 2,000 people for tech in development.

That's a clever idea... an ad network for all those newsletters...

Any chance you'll be adding music as a category?

It seems it's also a great way to find newsletters for a subject?

Thanks for including Upbeat in your Tools & Services section!

Can't enter a search term on mobile

Did we give it the hug of death?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com