Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

by pixelfeeder • 9 years ago

204 56 9 years ago

cm2012• 9 years ago

Neat acquisition channel possibility.

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.

LukasRos2• 9 years ago

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.

pixelfeeder9• 9 years ago

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.

garysieling2• 9 years ago

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

lprubin5• 9 years ago

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

pixelfeeder9• 9 years ago

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.

estreeper• 9 years ago

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.

bluetwo• 9 years ago

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?

chrisfrantz• 9 years ago

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

jmunsch• 9 years ago

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

yeukhon• 9 years ago

Actually I was thinking upstart in Linux.

fady• 9 years ago

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.

danenania4• 9 years ago

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!

pixelfeeder9• 9 years ago

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.

tyingq2• 9 years ago

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

danenania4• 9 years ago

Great! Looking forward to the first batch.

tyingq2• 9 years ago

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.

danenania4• 9 years ago

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

garysieling2• 9 years ago

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.

danenania4• 9 years ago

Thanks! I'll check it out.

petercooper2• 9 years ago

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.

ryanx435• 9 years ago

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

pixelfeeder9• 9 years ago

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

petercooper2• 9 years ago

various niche topics

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

sheraz• 9 years ago

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

sillysaurus3• 9 years ago

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.

jasonlfunk• 9 years ago

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

EternalData• 9 years ago

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.

jstandard• 9 years ago

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.

folli• 9 years ago

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.

pixelfeeder9• 9 years ago

makes total sense and you'll totally see that being available very soonish.

royceh• 9 years ago

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.

theprop• 9 years ago

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.

pixelfeeder9• 9 years ago

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

erikig• 9 years ago

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.

jchin• 9 years ago

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.

pixelfeeder9• 9 years ago

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

wolfgang42• 9 years ago

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.

TekMol• 9 years ago

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."

dang• 9 years ago

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".

ryanbertrand• 9 years ago

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.

rogerjin14• 9 years ago

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?

advertiise_com• 9 years ago

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

sercan• 9 years ago

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 ?

Upstart – Find newsletters to promote your business or side projects

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