Gain valuable insights into the performance of over 100,000 newsletters. Study the critical trends, discover sponsorship opportunities, and find acquisition targets.
Hi PH 👋
9 months ago I launched the first version of Newsletter Spy which at the time was just a weekend project.
It got far more attention than I expected. Unfortunately, quickly after the launch, Substack changed their website in a way that made it impossible to fetch subscriber counts. As a result, I was no longer able to provide updates and the project fell into hibernation.
To my surprise people kept buying access to Newsletter Spy even though I added a big warning that the dataset was outdated and no longer updated. Also at least once a week someone would reach out to me and ask for an update. Thanks to these conversations, I quickly learned that Newsletter Spy could be useful to many people even without exact subscriber counts.
So I decided to revive the project.
As with v1 the database is useful, for example, if you're looking for newsletters you can book ad slots in. But you can also use it to find leads, analyze competitors or the market as a whole, or to find abandoned newsletters you can acquire.
- The Substack database now contains 50,000+ newsletters. Instead of subscriber counts, it now contains metrics like the category rank and the average number of reactions, which usually give a good idea how big a given newsletter's audience is. Also, in contrast to v1, the database is now updated daily.
- In addition to the Substack database, there's now also a Revue database. This database contains exact subscriber counts for all newsletters that share this number publicly.
- Finally, a third database contains information on newsletters from other major email service providers like ConvertKit, MailChimp, etc. I started experimenting with a machine learning model that predicts the subscriber count, but the results are still meh and should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the database also contains columns like "Fame" (how well known is a given newsletter), "Buzz" (how much are people talking about the newsletter online), "Traffic", Traffic Change" (growing, stagnating, declining) which are more accurate and make it possible to estimate a newsletter's audience size.
I'd love to hear what you think, and feel free to ask any questions!
@jakob_greenfeld This is amazing - I'm torn between wanting to get more great content but having that flooding inbox full of distractions.
Excellent work with this and good luck today on the launch!
@jakob_greenfeld hey Jakob! I like how from just a weekend-project (and simply a list) you managed to grow it to where Newsletter Spy 2.0 is today. This is huge and it's a great inspiration for anyone building RaaS products 🦄 good luck!
He's baaaaack! Newsletter Spy 1.0 was probably my favorite product of 2021. I used it to acquire a newsletter, and reach out to dozens of others for partnerships. Cannot freaking wait to use this. Keep rockin Jakob!
As a customer of newsletterspy 1.0 I can only recommend this product. It gives your a great overview of the space and provides competitive advantage. Thanks for building 2.0 Jakob!
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