This is cool, I spotted it in the wild last week and added my first newsletter signup (with my first ever Medium referred signup!) earlier this week.
Question: Have you been in contact with anyone at Medium? Is this something they approve of, or is it a slight hack on how they do things and there's potential they may shut it down?
It's quite a big change for Medium to allow writers to gain value outside of its platform.
@fredrivett thanks so much for trying Upscribe! Im so glad you like it.
Very good question. Medium had to approve Upscribe so they are totally in the know and have been super supportive. They even mentioned Upscribe on three of their staff blogs in multiple languages. Really great team over there!
@joshuaanderton Wow, super interesting that they are happy with having an external setup to collect emails from Medium posts and not integrate anything themselves. Not that either route is right or wrong, just different paths and interesting to see they're going with letting outside developer(s) create a key feature here.
Can I ask what the approval process looked like? I didn't even know there was such a thing.
@fredrivett I know what you mean. I'm very excited that they're happy about it.
Totally! There is a submission process to go through with Embed.ly (recently acquired by Medium) where each app is manually reviewed and then accepted or denied. Once accepted Medium uses the OEmbed framework to fetch custom content for the link you paste in your story (same concept as embedding a YouTube video).
What an incredible tool, i'm really glad I found this. All you have to do is create a form and then copy and paste it into a medium post. You can also integrate with a number of different newsletter platforms like revue and mail chimp so all of the sign ups are automatically sent there! You can see an example of what it looks like on my most recent post: https://blog.starters.co/the-fir... (*PS Please hit that little heart button 💚 if you like it and if you want to keep up with whats happening in the sports tech industry I highly recommend subscribing to our newsletter! 😝)
@troy_ruediger I'm so glad you find it valuable! Really appreciate that you posted it on Product Hunt as well. Starters is such an awesome service and you all are pumping out great content.
Upscribe is a tool that allows you to build totally embeddable newsletter signup forms for Medium.
The mission behind Upscribe was solely to build a tool that provided true value to email marketers and writers. I have had a ton of ideas in the past but my mentality was always "if I build something awesome, people will user it!" which is - almost always - wrong. Upscribe was built AFTER getting feedback from real email marketers. Originally it was not going to be for Medium at all, but it evolved and it will continue to evolve to be whatever our fantastic users need it to be.
Here are a couple of live examples of embedded Upscribe forms:
https://medium.com/behavior-desi...https://blog.yalabot.com/why-we-...
Please let me know what you think of Upscribe in the comments below! Your opinion is so important to Upscribe's success.
Thanks,
Joshua
I bloody love these products. Simple tools that solve one very specific need for a very specific niche. Great job guys!
PS: For business model I think the form should be free and users pay to export the list. The bigger it is, the more it costs ;)
@mnlfrgr I'm so glad you feel that way! I totally agree. Eventually Upscribe may serve additional purposes but for now, being this specific means we can focus on building something actually useful.
Thanks for the suggestion! My worry with charging to export is that people can already integrate a service like Mailchimp and bypass the need to export. I also feel like it makes signing on to a brand new service a little less daunting when you know you can always just export your lists if you don't like the tool. Would love to know your thoughts on that though!
@joshuaanderton Fair play. You should ask yourself: where is the value here? IMHO, people can "survive" without that tool but if it's free to use they'll use it, they'll accumulate subscribers and eventually they'll want to do something with this mailing list. You can make the integration with third parties a paid add-on because that adds value (it saves time).
@mnlfrgr I've definitely considered charging for the integration options (for all future users since our current users are used to having these features for free). I'm going to keep all this in mind (and in Trello) for when we role out the premium version in a week or so. Thanks again for your thoughts! Super helpful.
@joshuaanderton You're welcome! It really is an amazing tool and a great idea. I have already created my first form.
My question may be coming out of the left field but I really need to ask: how do I get to pay for this? I'd really like to show my appreciation in a monetary way. :) You deserve it!
@antonis_tsagari I'm so glad you've already created a form! Thanks again!
That means a lot! Actually I am launching a premium version very soon for a small monthly fee. I will absolutely be sure to let you know when it's available.
@alancassinelli Not only you - I cannot see examples here (my network is okay) - and I cannot also embed this (I tried everything here). Help Joshua :)
I write a bit on Medium and some of my techy articles got many tens of thousands of views, which for me is a great objective considering everything (I ask my wife to do the spellchecking :*) , this is amazing! I always wanted to get a input form like Mailchimp gives me for websites, on Medium! I'm glad this got hunted :D
@orliesaurus that's super exciting! What is your blog URL? I will be checking it out for sure! Hey man, gotta appreciate those supportive wives of ours!
Thanks so much for the comment!
@pmigueli thanks so much! You should see it pop up after you 1. paste in the link and 2. press enter/return (that triggers the embed). Let me know if you have any further issues! Here is a tutorial I wrote incase it helps at all! https://medium.com/@upscribe/hey...
@pmigueli it looks like there is a bit of trouble with our shortened URL right now. I've replaced it with the full URL (not much longer lol) and it should work for you now! Let me know!
@druh_opryshok thanks!
Good observation! I used Wordpress for the initial prototype (a custom theme) as this allowed me to launch faster with less resources.
I will continue to use WP for the sales front but the application will be standalone soon.
@joshuaanderton that's awesome. Did you write a lot of code or use some plugins? Also if you are going to write a post about the service would love to read a paragraph or two about the prototype. I'm a non-technical founder and also do a lot of work hacking services together.
@druh_opryshok it was a fair bit of code. Not nearly what it would have been if I had started from scratch though. I have background in full stack developer and I got my start with Wordpress so it made sense to start there for this project.
I would definitely recommend trying out a few Wordpress courses on @treehouse (teamtreehouse.com). I got into web development years ago because I was trying to find a developer who would partner with me on my first project and I was having zero luck. Wordpress gets your feet wet with PHP, JavaScript, HTML & CSS - without diving full on into any of them.
@alex_circei ok I think I found the issue. I've replaced the shortened URL with our full URL. Try refreshing the editor page and pasting the new URL. Let me know if it works for you!
This is one of those times when @producthunt pays you back for all the time spent distracted by some amazing new creation that maybe doesn't add value to your business. This solves one of the primary weaknesses of @medium in my opinion and it makes so much sense that they are open and supportive of third party devs with good ideas. The only thing that puzzles me is why they didn't do it themselves if they are happy to facilitate it???
Anyway great work @joshuaanderton! Added it to a few posts (e.g. https://medium.com/p/a2c4d5f3d13d)
@redoisin thanks so much for the comment! I'm so glad you like Upscribe. Medium is such a great team. I'm super excited that we are able to offer this service for their awesome users.
@tunaroses hey! I am a huge fan of Medium Letters. It's a great way to get other Medium users to return to your blog, however it isn't accommodating for lists I've grown on Mailchimp for example.
@dshan thanks for letting me know Derek! I've just fixed this. Sorry about that! // you'll see he form as soon as you create one, from there you copy the link to embed on Medium. Let me know if you have any problems at all!
I have been using Upscribe for about two months now. It's been a wonderful experience and Josh has been great at reaching out and keeping things up-to-date. @joshuaanderton Congrats, bud! Happy to see you have finally made it to ProductHunt!
Looks great! Almost passed this up since I didn't see anything about integrations on the homepage. I was really surprised how many you already have. We'll definitely use this once you have Pardot up and running.