Kevin William David

Swapstack - A marketplace connecting newsletters & brands

byโ€ข
As a newsletter creator, finding paying sponsors is hard!
Swapstack is a marketplace connecting brands & writers to run paid sponsorships.
โœ๏ธ As a writer: Work with brands your readers love.
๐Ÿ’ผ As a brand: Work with writers who speak to your audience.

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Jake Schonberger
Hey Product Hunt! ๐Ÿ‘‹ ๐Ÿ‘‹ Myself, @jake_singer & @nicolas_ordonez are very excited to share what we've been building for the last couple of months. TL:DR: Swapstack is a marketplace and community that helps connect newsletter creators and brands to run high-value sponsorships. Swapstack is built for creators, by creators! What is Swapstack? Starting, growing, and monetizing a successful newsletter is an extremely difficult process. The process of growth & monetization can be arduous, lonely and confusing. As newsletter writers ourselves, we wanted to monetize through sponsorships, but had trouble figuring out the best way to get started. We met a ton of other writers & creators in the same boat, and started building Swapstack. We started Swapstack as an attempt to make it easier for writers to do two things:
  • ๐Ÿ’ฐ Easily meet brands that want to sponsor their newsletter
  • ๐Ÿค Meet other writers and share learnings along the way
  • ๐Ÿš‰ The Platform The Swapstack platform acts as a marketplace that helps connect writers to brands, enabling creators to focus on their work. โœ๏ธ As a writer:
    1. Build your newsletter profile
    2. Browse dozens of brands looking for newsletters to work with.
    3. Pitch to the brands you like.
    4. Collect payment via Stripe (we cover all stripe fees!)
    5. Join our slack community and meet other writers
    ๐Ÿงณ As a brand:
    1. Create a campaign
    2. Browse hundreds of writers.
    3. Reach out to newsletters that align bet to your brand.
    ๐Ÿ“ˆ What weโ€™ve done to date:
  • Onboarded 250+ writers
  • Onboarded 70+ brands
  • Facilitated hundreds of engagements!
  • Built a Slack community of 150+ writers.
  • ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ‘งโ€๐Ÿ‘ง The Community The Swapstack community consists of 150 writers at all stages of their newsletter journey. We also use the Slack channel to share early product updates and other opportunities. Swapstack is FREE for writers. We add a 10% platform fee on for Brands which we also use to cover stripe costs. Would love any feedback from this community, and am very open to collaboration for anyone interested in connecting. Thank you all! Team Swapstack Huge shoutout to a couple of our early supporters: @Kevin for hunting us :) @arielle_niss from Earbuds Podcast Collective @bchang from The Peak @anum_hussain from Below the Fold @aashnishah from HypeDocs who's helped from the very beginning!
    Aashni Shah
    @jake_schonberger1 thanks for the shout out Jake! It's been amazing rooting and cheering you on for the last few months! Love to see what you've built so far! โค๏ธ
    Jake Schonberger
    Awesome @aashnisshah. Looking forward to working on your upcoming newsletters together too :)
    Erik Torenberg
    Congrats team! Amazing to see what's evolved. Want to give people just a taste on what they can expect in the future? :)
    Jake Schonberger
    @eriktorenberg Thanks Erik! Lots in store for the future... Our vision is to be every creators sales team...and every brands hub for creator partnerships. Right now, we're focused on supporting writer & brand relationships in a sponsorship fashion. In the coming months, we'll expand our creator support: - Podcasters - Conversational media - Community leaders ...across many different engagement types: - Sponsorships - Guest writing - Creator contracting etc. AMPED to realize this vision!
    Jake Singer
    @eriktorenberg @jake_schonberger1 SO MUCH in store for the future :D
    Arnav Bathla
    @eriktorenberg @jake_schonberger1 Late comment, but SUPER inspiring to see Swapstack๐Ÿš€
    Packy McCormick
    I was skeptical about newsletter sponsorship platforms. Others Iโ€™d seen have low quality on both sides. But I like Jake, so I tried it, and itโ€™s been excellent. When I had an open slot, Swapstack matched me with a big name sponsor thatโ€™s highly relevant to my audience, at my full rate. Last week, when a sponsor dropped out last minute, they found me a high-quality replacement within an hour. Canโ€™t recommend Swapstack highly enough.
    Jake Singer
    DUDE! Thanks so much for your support @packym. Can't wait to keep getting you that cheddar ๐Ÿง€
    Jake Singer
    Hey all! Super excited to be launching Swapstack on PH! As the author of The Flywheel, I got a first hand look at how hard and time consuming it can be to find sponsors for my newsletter. We're creating Swapstack to help make it easy for writers to monetize and brands to reach an amazing audience for their products. Since we started onboarding users a couple of months ago, we've seen a bunch of folks make their first $ online through Swapstack, which is extremely exciting for us. We've worked at big tech companies before, and think people should have more options to go indie!
    Aja Singer
    I've been working with Jake and Jake since they launched Swapstack and I'm so impressed with what they've built. It's an incredible resource and everyone with a newsletter should sign up!
    Jake Schonberger
    @ajasinger Woot! One of the original swappers from iteration 0.0.01! Thanks Aja, excited to keep working on this together.
    Stef
    Wow this looks like exactly what I need! So great to see all the new creator tools out there. Canโ€™t wait to try this!!
    Jake Schonberger
    @stefanopsal1 yes!! Let's get Rendezview a couple writers to work with! Thanks for the support, Stef
    Louis Nicholls
    Cool stuff! Over at SparkLoop we work with thousands of newsletter creators to grow their audiences faster โ€” and finding sponsors is definitely one of their main challenges! This looks like a great tool to make the process easier for all involved. Excited to watch it grow in the future :)
    Jake Schonberger
    @louisnicholls_ Hey Louis! Thanks for the note, and yes exactly - we hear our writers talk about A) Growth and B) Monetization. We provide some suppport to help our writers do cross-promotions, but have mainly focused on driving the sponsorship funnel and creating high quality matches between writers and companies. Would be great to link up and talk about potential ways to work together! Think that would be a potential win-win
    Louis Nicholls
    @jake_schonberger1 totally โ€” shoot me an email?
    Tomas Laurinavicius
    Solid launch! One thing that annoys me with new marketplaces is the lack of demand and supply, in your case, seems like you thought of it. How did you get initial sponsors and writers? Cold outreach? Personal connections? Congrats on the launch and I'm looking forward to using it for my personal newsletter.
    Jake Singer
    @tomaslau thanks Tomas! To the extent that you could call it a strategy, we actually basically didn't worry about this at first. Our approach was to first build a community of writers (around the shared interest in monetizing), and then once we had enough people there it was attractive to the brand side. We're so excited to have you in Swapstack!
    Tomas Laurinavicius
    @jake_singer nice! Community approach always helps. Thanks for sharing :)
    Jake Schonberger
    @tomaslau Doubling up on everything that Jake said. We did alot of community building (which we need to up our focus on!) before building any product. That led to alot of manual work... but really critical manual work that then led us to better understand what we really needed to build. We're still figuring alot of this out, but by focusing on community and doing things that don't scale, we were able to build the "more right" thing than by just jumping in to product mode.
    Patrick Trousdale
    There are many low-quality solutions out there to fill newsletter sponsorships. This is not one of them. I have both bought and sold ads on Swapstack with great results. Very excited by what Swapstack is building - an actual community for creators. Keep up the great work guys!
    Jake Schonberger
    @patrick_trousdale thanks for being part of the community, Patrick! Appreciate the kind words and excited to keep working together.
    Jake Singer
    @patrick_trousdale thanks for the kind words Patrick!
    Kushaan Shah
    A lot of my friends who recently started writing have wondered if they're too small or if their audience is too niche to make any money or benefit from any sort of platform. I think this is where Swapstack really changes the game - you don't need to have thousands of subscribers to help brands. Similarly, brands no longer need to go to a place like NPR to get the word out. At its core, it's a simple, elegant exchange but I think at a high-level, it's really democratizing standard advertising. Excited to be a part of this community and see the future of Swapstack play out. Congrats @jake_schonberger1 and @jake_singer! (If you're a writer or brand, hit them up!)
    Jake Schonberger
    @jake_singer @kushaanshah Yes exactly!! Thanks Kushaan. As you said - many of our writers just ticked over the 1k subscriber mark, and are working with brands to run sponsorships. A newsletter with ~2K readers can start generating meaningful revenue as a side hustle, compliment to their day job, or support themselves in other ways. Really excited to have you as part of the group.
    Jake Singer
    @jake_schonberger1 @kushaanshah thanks Kush!! Extremely well said. Have you considered doing marketing for a living?
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