I wonder if a subset of Cross-platform RSS recommendations would work nicely as a primary/significant growth strategy for Yakread. At a minimum, I’d just need to let people create a recommendations page which they’d show to people after subscribing to their own newsletter:
- For a substack newsletter, you could put a link to it in your welcome email: say something like “hey you already saw some substack newsletters I recommend, [click here] to see some non-substack newsletters I like too”
- For a Ghost newsletter, maybe the recommendations page can be embedded/shown as a pop-up on the welcome page. Ideally the email field gets prefilled with whatever address they just used to sign up to the Ghost newsletter.
- etc
The recommendations page would show a list of newsletters (RSS feeds, actually), and if you hit “subscribe”, then you get subscribed to them all with Yakread. And crucially: Yakread gives newsletter writers promo/advertising credit for each new person they refer to Yakread.
It’s a double recommendation, basically: you’re referring people to other newsletters, and you’re also simultaneously referring them to Yakread. So at a minimum, Yakread can reciprocate. And as Yakread grows, maybe it’ll turn into more of an ecosystem where lots of people recommend each other.
This I think would be the smallest version of the cross-platform-recommendations idea that would be provide business value for Yakread; so I could implement this first and then add the other stuff (e.g. the RSS->Email service, links to other RSS readers, …) after that’s released.
As a benefit for people getting recommended, maybe Yakread could also have some kind of “Upgrade subscription” button. i.e. if someone subscribes to your newslettter via the Yakread recommendations page thing, then they’ll just have your RSS feed added to their Yakread account. After they’ve read your newsletter a bit in Yakread and decide that they like it, they could hit the “upgrade” button which will subscribe their regular email address to your newsletter, so they’ll get it in their inbox too instead of just in Yakread.
I really like that flow actually. A major benefit of Yakread is that you can subscribe to lots of stuff and it’ll never get overwhelming, since it all gets filtered down to one daily email with five links. It’s perfect for trying out recommended newsletters on a whim. If Yakread has a way to then take the newsletters you decide you really like and pass them off to your inbox, that just sounds *chef’s kiss*. Great for readers, writers, and Yakread.