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Upscribe — Email marketing & embeddable opt-in forms
Upscribe is a simple email marketing tool. Send email newsletters, drip campaigns, and collect subscribers using embeddable opt-in forms.
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@ggnall hey Graham. I know what you mean. With the launch of the Medium API I'm thinking that a third party service could build out that type of feature (we may even look at doing something like that as an add on). Thanks so much for checking out Upscribe!
Very excited to try this out. However, signing in via FB gives an error that the app is 'still in development mode'?
@joshdance thanks so much! I have just fixed the FB login issues. Appreciate you letting me know!
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!
@astrism we will get parrot integrated asap then! Will also add the integration list to the homepage 😄 thanks Grant!
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!
@joshuaanderton I am co-editing restful.io - my personal one is my username @orliesaurus - yeah wives are 51% of our success!
@orliesaurus awesome! Should see a follow from me shortly 😊.
Lol yes at the very least!
Love the idea. Look forward to seeing how this evolves. It should definitely catch on for sure.
@bryansarnold thanks so much! I'm also super excited to see where things go.
Nice micro-project, Joshua and the team. As i see you built it on Wordpress, but how?!
@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.
Wow. I've just started exploring opportunities on @Medium and this product came just in time. Works perfectly!
@yonishechter thanks so much for the comment Yoni! I'm so glad you find Upscribe useful :)
Here is a Demo for anyone who wants to see it in action https://medium.com/@upscribe/how....
Great work @joshuaanderton
The form is only available on mobile and for Apple, is that correct? I went to it on my desktop and it sort of works to sign up... but it did not seem quite right... so then I realized maybe it is actually only for mobile? I am an android mobile user...
@alauremktg Upscribe should work on mobile and desktop alike. What kind of computer & browser are you using? Will look into this asap!
Great work on this, customized it and added to my publication. Super easy. Just in time for the new year and Season 2 of my work. Thanks!
@gregofisch thanks so much for using Upscribe! So glad you are liking it! Good luck with Season 2 :)
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.
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.
This is awesome! One thing I'd like to add is to make it a little bit more clear what you have to do to embed it. Make it really obvious that on Medium, you need to select the "add an embed", and then paste in your new upscribe link.
I looked around for a bit and it wasn't immediately obvious how to do it.
Great work! This is awesome!
@izzydoesizzy hey Iskender! You actually don't have to select the embed feature in Medium. You can simply paste the form URL in your story and press enter for it to appear (may take a second or two to load).
Thanks so much for the comment! Let me know if you have an questions at all!
@joshuaanderton Ah gotcha. Just tried it, it works. Still, you guys should put a very simple line stating that specifically. Once your form is generated, it doesn't tell you anywhere that you can just do that. ^_^
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).
@joshuaanderton Nice, appreciate the insights here Joshua. All the best with Upscribe, you've got a user here :)
@fredrivett really appreciate that Fred, so happy to have you on board! Thanks for chatting! Will talk again soon I'm sure :)
@surjithctly thanks!
Not sure what you mean Surjith, would like an example of a live form or a demo of the Upscribe admin?
@joshuaanderton Yes. I meant a link to a medium post with a live form.
If you feel the admin is worth showing, you can add a screenshot :)
@surjithctly awesome. Here is a form that Yala created with Upscribe: https://blog.yalabot.com/why-we-...
Feel free to check out the admin too though!
Very confused. Made form, forced to signup, says it'll be sent to me via email, and all I get is an email to sign in and create my first form. ??
Also, lots of work without ever seeing what this actually looks like. Is there a preview or demo anywhere?
@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!
Braavo