Thank you IH 🙏 Our platform is open for any newsletter creator! 🚀
First of all I want to say thank you to all the indie hackers that joined our private beta and gave us valuable feedback since we started 3 months ago.
Today we are opening Sponsy into open beta, where everyone can join and try it out.
With Sponsy in less than 5 minutes you can set up a full management system for your newsletter's sponsorships. You can easily create and accept sponsorships' offers and get paid straight away into your account.
Here are some features:
⭐️ Have a public page with all your info and slots (no code required)
⭐️ Easy payments straight to your bank account through Stripe
⭐️ Define and create templates for each of your spots, so you'll get the correct information and assets from your bookings
⭐️ Manage your bookings and calendar in an easy-to-use platform
⭐️ Copy paste HTML/MD code straight to your email provider with your ads
⭐️ Get notified by email when you have a new booking
It's all free to use while we are on beta, and we will let you know if things change in the mean time. Most likely it will stay like this and we'll add paid features in the future.
We plan to add new features soon to help newsletter creators to easily find sponsors that match their newsletter, and to help with cross promotion too.
Sign up now https://getsponsy.com and let us know what you think here in the comments!
Hey @sircon, I really like what you've done with Sponsy so far so I wanted to give some feedback from my first impressions. This is coming from the perspective of our workflow at Stacked Marketer so it might not apply to everyone, of course.
Slots: It's confusing to say 10 slots but then you're allowed to add 10 at a time. Should communicate this better. If it says just 10, it's not enough for a daily newsletter, that's for sure. Should be at least ~60 to cover a quarter in advance.
Payments: I'm not convinced forcing Stripe integration is the way to go. I guess it depends on the workflow for newsletters. I had this conversation with the folks at Swapstack too. 2.9% per transaction is insanely high compared to a bank transfer usually.
Stats: This will be a very difficult challenge for any sponsorship marketplace (and why I think many will be doomed to fail). You have to make sure stats are properly defined and properly verified.
When someone says "Click Rate" they can talk about "total clicks from opens" all the way to "unique clicks on the ad spot", which makes for a massive difference in "click rate". Without clear definitions and quality checks, the information cannot be used to compare newsletters.
"Open rate" also has that issue with "total opens" vs "unique opens" but it's less and less important.
Monetization: I think there could be some merit for focusing on the calendar (And template) management aspect and charging it to trial or free for somewhat limited use, then charging for it straight up.
I would definitely be interested in using it to manage our ad inventory. Would be great if you can generate IOs, team management (sales, copy, edit, approval of copy, etc.), branded public page...
I guess the main question is if you are making this for small newsletters or you want this to be a service Morning Brew would have used instead of building their own.
Hi @Manu_C, really really nice feedback, thanks a lot. Even though all your points are super valid, I'm going through them with my thoughts.
Slots: You are totally right, and we thought about that issue before. One feature we have in mind is recurring slots which will take the effort out from creating 10 slots at a time. And we would also need to revamp how the booking system would work in the public page, because having 60+ slots as it is, it would be painful design wise.
Payments: I can imagine 2.9% can be painful for bigger newsletters with bigger transactions volume, but tbh for a mid sized newsletter and for the easiness of setting up Stripe, it is worth the cut. Also, in the case of my newsletter, I'm based in the Netherlands and I had sponsors from the US, and letting Stripe handle these transactions it is a bliss over a bank wire. As volume and value grows I agree that it might start being a painful/superfluos fee.
Stats: Totally agree on this and it was a topic we talked quite a bit, but for the sake of the MVP we didn't do much and let the user set their numbers. The way I see it in this MVP is that this is a page from the creator and he has to show and explain his numbers, that's why we were also reluctant to open it as a marketplace for now, and we decided to just go to create the "sponsor" page for the creator, and I think we are going to keep on that path offering better customization of the page, subdomains, widgets you can add to your page, etc. The other alternative we thought is connecting to the ESPs and fetch the stats, and with that we can keep valid and standard figures across newsletters on Sponsy.
Monetization: There are definitely many paths in this regard we can follow. For now as we try to find product-market fit we'll keep it for free. This is a side project and our overhead is super low at the moment, so we don't really care so much about monetization as that will come naturally later on.
Please take into consideration Sponsy is a functional MVP, with just a minimum set of features to see if there is interest and some traction. And from here it can grow into any possible path forward.
I think our target is something like Stacked Marketer when it had ~1000 subs and it was starting to think about monetization 😜 - a small/mid sized newsletter that is putting out regular content and wants to start monetizing but isn't really sure how to do it yet.
Having said all that, please reach out to me on twitter (@sircon), we would love to get in touch with you and see how can we actually help your current flow! Maybe there is something worth in it for both of us, and Sponsy can turn into your Morning Brew-like system 😉
Thanks a lot for the feedback nevertheless! 🙏
Sure thing, I'll reach out soon.
Regarding Stripe, 2.9% of $1000 or under is probably worth it. It starts not being worth it once you reach minimum payments of $2-3k and growing I reckon.
Not only because the fee is higher in terms of the total dollar amount but also because a wire transfer is not what's stopping advertisers, so the benefit or Stripe drops, while the cost increases.
This looks great, nice work!
I noticed a potential spelling error in the demo :)
At the top it says
Be a sponsor from
IPO Brief
Should that be for?
Keep up the good work and goodluck!
Hey, thanks! You are absolutely correct, thanks for spotting it! Will fix it straight away!