Swapstack - A marketplace connecting newsletters & brands

Hey Product Hunt! 👋 👋 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:

💰 Easily meet brands that want to sponsor their newsletter

🤝 Meet other writers and share learnings along the way

🚉 The Platform The Swapstack platform acts as a marketplace that helps connect writers to brands, enabling creators to focus on their work. ✍️ 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

🧳 As a brand:

1. Create a campaign
2. Browse hundreds of writers.
3. Reach out to newsletters that align bet to your brand.

📈 What we’ve done to date:

Onboarded 250+ writers

Onboarded 70+ brands

Facilitated hundreds of engagements!

Built a Slack community of 150+ writers.

👨‍👨‍👧‍👧 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!

Congrats team! Amazing to see what's evolved. Want to give people just a taste on what they can expect in the future? :)

I was skeptical about newsletter sponsorship platforms. Others I’d seen have low quality on both sides. But I like Jake, so I tried it, and it’s been excellent. When I had an open slot, Swapstack matched me with a big name sponsor that’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. Can’t recommend Swapstack highly enough.

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!

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!

Wow this looks like exactly what I need! So great to see all the new creator tools out there. Can’t wait to try this!!

Cool stuff! Over at SparkLoop we work with thousands of newsletter creators to grow their audiences faster — 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 :)

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.

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!

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!)