The one where Substack gives me an aneurysm

Big news, and not in a good way: I've discovered, thanks to one of you who reached out, that Substack has an unexpected quirk which is breaking 1-click subscribes. If you're not on Substack, this doesn't affect you; if you are, please read on (especially if you've used paid forwards or cross-promotion).

Some quick background for anyone who isn't aware: whenever someone clicks "subscribe in 1 click" for a newsletter we forward, they show up in a little admin console I made. A few times per day, I go through all the 1-click subscribers and I paste their address into the relevant newsletter signup form manually. It's a little tedious but manageable, and The Sample wouldn't be a viable business without it: this lets us measure (and in some cases, charge for) the subscribers we send people.

Although Substack newsletters use single opt-in by default (i.e. they don't require new subscribers to click on a link in a confirmation email), they do sometimes still trigger confirmation emails. Presumably this happens when a new subscriber "looks fishy." It seems this is happening quite often when I handle 1-click subscribers. (Perhaps they've noticed I sign up for lots of newsletters with lots of different addresses—fair enough!) I've known about this for a bit, hence every once in a while I include a reminder to export your subscribers CSV in case anyone doesn't click the link. I also added a note about this to the publisher console several weeks ago.

Here's the big problem which I was made aware of just recently: it turns out that if (1) someone signs up for your newsletter, and (2) a confirmation email is triggered, and (3) they don't click the confirmation link, then it is impossible for you, the author, to import that person into your list manually. Substack has a page where you can type in addresses or upload a CSV of subscribers, but even if you upload your CSV of subscribers from The Sample, it is likely that some (and possibly many) of them will be skipped.

I'm planning to talk to Substack support to see if there's any way around that, but I am doubtful they will provide a solution. The downside of letting people send unlimited emails for free is that you attract a lot of spammers, and I'm sure they have to work hard to make sure their email domain reputation stays good—otherwise all your emails would end up in people's spam folders. So I don't (necessarily) fault them for restricting subscriber import, and I really don't see them changing that policy just for us. Hence I will need to make some changes going forward:

1. I am no longer handling 1-click subscribes for Substack newsletters. If you use Substack, you must do this yourself by exporting your subscribers CSV from the publisher console in The Sample and then importing it to Substack. You should do this periodically as you get subscribers from us. I am going to make this as convenient as I can. Probably by default I'll send you an email alert when you get new subscribers (at most once per day? Week?), and it will include a direct link to export your subscribers, and it will include a link to the import page on Substack. So it should only take 10 seconds or so.

2. I need to be reasonably confident that subscribers aren't falling through the cracks. People might stop using the 1-click subscribe button if they find it doesn't actually work. So I will likely record the times at which you export your subscribers. If too much time passes between a 1-click subscribe and a CSV export, I'll pause forwards for your newsletter until you export again.

3. For those of you on Substack who have used paid forwards, I will refund the money for everyone who didn't make it to your list. For cross-promotion, I'll give you more forwards. Once the please-export-your-subscribers alerts are in place, I'm going to contact all of you who are on Substack and try to figure out which of your subscribers never made it on to your lists. Hopefully this can be done without too much hassle on your part. Otherwise maybe we'll just make an educated guess, or we'll make the very conservative assumption that no one made it (time has a cost after all, and I for one am feeling a bit short on it).

4. I'm going to start adding integrations for Ghost and other newsletter providers so that as much as possible, we can move past all this janky manual 1-click subscribe stuff. I'll write a blog post about this experience and title it "Substack, please support API integrations" or something, and then include a link to it with every please-export-your-subscribers alert. Again, I doubt anything will change soon, but if enough people bug Substack about it, maybe they'll get around to adding an API eventually. Did I mention that Ghost is a great newsletter provider by the way? You really should check them out.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know.

Jacob