😎Stay sharp, stay ahead with SWIPE
📅UPDATE 11/13/2024
Last coupple of days we had SWIPE newsletter unexpectedly flagged and removed from Substack without any warning, highlighting the inherent limitations and risks of relying on FREE platforms. While you can build whatever you want with available tools today (which is great) you also depend on the wimp of the tools you are using.
In reality, once it get’s serious, for many it all boils down to put your monnry where you mouth is. To ensure a more reliable and professional experience for our subsribers, we are committed to find a robust and serious technology stack moving forward (including Substack).
SWIPE was never a business. It’s a fun project and it’ll continue to be one. Yap, things might change.. things will change to a certain degree. We talked about dedicated domain, native content, case studies of how we do things in our jobs, etc. But the essence of SWIPE, digest part will always stay the same.
Having said that, please read the rest of the page… the origin of SWIPE, your email in our list, problems and future actions.
📅UPDATE 10/29/2024
👋Hi, Vlad from the SWIPE crew here.
SWIPE started as a free Media publication in 2016 that covers digital marketing in general, though it always felt like the sum of our interests. When I say us, I mean Nicolas and me, Vlad, the funding heads.
Nicolas left the project in 2018, and ever since, I’ve been running SWIPE as a side hustle that never earned any money (and I did not expect that at all) but helped me explore and research digital marketing topics, bookmark cool reads I’d never consider otherwise, and stay in contact with like-minded marketers, business developers, and developers.
The thing is, I have a knack for many things, starting with SEO but also PPC, development (I started with HTML and CSS back in the days of old), and design (Photoshop over Figma). Running SWIPE helped me keep a tap on what works and what’s new in these fields.
So today, SWIPE is kind of all of the above + much more. What is SWIPE?
SWIPE is a free bi-weekly publication. Your playbook for AI, Marketing, and Web Development success. A digest and an overview of the news, tools, tips, tricks, and tactics from the world of AI, web development, and marketing that you can use to grow yourself and your business.
SWIPE is not without problems!
Namely irregular updates and newsletter solution changes haunted us for years…even today. For the sake of complete transparency, let me address these.
Irregular updates. I do have a job in digital marketing, and sometimes it gets the better of me. I have a family, and they also need more of me. Finally, the world we live in is relentless, and it, too, affects everything I do. Everyhitng we do.
Newsletter solutions. Running SWIPE as a free publication is a logistical nightmare. Let me give you an example. Originally, SWIPE started on Medium, which was completely free. Then, the Medium platform started requiring you to log in so you could read. Then, they added a huge paywall.
On the other hand, sending a publication as a newsletter is tough…when in free mode OFC. We used MailChimp, but the free tier is low. So we opted out of Upscribe, SendGrid, SendinBlue, and even automation via Gmail, but all of them come with their own limitations. In the light of recent events, same can be said for our current platform Substack.
All the while, the number of followers, subscribers, likes, and shares grew pretty steadily, so today, SWIPE has close to 20k subscribers (almost 18k ported here) in various tools and services. And this is a problem. We value privacy above all! But adding you to a newsletter does not sound like I do, right?
👉Please bear with us🙏
If you feel like this is SPAM, please don't! SWIPE does not sell anything, not even newsletter subscriptions, and we have emails subscribed since 2016 when 2-type email authentification was not a standard like it is today. You or someone on your behalf added your email to the newsletter, and that’s the only reason you are here.
That said, we want to ensure we’re only sending emails to those who are interested. So, we'll remove everyone who isn't engaging with the emails (i.e., open emails). Please remember that this will take time while I re-arrange newsletter solutions, i.e., import to Substack. For now, the process is as follows:
we’re using an email checker to vet hard-bounce emails before adding them to the current list.
Emails that bounced during the send and had poor engagement/open rates will be unsubscribed. THE PURGE IS COMING (11/18/2024). Sorry, there is just no way around this.
Depending on the free tiers of the services I use ATM (Substack native sending and SendinBlue), emails will be delivered via one of these, and you'll get a clear unsubscribe link. Medium's newsletter service has been discontinued since May 2023.
Please remember that many services have been used in the past, and data may overlap, but you won't get bombarded with emails if you click on the UNSUBSCRIBE link.
Otherwise, feel free to subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website and never miss an update🙃
Subscribers and Open rate stats
📅UPDATE 10/29/2024
22 months into Substak, SWIPE grew to 18K subscribers. We did not know how the move would go. In foresight, changing platforms is not something I’d repeat and I hope I won;t have to. But with SWIPE being an on-and-off side hustle (well, not really a hustel when you come to thing of it), that was bound to happen. You can see the slow email-moving process in this chart.
What surprised me was a steady 25% newsletter open rate (on average) and a relatively low 10% unsubscription rate. This means that SWIPE has lost a bit over 1800 people so far. Even with the summer dip in the open rate, I am quite surprised by how much the open rate returned with the last two releases.
On the other hand, we did not do much to promote the newsletter to the new audience. For now, we get around ten new subscribers per month coming from Substack and social networks. I'm not sure if that’s a good result, but it is something we should do, and we will work on it.
Yes, SWIPE should have been better.
But as with any labor of love or side hustle, not enough time has been invested in it. I intend to change that in 2023.
The crew just got bigger.
Two guys have joined to help with SWIPE. We’re brainstorming the best ways to contribute equal parts to digest, and ideas about what more we can do are flying around. But ideas and plans are one thing, and reality is something else. Still, going through three bookmarks is better than one.
Ads and native content?
As I said, I/we haven’t done much promoting SWIPE. This is about to change because one of the new team members excels in PPC and ad dollars, and we are up for spending some cash to promote SWIPE.
Also, we’re considering having native original content. We all make a living by helping SaaS companies with their marketing efforts, from SEO and PPC to content creation…so why not share our experience? After all, we are huge advocates of learning from others' examples.
Dedicated domain is coming. The great purge of emails is coming. Survery about native content is coming. All I can say is stay tuned for news.
Why Substack?
Well… SUBSTACK is awesome. I personally followed many different newsletters before I moved SWIPE. Also, I am guilty of sharing what they create. I still have Substack Notes to explore and follow rigorously, but being part of a community of people who share your interests already bears many fruits.
I invite you to join in.
To learn more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
