Using Substack + beehiiv for Growth

I’ve always wanted to leverage the social strategies of Substack with the monetization flywheel & open API of beehiiv to grow my newsletter. 

I figured out a way and I’m sharing the honey.

First, I do believe Substack and beehiiv are both awesome newsletter platforms. 

They just have different capabilities for growth:

• Substack - Closed. Build a network and grow together.

• beehiiv - Open. API. Monetize with an Ad network. Reinvest earnings to grow.

Once you build a network of followers in Substack, it gets scary to leave. You put in all this work to build up your network of newsletters that recommend yours.

But with this workflow, you don’t have to worry about giving that up. Plus, since people are still subscribing on Substack, you’ll still be driving subscribers to the newsletters that you recommend, too. Win Win.

Why Trust Me: Alex Lindahl is a GTM Engineer at Clay, Angel Investor, and Author of Claymation. Previously, he's spend over a decade working a fast growing startups such as Acquia, Snyk, & Chainguard.

This is how you can set up an automation to grow with both platforms.

Then be sure to check out how I use Clay to automate enrichments + segmentation for the audience.

The Workflow

This is part of a larger workflow that I have setup for claymation.io:

Step 1: Setting up Zapier Email Parser

Below is a video of how I set this up. You can also check out this more in depth guide from Zapier if you run into any trouble.

Overview:

1. Create Zapier Email Parser Inbox

2. Forward one of your Substack ‘New Subscriber’ emails to the Inbox

3. Show Zapier what info you want to extract

4. Subscriber emails will now be extracted from forwarded emails that you’ll then use in the next step when setup your Zap workflow (Zapier Email Parser to beehiiv)

Step 2: Create Zap

This is the workflow that we’re building and below is the video walkthrough so you can follow step by step.

And now the video walkthrough:

Step 3: Forward ‘New Subscriber’ Emails to Parser

The last step is setting up a filter in Gmail so you can forward all of the Substack email notifications to your Zapier Email Parser Inbox.

Gmail has step by step instructions here.

BOOM! Your workflow is set up and now you can leverage both Substack + beehiiv’s different growth strategies.

Discover more creative ideas on using Clay by referencing their Claybooks — which are step-by-step tactical guides on creative GTM solutions like this one.

If you’re on Substack and want to try beehiiv - use this link to get a 30 Day Trial + 20% OFF for 3 Months