Automate adding Substack subscribers via POST request

TL;DR

Execute this CURL request through your platform of choice:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3" -d "email=email_to_add&source=subscribe_page" https://www.yourname.substack.com/api/v1/free?nojs=true

Discussion

Substack is great for a variety of reasons, such as it being:

• Easy to use.

• Visually appealing.

• Full of growth features like recommendations.

It is, however, missing a KEY feature:

It has no API!

And it has no public plans to release one.

Since it’s 2023, I am pretty sure this is a conscious decision in order to prevent using Substack with other email tools (e.g. ConvertKit, etc.). Or maybe they are just focused on trying to be another Twitter.

In any case, there is a workaround.

Specifically, using the above API call, you can auto-subscribe people to your newsletter.

Here are some key considerations to think about when doing so:

• Make sure people opt-in to getting subscribed to your newsletter. You don’t want them marking it as spam (because you are in fact spamming them). For example, for free resources I post on Gumroad I include this notice to make sure people know they will get added:

• You’ll need a platform to handle the API call for you. I use Xano (about which I write an entirely separate newsletter).

• If you have double opt-in enabled, people will just get the request that they confirm their subscription, which they might ignore:

  

In any case, this workaround is a huge step forward and majorly improvement my Substack experience. I was so frustrated with this feature gap that I was considering leaving the platform entirely.

But now we are off to the races!

I can create email sequences using other platforms, build lead magnets to capture emails, and get everyone into my “main” list (Substack) in an automated fashion.