What is N2S the Substack Post Scheduler?
My Experience with Newsletter to Socials
Image credit: Matt Kragger’s Instagram.
Hey Guys,
As some of you know I’m extremely interested in early-stage Creators especially as it pertains to Substack’s community.
I’m primarily interested in non-fiction categories and writers who bring their talents that might be valuable to professionals (i.e. LinkedIn’s audience). I’m trying to get to know and interview a variety of these early-stage Creators.
I’m one of the very few people who have devoted all of their time to being a Creator on Substack and elsewhere, with limited monetization in place. I’ve done this because I really love new challenges.
Recently I came across a builder, Matthew Krager, who is specifically building a tool to empower Substack writers to help with their growth on social. His early stage tool is called Newsletter to Socials, or N2S for short. It also has its own Substack:
Matt is already a developer at Stripe. That he has dedicated himself to this side project in service of Substack Creators is really significant. I’m very impressed with GenZ approaches to the future of the internet. Marketing automation is hard, especially for a solo-entrepreneur. Let’s give credit where credit is due.
N2S is just the Beginning
It makes you wonder if Substack one day had its own builders and app-ecosystem, what it could become? Or what if E-commerce store managers and brands on Shopify built their own Substacks for origin stories and product evolution?
Newsletter to Socials is an all-in-one tool that turns your newsletter or blog into engaging social media content. You focus on writing. We'll handle getting you seen.
My immediate reaction to the tool was finally, this is a way I could automate some posts on social in ecosystems where I don’t spend much time:
Instagram
Pinterest (TBA)
For Newsletter branded accounts on Twitter
Authors page on Facebook
Marketing automation via Email marketing is a huge deal, just ask Klaviyo: (Shopify recently invested $100 million in them.)
I have a wide experience in post schedulers like Buffer, Hootsuite and others in my experience in marketing and being a consultant for startups. Matt is carefully interviewing Substack Creators to identity their pain points, needs and what features are most impactful for them. This in my opinion, is the right approach.
N2S is able to pull text and quotes seamlessly from your RSS feed (free posts) and create image and text posts from them and transform them into seamless campaigns. So for us early-stage Creators on Substack there’s also early-stage builders, and I think it’s important that we support each other.
N2S could have automated wordpress, or Ghost, or any other blogging service’s audience, but he chose Substack. Maybe he felt the genuine momentum of Substack’s community and saw how writers, creators and hobbyists were struggling with growth on social media, I am not quite sure. Whatever the motivation, builders are really valuable. While all of those community Discords, Reddit posts and Facebook groups are great, they don’t actually help us grow our free subscribers lists necessarily.
You need to put in the work in the field, and you need to use tools that can save you time. Marketing and sales are a huge part of the hustle of building a successful Substack Newsletter. There are many aspects to cross-promotion and posts re-use that ordinary writers, activists, hobbyists and artists may not be aware of.
Saves Creators Time doing social media posts
Automates quotes as hooks into social media posts
Enables Creators to focus more on the creative aspect of their craft
Smart Automation
N2S is even able to take the “Controversial” tid-bits from my posts and enable me to use it as a hook quote embedded in an image automatically.
For Instagram, Facebook and for a Newsletter account on Twitter I really like this feature. While I’ve only had a few days to test out N2S and give my feedback, I see huge potential in this tool.
Matt isn’t just a random developer. He’s also first and foremost a Substack Creator. His interest in food and the incredible visuals gave him ideas on how to create new kinds of posts on Instagram. Substack has an entire page for Foodie culture. This is Matt’s personal Substack:
Basic Walkthrough in How I’m using the Tool
With minimal clicks I can schedule a Campaign that takes my image and my snippet quote and the end result is pretty much the quote on own image I am looking for:
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From here I click on “Schedule Post” and then “Start Campaign” and a few seconds later:
So let’s see in 6 minutes what this produces:
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The tool can do a lot more than take snippets and make Quote hooks, but so far that’s what I’m doing the most.
Thanks for reading! If you think what I’m doing is valuable to someone and want to support, you can certainly do so.
Thank you so much for sharing my story! I'm excited for the future of the Substack community and absolutely want to be a part of its growth in anyway I can