Unlock Your Substack Potential with Data-Driven Application
I Analyzed My Substack Niche and Built an App - Now You Can Too
Joining Substack felt like stepping into a completely new world for me. Initially, I thought about writing beyond just programming — topics like childcare, gardening, cooking, and travel intrigued me. But then I wondered:
Are there others writing about these topics?
How can I find out how popular a niche is based on subscriptions?
Can I learn from the top-performing newsletters?
How crowded is my niche in the Substack ecosystem?
I had so many questions. That’s when I started looking into a systematic way of retrieving insights to make informed decisions.
After some digging, I realized that many others were also interested in understanding the landscape of their field before diving in.
Since it was relatively easy for me to gather and visualize the data, I thought — why not build a tool to make this information accessible to others? And so, this project was born.
The Tool Plan
I wanted the tool to do four key things for me:
Display important metrics that matter to me.
Allow me to combine and intersect different keywords to see how the data shifts.
Provide detailed insights about my own newsletter — especially understanding Substack’s tiered data structure, which surprised me.
Show me the top-performing newsletters so I could understand my competitive ceiling.
Technical Design
Inspired by Finn Tropy , I decided to store all retrieved data in my database. This way, I wouldn’t be at the mercy of Substack’s API — if they ever change their schema or restrict API access, my tool would still function.
Of course, this means that the data won’t always be real-time, but for understanding the overall landscape, do you really need subscriber counts to be precise down to the last digit?
For the tech stack, I wanted to keep things simple. I had previously struggled with backend-frontend hosting setups — either combining them in a non-scalable way or maintaining separate hosts, which felt excessive. This time, I decided to try Next.js with Vercel, known for its smooth deployment experience. And it turned out to be the best choice yet.
Everything was seamless — until I deployed the app. The Substack API worked perfectly on my local machine but wasn’t returning the correct results on Vercel. That was an unexpected hurdle.
How It Works
The dashboard is designed with a left-right panel layout, making navigation intuitive.
Newsletter Analytics: Displays various data visualizations to analyze trends.
My Newsletter: Allows users to search for detailed insights about their own newsletter.
Member Analytics: A feature I built primarily for my own use — I was curious about how coding, web development, and product-related newsletters affect trends.
Users can perform union searches (combining multiple keywords) or intersection searches (narrowing down to common results).
One thing you may notice from the screenshots is that certain newsletter fields seem off — for example, the tool might show zero AI-related newsletters when there are obviously many.
This discrepancy is due to how Substack organizes and indexes keywords. Some keywords might be too short to be fetched, while others might not be indexed properly. After testing various keywords, I found that Substack’s search results on their website closely matched the API results, so this is likely a platform limitation.
Additionally, since Substack’s API isn’t designed for large-scale use, it likely applies rate limits on shared hosting or deployed projects.
To work around this, I decided to fetch keyword and newsletter data locally and store it in the database, ensuring users can access the information without running into API restrictions.
If you search for a keyword and don’t find results, feel free to submit a request through the contact form — I’ll add it as soon as possible.
Try It Out!
Would you be interested in exploring your Substack niche with this tool? I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback! Here’s the link:
Substack Explorer
Find and track the best newsletters in your fieldwww.substackexplorer.com
Finding the Substack API
A lot of people have asked me where I found the Substack API. Honestly, I just asked AI to help me. But to save you the hassle, I created a small collection of API endpoint documentation.
Substack Explorer
Substack API documentation
Feel free to check it out, and let me know if you find any corrections or additions!
Enjoy exploring, and happy writing on Substack!
That’s awesome! I have been thinking for weeks that I should build a tool that will help me better understand my pub and notes. I’m glad you came out with it. You come up with some amazing product ideas. Keep up the good work.
Thank you Jenny! Also I may check out next.js for my little project (figuring out how to do it as is has become challenging). So thanks for that!