October 5th, 2024

Moving to Beehiiv

This is a post that I will update this weekend with all the steps I am doing to move the newsletter.

05 October 2024 - 07:00 AM
First thing, I put the newsletter on private on Substack:

Screenshot of how the git commit looks like — How does it look like while being on private

05 October 2024 - 10:00 AM
Second, I need to manually unsubscribe people who unsubscribed from Substack between the first import (20 September) and now. I seem not to have found a way to delete all subscribers in Beehiiv and start from scratch.

I could have deleted everything and started from scratch, but I also have some imports running so I don't want to force my newsletter into a state where it has some errors (like I delete some subscribers and the imports are still running). Maybe it is just my developer brain that thinks about this :)

05 October 2024 - 11:56 AM
Third thing, I did a small PR to change how citation is displayed in our internal source:

A shoutout to Kevin Chambers, who quickly replied to all my questions, good or stupid, that I had. This helped me a lot with the migration.

05 October 2024 18:35 (06:35 PM)
After finalizing all the imports, I noticed there is a difference in the total number of subscribers between Beehiiv and Substack: Beehiiv has less than Substack.

I wrote a short script in Ruby to compare them and found:

Total missing lines: 118

🙃 - I am not sure why this difference exists.

I tried to import them manually, but Beehiiv reports back 0 imported. They are not found to be imported into the interface.

06 October 2024 - 00:04 AM
A ticket has been created after Kevin tried to help me debug this. We will probably have to consider announcing that some people will not receive the newsletter until this issue is solved.

06 October 2024 - 06:00 AM
I continue to edit the newsletter and add content to it

The editor is super good. I discovered that it allows markdown so I will do some PRs to my Rails app where I have the content and create the citations to generate some markdown ready to copy/paste in the editor.

I also want to play a bit with the API - the first thing I think is probably an integration between LemonSqueezy and updating the subscriber status on Beehiiv if possible. I will probably use https://developers.beehiiv.com/api-reference/subscriptions/put to add a custom field to the subscription and then create a dynamic segment from that. I will figure this out next week. But I am pretty excited to have an API and thus will be able to automate more stuff.

Just figured out a new task for today: export the paying subscribers in LemonSqueezy and cross-reference them with the subscribers marked as paid in Beehiiiv.

07 October 2024 - 06:30
I discovered that by default, Beehiiv does not have an RSS feed via a question on Ruby.social, where someone noticed that the newsletter feed is gone.

Found a way to generate one via Settings -> Publication -> RSS Feed, but the generated URL is not good: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/X67SCnFvlW.xml

I haven't been able to find a way to add an RSS feed button to the main website using the website builder.

I made a quick fix to https://feed.newsletter.shortruby.com and this will be the way to go for anyone that wants to add the newsletter feed. This reinforces my idea that whatever you build you should own the URLs. It allows you to add features that are missing or fix bugs even if the platform does not have support for them.

8 October 2024 06:23
Beehiiv support reviewed all the non-imported email addresses and confirmed that all of them are invalid. And I agree that it does not make any sense to import them. I don’t want to have subscribers just for numbers but I want people that are reading the newsletter.

So this issue is solved!