🟧 StampFans

Russell Davies announced earlier today that he’s starting a physical print newsletter as an experiment via a new service called ‘StampFans‘ and this obviously caught my attention.

I love messing about on the borders between print and digital. It used to be a thing. 

So I’m going to do an experiment with and see if I can do anything interesting/worthwhile with it.

In the Not A Good Start department the URL they give you doesn’t seem to work as a link so you might need to copy and paste it. Try this: my.stampfans.com/russell-davies

Also, it seems the Stripe configuration is only for US addresses. Hopefully, they’ll fix that. Like I say, an experiment.

Despite these initial hiccups, Russell’s enthusiasm is clear, and his plan is simple:

I’m going to spend the rest of the year working out what to write. Once a month. Every month. Starting at the end of September. You can read along if you want. (It’ll cost you $3 a month, that’s the minimum cost. And it seems they only post to the UK, US and Canada. Sorry)

Now, you all know me well enough by now to know that I’m very into ideas of printing out the Internet, and alternate forms of web publishing. Having sent my own single page zine out 4 times a year via snail mail since 2022 ‘StampFans’ is extremely up my street.

I’ve written about the economics of printing and publishing physical newsletters at the links above. But here’s what StampFans offers, according to their site:

Starting a StampFans is free!

When you create a StampFans, you get instant access to a powerful publishing tool for free. No card required. We simply keep a small $3 fee per subscriber transaction. You set your own subscription fee (anything over $3/month). EXAMPLES If you charge a $6 subscription fee, you’ll keep $3/month per subscriber. With 100 subscribers, you’ll earn $300/month! If you charge a $9 subscription fee, you’ll keep $6/month per subscriber. With 100 subscribers, you’ll earn $600/month!

This is just letters in envelopes mind, not hand cut and folded zines like I send – which is a literal labour of love let me tell you – but 3 bucks on every issue/subscriber transaction to materialise a blog post into the physical postal system seems pretty reasonable, given what I’ve learnt about printing and shipping etc.

You are also getting something ‘real‘ for your money.

I’m starting a physical zine, a physical newsletter, in 2022 because I belive thats where I belive real value is.

As our culture moves / trends towards ever greater levels of abstraction, making and sending real things to real people is the way forward

StampFans, which launched in February is another sign that the ‘Real things for real people‘ culture that I want to be a part of, create and participate in, is growing.

I’ve reached out the Founder/CEO, we are going to have a call very soon. Will report back.

Update:

I had a call with the CEO and StampFans is a very cool service, and he seems like a lovely guy. The whole thing is being bootstrapped for now, by tapping into B2B sales and marketing infrastructure API’s to create this service.

He has plans for nice envelopes and all sorts. Love it!