Meet Substack Summary Generator - So Your New Readers Can Catch Up On Your Newsletter Quickly!
Transform your Substack content into bite-sized brilliance.
You know what's funny? Sometimes the best ideas come from scratching your own itch. After diving back into coding (remember my journey getting back into development with Ruby on Rails?), I've been thinking about creating something genuinely useful for the Substack community.
Here's the thing - have you ever discovered a great newsletter but felt overwhelmed by all the past content you'd need to catch up on? That's exactly the problem I wanted to solve with my latest project: the Substack Summary Generator.
What is it? It's a dead simple tool that takes your Substack URL, analyzes your recent posts (you choose how many), and creates a clean, shareable summary page. Each post gets:
A quick overview
Key concepts
Important keywords
Direct link to the full post
The best part? No sign-ups, no complicated setup - just paste your URL and go. Just like when I built magenda, I wanted to keep it simple and focused on solving one specific problem really well.
How to Use It:
Enter your Substack URL
Pick how many recent posts to summarize (1-5)
Hit "Generate Summaries" and let the AI work its magic
Share your custom summary page anywhere!
Perfect for:
Newsletter creators wanting to give new subscribers a quick catch-up
Readers discovering new Substacks
Creating quick digests of your premium content
Sharing collections of your best posts
But here's where it gets exciting - this is just the beginning. Remember how I talked about building with AI? I'm thinking about creating something bigger: a Substack Growth Dashboard.
Picture this:
A chatbot fine-tuned with your posts
Viral content analysis in your category
Growth comparisons and actionable tips
And much more!
Here's where I need your help: Since Substack doesn't have a public API (meaning I can only work with publicly available data), I'd love to hear what features would be most valuable to you. What metrics would help you grow? What insights would make your newsletter better?
This project is part of my ongoing journey of building useful tools while learning and sharing the process. Sometimes the simplest solutions can make the biggest impact D:
Try it out and let me know what you think! And if you have ideas for the Growth Dashboard, drop them in the comments below - I'd love to hear your thoughts!
PS. How do you rate today's email? Leave a comment or "❤️" if you liked the article - I always value your comments and insights, and it also gives me a better position in the Substack network.
WOW - works quite well. I’d love to see a solid summary of the entire newsletter to help me decide whether to subscribe or not. Sometimes, newsletters include one or two interesting notes, but when looking at the overall content, they often cover topics I’d rather avoid—such as politics or subjects that don’t interest me. The last five notes are useful, but they’re not always accurate - please review the key concepts generated from my post on books for example :-) Anyway - I wish could do things like this.