Substack Newsletter Sponsor Lead Extractor

Turn Substack newsletter references into sponsor-ready author sales leads — the author's publicly declared contact email, MX/DNS-verified emails + phones + socials + tech stack from the newsletter's own site, an A–D lead score, a sponsor-readiness signal (publishing recency + frequency + catalog size), and a newlyLaunched flag. Clean, deduped, and billed per successful contact.

Newsletter sponsorship is a booming B2B market — agencies and brands actively buy "find newsletters to sponsor" lists. This actor is the newsletter twin of our Podcast Sponsor-Ready Host Lead Extractor: same public-RSS <itunes:owner> email pattern, same shared enrichment layer, zero new infrastructure.

Why this actor (not another content scraper)

Every other Substack actor on the Apify Store (digispruce/substack-scraper, scraper_guru/substack-scraper, …) sells raw post content. None turn a newsletter into a sponsorship sales lead:

• the author's publicly declared contact email from the RSS feed (<itunes:owner> / <itunes:email> + <webMaster>) — ranked first;
• MX/DNS-verified emails, phones, socials, and tech stack scraped from the newsletter's own publication site (the RSS channel <link>);
• an A–D sponsor-readiness grade from publishing recency + frequency + catalog size + reachability, with a plain-English pitch-readiness line;
• a newlyLaunched rolling-window flag for fresh-newsletter prospecting;
• per-verified-success pricing — you are never billed for a newsletter that returns no contact (the #1 complaint about flat-rate RSS dumpers).

Inputs

Field	Type	Required	Description
newsletters	string[]	yes (≥1)	Substack publication URLs (https://platformer.substack.com), bare publication slugs (platformer), custom domains (lennysnewsletter.com), or direct feed URLs (https://platformer.substack.com/feed). One record per resolved newsletter.
verifyEmails	boolean	no (default true)	Validate the best contact email's domain against live MX/DNS records.
enrichWebsite	boolean	no (default true)	Fetch the newsletter's own site and extract emails/phones/socials/tech. Disable for faster runs when only the RSS owner email is needed.
concurrency	integer	no (default 5)	Newsletters processed in parallel (1–10).
proxyConfiguration	object	no	Optional. Only needed if you hit rate limits; the actor works without a proxy.

No keyword search: Substack has no keyless keyword-search API (the search page is JavaScript-rendered and its XHR endpoint is gated). Discovery is explicit-ref only — the same pattern as our Website Contact & Shopify lead actors. Pass the newsletter references you already have.

Output schema

One record per resolved newsletter (see the sample below). Fields:

Field	Description
inputRef / matchType	The raw input reference and how it was resolved (slug / url / feed).
feedUrl / title / author / website / summary / category / language	Newsletter metadata from the RSS feed.
ownerEmail / ownerName / webMaster	The author's publicly declared contact email + name from the RSS <itunes:owner> and <webMaster> tags.
emails	Deduped contact list — owner email first, then webMaster, then MX/DNS-verified emails from the newsletter's own site.
emailVerified	true if the best email's domain has an MX (or fallback A) record.
phones / socials / techStack	From the newsletter's own site (enrichment layer).
postCountInFeed / lastPostDate / postsLast30Days	Publishing cadence (sponsor-reachability signal).
newlyLaunched	true if the catalog is young and the latest post is within the rolling 90-day window.
sponsorReadiness / sponsorLabel	A–D grade + plain-English pitch-readiness line.
leadScore	A–D data-richness grade.
hasContact	Whether any real contact signal was found (gates billing).

Real-run sample

Run input:

{ "newsletters": ["https://www.lennysnewsletter.com", "platformer"] }

Result dataset (real, live-verified 2026-07-16):

[
  {
    "inputRef": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
    "matchType": "url",
    "feedUrl": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/feed",
    "title": "Lenny's Newsletter",
    "author": "Lenny Rachitsky",
    "website": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com",
    "ownerEmail": "lenny@lennyrachitsky.com",
    "webMaster": "lenny@lennyrachitsky.com",
    "language": "en",
    "postCountInFeed": 20,
    "lastPostDate": "2026-07-13T15:02:17+00:00",
    "postsLast30Days": 20,
    "newlyLaunched": false,
    "emails": ["lenny@lennyrachitsky.com"],
    "emailVerified": true,
    "phones": [],
    "socials": {},
    "techStack": ["Cloudflare", "Express", "Google Tag Manager", "React"],
    "sponsorReadiness": "A",
    "leadScore": "B",
    "hasContact": true
  },
  {
    "inputRef": "platformer",
    "matchType": "slug",
    "feedUrl": "https://platformer.substack.com/feed",
    "title": "Platformer",
    "author": "Casey Newton",
    "website": "https://platformer.substack.com",
    "ownerEmail": "platformer@substack.com",
    "webMaster": "platformer@substack.com",
    "language": "en",
    "postCountInFeed": 20,
    "lastPostDate": "2024-01-12T01:00:49+00:00",
    "postsLast30Days": 0,
    "newlyLaunched": false,
    "emails": ["platformer@substack.com"],
    "emailVerified": true,
    "phones": [],
    "socials": {},
    "techStack": ["Cloudflare", "Express", "React"],
    "sponsorReadiness": "C",
    "leadScore": "B",
    "hasContact": true
  }
]

Notes on truthfulness: lenny@lennyrachitsky.com is the author's real own-domain email declared in the public RSS feed and MX-verified — a prime sponsor target (active, 20 posts in the last 30 days → sponsor A). platformer@substack.com is Substack's public forwarding address for the publication (it forwards to the author) — a usable sponsor contact, and the actor honestly grades Platformer C because it last published in January 2024 (Platformer left Substack). The actor never invents emails; when no contact is found, hasContact is false and the record is not billed.

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price	When charged
Sponsor-Ready Newsletter Lead (primary)	$0.008	Once per newsletter that returns at least one real contact signal + publishing metadata.
Verified Newsletter Email	$0.003	When a newsletter yields at least one MX/DNS-validated email.
Sponsor-Readiness Signal	$0.001	When the A–D grade is computed.
Actor Start	$0.0001	Once per run.

Zero upstream compose cost (self-contained: public Substack RSS + the newsletter's own public site), so the primary event is priced well above per-run compute. A run that returns 50 sponsor-ready leads with verified emails costs ≈ $0.008×50 + $0.003×50 + $0.001×50 + $0.0001 ≈ $0.60.

Performance & troubleshooting

• Speed: each newsletter is 1 feed fetch + (optionally) 1 site fetch, run concurrently up to concurrency. ~50 newsletters/minute on the default concurrency.
• No contact returned / hasContact: false: the newsletter's RSS feed had no <itunes:owner> email and its site exposed no contact info — not billed. Some Substack-hosted newsletters only expose the <slug>@substack.com forwarding address; that is a real, MX-verified sponsor contact.
• Stale grade (D/C): a newsletter that stopped publishing scores low on recency — correct, not a bug (e.g. a publication that left Substack).
• matchType: invalid / empty result: the reference could not be resolved to a feed (bad slug, dead link). Confirm the publication exists.
• Rate limits: rare (Substack RSS is generous). If you hit them, set concurrency lower or add a proxyConfiguration.

ToS & safety

Contact is taken only from the newsletter author's own publicly declared RSS email (<itunes:owner> / <webMaster>) and the newsletter's own public website — identical to the podcast actor's public-RSS pattern. No account scraping, no behind-login data, no API keys, no residential proxy. Safe for outreach use.