One Embed, Two Platforms Growing at Once
How a Drippery signup widget silently converted a Medium reader into a Substack subscriber
Today, a Medium reader signed up for my email series through an embedded Drippery widget. Nothing unusual — except they also ticked an optional checkbox. That one click made them a Substack subscriber too.
I didn’t send a follow-up. I didn’t ask them to visit another page. One embed did the work of two platforms.
What actually happened
I built Drippery — a dead-simple drip email tool for creators. Every Medium article I publish includes an embedded Drippery signup form at the bottom. When someone signs up for an email sequence, they see an optional consent checkbox: “I also want to subscribe to the author’s Substack newsletter.”
It’s explicit. It’s opt-in. No tricks, no pre-checked boxes. The reader decides.
One person decided yes. That’s my first Substack subscriber acquired entirely through Drippery.
Why this matters more than it sounds
The conversion rate on that checkbox is technically 100% right now, which is meaningless with a sample size of one. But the mechanism is what matters.
Most creators treat every platform as a separate island. You publish on Medium, hope someone clicks your bio link, visits your Substack, and subscribes. That’s three steps of friction — and most people drop off after the first one.
With Drippery’s embed, it’s zero extra steps. The reader is already filling out a signup form. One additional checkbox converts them across platforms in the same action.
Even at a conservative 20–30% opt-in rate on that checkbox, every Medium article becomes a passive Substack growth engine.
The flywheel I accidentally built
Here’s what my content system looks like now:
Medium articles contain a Drippery embed widget and a Substack link. They bring discovery — new readers who’ve never heard of me.
Drippery embed converts those readers into email sequence subscribers. The optional checkbox simultaneously converts them into Substack subscribers.
Drippery email sequence nurtures subscribers over days and weeks, linking back to more articles and to this Substack.
Substack posts link to Drippery and Medium content, closing the loop.
Nothing is a dead end. Every piece feeds the next one.
The landing page piece of this flywheel was the last to ship — I wrote about how that came together in Three Features Shipped. One Was My Landing Page.
![[Build Log] Three features shipped. One was my landing page.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G2qy!,w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a73a219-91af-43c5-a26d-b9f13ccef2e4_1536x1024.png)
What I’m watching next
Right now, the numbers are tiny — one subscriber, one conversion. I’m not pretending this is a case study yet. It’s a proof of concept.
What I want to see is how the opt-in rate holds up at scale. If 100 people sign up through Drippery and 25 check the Substack box, that’s 25 subscribers I got without writing a single extra word of content or running any promo.
That’s the bet I’m making with Drippery: tools that grow your audience while you sleep, not tools that give you more work to do.
If you’re a creator publishing across multiple platforms, this is the exact problem Drippery solves. It’s in beta right now — drippery.app.
