🤖 Weekend AI Launch #003: Substack Search

AI tools in 48 hours - from idea to launch.

Hello creators 👋🏼

I'm excited to share the third launch from Weekend AI: Substack Search (powered by AskSubstack).

First of, thank you for all the warm support on last week’s AskSubstack launch. I had so much fun building it and chatting with many of you. Big thanks to everyone who tried it and shared feedback 🙏🏼

Here’s the original post for those who missed last week’s launch.
TL;DR: AskSubstack turns any Substack into a chatbot for you and your readers to interact with.

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This week’s launch was inspired by the community.

Karo (Product with Attitude)

commented on AskSubstack launch last week. Here’s a snippet:

In my Substack roadmap post, you'll see so many people calling out discoverability as the weak spot, this nails it (for content).

That led me to re-reading her Substack roadmap post, especially the section on Discoverability Improvements. If you haven’t read it yet, you should!

And I agree. The discoverability on Substack is rough. I tested the built-in search and… it’s not great.

So I built something better.

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Introducing Substack Search

A creator-focused search engine that returns relevant posts based on your questions and highlights the writers behind them.

Substack Search does a few things:

• Finds old and new posts that answer your questions

• Helps you discover writers who are worth following

• Drives traffic to paid and free articles

New writers? If your work’s relevant, it’ll show up.
Paid posts? They’re surfaced too, bringing more eyes to your premium content.

Here’s how it looks:

Super excited to share this with you 🤓
Give Substack Search a try and let me know what you think.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

I recently launched Weekend AI 🧪 - my space for building and sharing AI tools that can 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive.

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Substack Search: Find The Best Voices on Substack Instantly

🔗 Landing page for AskSubstack
🔗 Try the Substack Search

I want Substack Search to be your go-to search engine whenever you’re looking for something on Substack.

Wondering who to follow?
With Substack Search, it’s now easy to find out who’s writing about the topics you care about 🚀

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Launch breakdown

Build time: ~10 hours

Frontend:
The frontend was simple to build for both mobile and web.

Pro tip: When you use tools like v0 (or similar) to design your interface, ask it to include mock data. This makes backend development much easier, since you know exactly what structure your endpoints should return.

Backend:
The backend was smooth, thanks to the mock data and last week’s chatbot build. I reused a lot of the structure, created a new endpoint for Substack Search, and returned what the frontend expected.

Build time for Substack Search: 3–4 hours
Remaining time: Refactoring last week’s codebase.

Improvements this week:

• Added usage tracking to get a sense what users are searching for

• Migrated backend to Supabase!

• Built a magic link login system so that creators have better control over chatbot access to their users

  • This turns out to be more complicated than expected because of the sub-domain routing 🤦🏻‍♂️ but it’s now fully working ✅

Search Engine:
Right now, it’s a simple vector search. Next step is to scale up ingestion and improve search quality.

Launch time: 1 hour

Video for marketing:
Made a quick screen recording using the same zoom-in/out method from last week. Here’s the demo video:

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Challenges

No big blockers on the Substack Search itself.

The real pain this week was building authentication across sub-domains. To this, I have learned a lot!

Also, still no documentation yet 🙈
But that’s definitely on the to-do list. Every launch teaches me something new, and I want to capture it all.

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Next step

1. Finalise, automate, and scale the ingestion pipeline

2. Document Document Document — reflect on all three launches and write proper documentation for everything I’ve learned so far

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Third week of Weekend AI. Third launch.
Try out Substack Search and let me know what you think!

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Are there any AI tools you wish existed, or pain points you’re facing that you’d love AI to solve? I would love to learn more!

Happy learning,

Ryan O. 🎮