How I Grew My Newsletter from 0 to 4000 Subs in 7 Months 📈

Hi everyone!

My newsletter, Refactoring, hit 4000 subscribers last week! 🎉

Growth to 4000

I am incredibly excited about this, and wanted to share my process for growing it in the last months. Some context:

Got from 0 to 4000 subscribers in 7 months
Almost zero initial audience (~200 twitter followers)
I work on it 1hr daily + 4hrs (half a day) over the weekend (total 9hrs / week)

I focus mainly on four things:

📬 Write weekly
🐦 Twitter
🤝 Communities
💼 Linkedin

Let’s start 👇

1) 📬 Write weekly

I started with two articles per month, and moved to weekly after a couple of months or so. This vastly increased engagement and growth. It’s challenging, but you can do it.

If you write less than weekly I feel people forget who you are, and you are also not building a strong enough habit for yourself.

I spend 5 hrs a week to write (about half of the total time), here is my process: https://refactoring.fm/p/how-i-write-refactoring-

2) 🐦 Twitter

Once a week I post a long thread where I basically re-write the last article in a Twitter-friendly format.

Then I tweet ~once a day, but I schedule most tweets on FeedHive over weekend.

My tweets are about:

Content and resources related to the latest article (~twice a week)
General Engineering Leadership stuff (~twice a week)
Build in public updates (once per week)
Resurface old articles from the newsletter (once per week)

I also run this Twitter Ad — I have a budget of €10/day, and usually bring in new subscribers at €0.15 / subscriber. It also brings a lot of followers (~1 out of 5 subs)

Current growth comes 50% from this and 50% from organic, and I am pretty happy with the breakdown.

3) 🤝 Communities

I post my articles on 4-5 communities where I know I can find other Engineering Leaders. I also engage there and participate in other discussions.

My advice here is to find where your target niche hangs and be there constantly. Be helpful, do not spam, and occasionally plug your content.

4) 💼 Linkedin

I add ALL my subscribers to Linkedin. Yes you read that right 😅 and I reply to every single one who writes to me there.

You can’t believe how many great conversations are born because of this. People are genuinely amazed that you are connecting with them.

Once a week I also post a summary of my latest post, with a link to the full article. Nothing more, nothing less.

🏁 That’s it!

Linkedin and Twitter are my most important growth channels, I focus on them because they are scalable and compound over time.

Let me know your thoughts! And feel free to ask any questions 📣