TL;DR: We did some things well, and a lot of things wrong. Hopefully you can learn from what we did well and from our mistakes.
It's now been about 3 weeks since Brian and I launched Startups From the Bottom, an email newsletter delivering a startup idea to your inbox every day. We're posting this in hopes that you can learn from what we did well and from our mistakes.
How We Did:
Let’s get right to the part that everyone likes to see...the stats:
Needless to say, we didn't exactly blow up. Traffic levels we’re not good, and we lost a little bit of steam the past two weeks. In 20 days, we ended up getting 532 subscribers to our email list though, meaning our conversion rate was just over 42%.
What We Did Well
- Our landing page was well-crafted. Because of that, conversion rate was through the roof (~42%). We think it did well because it was specific, free, and because we targeted highly relevant channels.
- We built a good product. People seem to love our emails. We get a lot of positive feedback, and are seeing open rates of about 55%. We've had 17 people unsubscribe from the newsletter, which is less than 1 per day.
- We tracked everything with a detailed spreadsheet. Every post, thread, or comment was logged. We also tracked where every conversion came from. This was tedious, but has allowed us to determine what tasks and post types are getting us the most subscribers.
Launch Improvements
I’ll be honest, our launch could have done better. Below is a list of things that we wish we had done. Make sure that you consider these things, and you’re launch will do better:
- Spend more time on the initial “launch” posts when introducing it to everyone. Shipping early and often is good, but the first time you put your product out there, you want to make a good impression. Spend an extra 30 minutes to write a good introductory post.
- Stay persistent! If you look at our graph, you can see that traffic dropped off significantly after about 10 days. That’s because we slowed down on posting, and stopped working as hard.
- Reach out to more social channels. The spreadsheet is a good for knowing what channels pay off, but we should have explored a few more channels. All of our posts we’re in forums.
- Give people a reason to come back. We asked many of you for product feedback after we launched. The most recommended thing to implement was to publish more content ON THE SITE. If you look at the stats, we have almost no returning visitors. Our landing page was great, but we don’t have any way to encourage website visitors to come back. It’s just an opt-in for an email newsletter right now, and that needs to change. This recommendation was great, and we’re in the process of fixing this problem.
If we implemented those 4 improvements from the beginning, I think we could have had a much more successful launch. If you have any suggestions, comments, or feedback on what we could improve on, please let us know!
Startups From the Bottom is an email newsletter delivering a startup idea to your inbox every day.