$100 milestone...and why I'm not happy with it

Hello, my dear newsletter crew members!
I have learned a lot by reading your stories and today I wanted to share my experience with this community with two goals: first, help those who are entering this world now, and second to ask for help and advice.

First, some context and numbers around my project. My newsletter is a weekly news roundup about space exploration and human spaceflight, it’s called The Space Roundup - https://spaceroundup.substack.com/ - and I send an email every Sunday. It’s worth saying that I really enjoy writing it and it has allowed me to get in touch with a lot of very interesting people at top companies and organizations such as NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and more, so in that sense, I am very happy and extremely satisfied with the experience.

I have been consistently working on it for the last 7 months, 35 emails sent in total, spending around 1.5-2 hours per week. I have built an audience around a Twitter account (https://twitter.com/curiousAstrona) that has grown up to 1.3k followers and via a welcome DM for each new follower, I have managed to attract an audience of 120 subscribers. Basically, I post space-related news on Twitter plus weekly links to my newsletters, I get followers and some of them become subscribers. Open rates are around 30-40%.

Regarding my monetization strategy so far, I wanted my content to be available for free, so I decided to monetize it via Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/spaceroundup) and Ko-fi https://ko-fi.com/spaceroundup so that in case someone likes my content, they support me that way. So far I have 4 monthly patrons and 1 Kofi contributor: which summed up to $100 so far.

What’s next? I want to find one or two sponsors in my niche, and I’ll a link to help them contact me on my newsletter. I just need a couple of companies that are interested in my audience (they can be tech, engineering, defense firms, etc) and that are willing to pay a small monthly fee for a banner or some sponsored content. I have even been contacted by a couple already, so I think there’s potential in there BUT here’s the problem: there’s no way they are sponsoring a newsletter with so few subscribers.

So the obvious problem here is that I don’t seem to be able to grow my audience: I am consistent, I create content my readers love (even some of them pay for it just as a way to support it), I amplify it on social media, and there’s a niche of companies that open to paying for sponsorships, but my audience is so small that I would need to multiply it (I think something between 1000 and 5000 subscribers might start sounding right to my potential sponsors)…and I don’t know how.

That’s why I need your help: I have signed up for several listing sites with little luck, I’m afraid of being shut down as a spammer on Reddit and Facebook groups if I post a link in there, organic growth on Twitter is soooooooo slow (7 months to get 1.3k followers and 120 subs? Come on!)… so yes, here I am asking for your feedback: what’s your experience getting to that first 1k-5k subscribers mark? What about min amount of subs to get a sponsor? What about other channels to amplify your content?

I’m all ears! 🙂
Thanks a lot for your help and for sharing all your knowledge with this great community

Cheers!