100 newsletter subscribers in first 24 hours, here's how

Hey Hackers,

A couple months back I started a newsletter ExplodingIdeas.co and got 100 subscribers in the first 24 hours.

Now I have over 1,000 here’s how you can do the same…

Market-Product Fit

Market-Product Fit is essential if you want fast subscribers. I have bootstrapped multiple successful projects in the past (meaning profitable) and it’s become my belief that instant traction is imperative. (vocalpresets.com - sold it, sleepy sound - profitable).

This means that once you put out an mvp you should be able to get results with minimal effort. Minimal effort could be a facebook post that gets a ton of comments, it could also be a reddit post that goes #1. This is a key indicator of market-product fit.

Market-Product fit means you have found a market to create a product for.

Building an audience

One of the most important parts of running an online business is having warm leads to engage. Therefore, all of my projects start with newsletters or a simple MVP I can build myself.

For the vocalpresets project I posted in music subreddits and said “I just made some vocal presets i’m giving away for free, anyone want them?” a bunch of people responded on reddit and the post went #1. In response to some of the comments I put the link to the website to download the free vocal preset. There was instant demand. I was getting ~50 signups a day with no paid ads. These signups were in exchange for the free vocal preset. For the next few months for that project I sent a weekly newsletter with tips on how to make vocals sound more professional. The demographic that was subscribing was aspiring music artists that didn’t know how to engineer. Through the newsletter I gave them tips and more free vocal presets that I created on my computer.

After about 3 months I had over 10,000 subscribers and decided to launch upgraded vocal preset bundles. Instantly there was a market of warm leads for me to sell to. I made over $1,000 day one of launch.

In the case of Exploding Ideas the market is people that want to build startups. Newsletter subscriptions are free. People who want to get new weekly ideas, entrepreneur interviews and hear about new trending niches (from ahrefs, google trends etc.) can subscribe.

I tested this by building a simple landing page website in nextjs and hooking it up to the sheets.best API. Sheets.best lets you easily set up a Google Sheet API endpoint. So instead of integrating mailchimp in your signup form on your website, you can just do the signup form through Google Sheets. It’s free as well. It’s also super simple in terms of integration.

In order to get the initial signup I went to startup and side hustle facebook groups and engaged in the comments section. Some people were talking about wanting to start startups but didn’t have any ideas. I told them to check out explodingideas.co on a couple posts and waited to see what would happen. A couple hours later I had about 10 signups.

Instantly I felt the momentum so doubled down doing the same thing for the next few hours. By the morning when I woke up I had 103 signups.

Numbers Game

This is by far the most important part. I have had so many failed projects. It’s so important to put your ego aside when testing new ideas online.

I have had about 25 failed projects that either didn’t get traction or were money pits. Therefore I've found it’s best to build a super high level MVP and build your audience before launching an online product.

Here are some of my standout failures

DataDegen - NFT enterprise data collection platform, spent thousands and it failed
Solaminter - solana nft marketplace, spent thousands and it failed
Musicalwalls - print on demand canvas, no market/product fit for the designs
BotWarrior - Fiverr for bots, got some newsletter signups but took much effort per signup

I found out these were failures because I built the product prior to having the audience, even though I interviewed people saying they were interested in potentially using it, when the product was in front of them they didn’t actually use it. Every time I ignore Market-Product fit and start an MVP building the product before finding the market I get burned.

What I learned

The best projects I've ever had have always started with a super simple $0-$50 MVP that got instant traction. Typically the only money I invest to start out is in buying a domain name, in the vocalpresets example it was $12 for the domain and $30 to setup the Shopify store. In the SleepySound example it was $50 to put out the first album of content.

When launching projects, be super flexible. Sometimes it hurts a bit when an idea you’re pumped about sounds great but ends up no one is very interested. It’s important to put the ego aside and move on to the next as fast as possible. Fail fast and move on.

Each failure brings you one step closer to that great idea with instant Market-Product fit.

Hope this helps someone. Feel free to engage below or dm me @ericlamcrypto on Twitter if you want to talk.