325 newsletter subscribers in 5 months. Good or bad?
Hey Indie Hackers!
Would love to get people's feedback on my newsletter.
It's called Year 2049 and I started it as a fun way to learn about the eventsm discoveries, and inventions shaping the future through comics.
Each week, the format is 1 comic + a short article about the story behind it. I could really use some fresh eyes on my work and try to get feedback on whether the format makes sense or if the comic isn't adding value.
I'm at 325 subscribers so far and I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad thing since this is my first newsletter ever and I have no clue what to expect.
Here's the link if you wanna check it out and tell me what you think: https://year2049.substack.com/archive
I'd say that whether it's good or bad really depends on your goals. What would you like to accomplish with this newsletter?
I'm also in the email newsletter space, although it's a paid newsletter - so a bit different). But happy to answer any questions I can!
My goal is definitely to grow the audience to the point where I can make some money off sponsorships to reinvest into products I want to create or even creating a paid version with more content (I use Substack).
How's your experience been running a paid newsletter? Would love to hear more about your journey so far
In that case, I'd say that 325 subscribers in five months probably isn't a sustainable growth rate. I don't know the math for free newsletters nearly as well as paid newsletters, but I imagine that 10,000 subscribers is probably a good goal for having an income-earning free newsletter. It really depends on your audience, as well.
Does Substack give you information on your conversion rate? The reason I ask is that, if you want to scale up the size of your newsletter, you'll need to identify the bottleneck that you currently have, which is one of two things:
Not enough people in your target audience are being introduced to your newsletter.
The newsletter isn't entertaining/useful enough for people to subscribe to.
Your conversion rate is a good indicator of which one of these is the bottleneck. If you have a relatively high conversion rate ( >10% might be a fine rule-of-thumb), then you are resonating with your niche and you should focus on finding ways of reaching more people within that niche. But if you're at very low conversion rates, say 1-3%, I'd worry that I'm not writing content my audience finds truly valuable.
Now, that advice is focused on a free newsletter. With a free newsletter, you need a really large audience that engages with your content. You're not competing for their money, but for their time. So the focus is mostly on entertainment.
For a paid newsletter, it's harder to sell entertainment on a subscription basis. Instead, usually, people only spend money on newsletters if they are valuable and improve their life in some consistent way.
The one exception is people who have built an audience already of people that want to support that individual creator.
Looking at your newsletter, I think you're most likely going to be best off starting with a free newsletter. When I try to find examples of paid newsletters in the futurology space, I'm not finding many results. I imagine that it's a niche where people want their news for free, as opposed to the niche I'm in (founders who are looking for their next software business opportunity), where people are looking for actionable research.
So hopefully my thoughts give you some points to think about! One thing I thought was really interesting is that you said this:
It sounds like your end goal may not really have anything to do with this newsletter. What would you really like to be building? Why did you decide to launch a newsletter if you want to create products? Are the products related to futurology in some way?
Happy to share this, but I feel like I've given you enough to respond to! Our product is Software Ideas if you'd like to take a look and ask any specific questions.
First of all, you're awesome. Thanks for typing all this out.
I think my biggest problem is #1 (not enough people are being introduced to it). I think i've been spending a lot of time writing the newsletter, and not as much online promoting it or trying to create more "snackable" pieces of content that convert people to the newsletter. That's something I'm currently working on improving. I think my current subscribers are enjoying it (email open rates have been consistently above 45%).
I think my end goal involves creating my own products (for now, I'm thinking books but that may change) because I don't want to rely on advertizing revenue from a newsletter forever. I'm more focused on building an audience that's interested in futurology or even getting new people to be interested in it.
I definitely have some more thinking to do about future plans so I really appreciate all your questions above to make me re-evaluate certain things. Thanks a lot!
Glad I can be helpful! My email is kevin@softwareideas.io - feel free to reach out if there's ever more you want to chat about!
Sounds quite good, well done
thanks!