How did you get your first 100 email subscribers?
Sometimes the hardest part is to get start the ball rolling and often it can be so hard to get those early adopters to trust you enough with their email!
What tactics did you use to get your first 100 email subscribers? If you've reached 1000 perhaps share any additional tactics too!
#ask-ih
Trending on Indie Hackers
I interviewed 10 people for Indie Hackers, but in the course of doing so, I cold emailed about 150 people to ask them to be interviewed. The vast majority of them said no, but a good deal of them agreed to be on my initial email list. That got me my first 30 or so. And the 10 people who said yes to being interviewed also joined my list, which pushed me to 40.
I didn't ask any friends, family, colleagues, or acquaintances to join. That's just a personal thing of mine… I'm too embarrassed to show anyone but strangers what I'm working on until it's good.
Anyway, after a few weeks of building the site and conducting interviews, I launched it on Hacker News. It did very well, in part because the people who I interviewed help me upvote the submission so it hit the front page, and in part because the site was tailor-made for the HN audience so the people there upvoted it to the top. That was August 11, 2016. Eight days later on the 19th, I hit 1000 subscribers to the mailing list.
very inspiring thanks for sharing.. I strongly identify with the second paragraph
Wow, I felt this. What format was your interview in??
The interviews are all here
Thanks Courtland. How did you choose who to cold email at the start?
I spend a few days online reading stories and forum comments written by bootstrapped founders. As I went, I added them all to a list and tried to track down their email addresses. That was actually fairly difficult, so a good bit of my outreach was responding to people's forum comments when I couldn't find their email addresses.
Did you try cloning their repos from Github? I've noticed a huge uptick in people finding my old email that way the past couple of years.
Didn't know that trick, clever
@csallen do you have any old articles showing what v.1 of indiehackers looked like?
Here's what it looked like in late August 2016, exactly 10 days after launch: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1g8bfdh7d2s5b1r/businesses--2016-08-21.png?dl=0
The link to "Forum" at the top wasn't actually functional. It took you to an empty page with a box asking you to sign up for the mailing list so you'd be emailed when (if) I built and launched the forum.
nice, thanks Courtland :) It's nice how you've managed to preserve a lot of the visual identity since so early on, did you start from scratch with it or use a template or theme?
I just started from scratch, no template.
I knew I wanted to do a dark site, because it would be unique and memorable to visitors, and most blogs just aren't memorable. So I went around looking for other dark sites.
I'm fairly certain I was most inspired by this one, from which I learned that putting a variety of bright bold colors on a background that's dark bluish gray looks really good and doesn't clash.
I kind of had the same goal. I think the "oh, I've been here before" feeling on the 2nd visit was huge for me remembering both this site and stratechery early on.
cool, yeah I see the similarities, thanks for sharing. I think blueish hue you've got going on is nicer though 👌
Thanks for sharing. Very inspiring.
In short, for me content marketing is working. In order to drive traffic to your site you have to create and share interesting content made for your target audience.
Things I’ve done that are working:
• Writing and sharing interesting / controversial blog posts ( https://logobly.com/blog/ridiculous-business-ideas/ )
• Creating shareable content ( https://logobly.com/startup-logo-archive/ )
• Creating and sharing a free ebook in exchange for email ( https://logobly.com/business-names/ )
Websites driving the most traffic:
• My LinkedIn ( 1600 followers )
• My Twitter ( 700 followers )
• Hacker News
• Indie Hackers
I use mainly messenger chatbot to get email addresses.
So what I usually do is join Facebook groups that are related to my target audience.
Then I'll post a lead magnet (PDF or anything) for them to download.
Before they can download it, they'll be redirected to the messenger chatbot asking for their email first.
What I like about this strategy is that I get 2 channels.
I can follow up with them through messenger broadcast OR email broadcast.
Hi @erroltiozon
Would you mind elaborating on this tactic?
Sounds very interesting.
Cheers
how interesting, thanks for sharing.
What would you say about the opinion that gated content is dying out, and now content should be free used differently to capture leads. also what do you think about solely capturing fb chatbot leads instead of the email ?
@armouti
I'm not sure how gated content is dying. Because based on observation, the reason why other articles get to be read while others don't is because of the value that the audience would get. Gated content is still effective as long as the business knows that it's what the audience wants. It's the same as the free content being used differently to capture leads.
To cut things short, I believe it's all about giving what the market wants because, at the end of the day, the market will always decide.
Capturing leads via chatbot is good. But then again, we don't know where the market hangs out or where they prefer to read the content. Others would prefer via chatbot, while others would prefer email.
The only advantage of chatbot right now is because of higher open rates but that doesn't mean that businesses would/should be focusing solely on messenger chatbot. The more distribution channel you have, the more awareness/attraction you can get.
That answers my questoins really well, thank you for taking the time to write a wholesome answer!
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Great question.
The lead magnet on the messenger bot was already the opt-in.
After they download it. I send them a welcome sequence telling them what to expect in the near future. Of course, there's a button there to let them unsubscribe.
But based on the results that I observed, they don't unsubscribe.
I think what really violates the GDPR is if a startup would bombard them with irrelevant newsletter and also promotions.
So far when you just give them value like resources they can use to solve their problem, they won't unsubscribe.
And I always encourage people to unsubscribe from my list haha.
That way I won't spend money on people who aren't really interested and at the same time I get high quality leads.
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You're welcome.
How many lead magnets did you create per lead segment?
As you know there are also other lead magnets you can use depending on the temperature of a lead.
Example:
I'd love to help out if you want.
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Yep, they basically said Yes.
But I think, you cannot consider them as warm or hot lead immediately.
They may have said yes to receive the ebook.
But the question is have they read it?
What's your next step to nurture those people who have left their contact info to move them up to the ladder?
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What was your A/B Test for this?
Because usually, it's difficult to get them to fill out form or maybe agree for a quick call after the ebook.
The biggest objection they have is 'Why I should I trust this person?'
Which is why some marketers would have at least 5 - 10 emails on their welcome sequence before asking something.
The principle behind is persuasion and micro commitment.
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I just put a very comprehensive guide on how we used engagement posts on LinkedIn and Facebook to get from 0 to 3,000 subscribers - https://encharge.io/engagement-posts/
I turned a presentation I made into an email course: Common Accessibility Mistakes and How to Avoid Them. It's a 10 email course for web developers wanting to learn about web accessibility.
Then I syndicated some old blog posts to a few Medium publications (freeCodeCamp, HackerNoon, and DailyJS) with a call to action at the bottom for my email course.
It took 3 or so months to get to 100, but the next 300 seemed to come faster :)
During the heat of crypto (around Nov 2017) I have started a newsletter for friends who were clueless about how to start or what blockchain is. So I started CryptoDash to curate some resources (without any particular goal).
I gained around 200 subscribers in 3 weeks and here is what I did:
Overall would say its a process and delivering quality content, but your circles are your most trusted people and many will try to help!
I am now relaunching the new newsletter under different brand and topics at www.GetMetaView.com (shameless plug) and will try to do the same thing to get to 1000+
Good luck!
All of these comments that have been posted are great. If you boil these comments down, the one common theme I’ve noticed is that people went directly to where their customer is to get subscribers.
Once you’ve defined you’re audience, think about where they usually go online. For example, if I launched a newsletter on startup trends, then IndieHackers, Hacker News, and multiple Reddit channels sound like great places to introduce your product to. I’ve started a few newsletters, and always try to think about three things when marketing them:
Hope this helps!
I'm still building a indie project, but I can share something from another business of mine which is a info product website.
I spent around 50$ to get someone to create a nice PDF guide (my content, his design). I added an opt-in box to my site and I think it took a few months to get to 100 subs.
My site was and is niche and is the only one on the topic, perhaps that's why people trusted me as they perhaps had no choice. I'm a monopoly hehe.
A friend of mine says something very important which applies to sales and I think it applies here as well.
Until you tell someone this is the price(exact dollar figure) and this is what you get, you will not get any sales.
Same here, unless you outrightly ask for the email of the person, you will not get it.
I strongly believe it is a numbers game and I have made a ton of mistakes and I'm still making them.
Hello, cool question, by the way!
We developed a project related to books for programmers and wanted to somehow attract them.
But in the comments on Facebook it is not very effective to do this, and there was no money for advertising in Facebook groups.
And we decided to negotiate with the admin of one small group, which puts out collections of music for programmers, that we will make cool collections of music with pictures and cool quotes and sometimes insert a link to our service.
So we managed to get 150 first users.
I created a YouTube video with a survey asking people what they most wanted in future lessons. At this time, I'd been making free tutorials for a couple of months and had a couple hundred YT subs. The video description included a link to the survey and a link to a Mail Chimp signup for the alpha launch of the paid lessons.
That got me to 20 subscribers. Then I created a dynamic site (as opposed to the simple HTML page with links to videos that it started as), and the signup process of the site includes users emails. That pretty quickly got me over 100.
Users can unsubscribe from the email list without losing transactional emails such as password resets, but I email rarely enough and try to make them useful enough that there's not much churn on the list.
https://www.indiehackers.com/@alchemist/growing-a-tiny-site-with-heatmaps-and-surveys-7d79c50c6c
One idea.. start planning your startup six months before you launch. Collect business cards and add them to a mailing list. Create a twitter account. Start adding value. Getting 5-10k followers is easy if you know how to network.
Then use this to get your initial users.
I set up a website and wrote ten case studies about marketing.
I shared these case studies on a few different Slack groups, Reddit, Facebook groups and turned them into twitter threads.
One of my case studies was about Nomad List and SEO. Fortunately Pieter Levels, the Nomad List founder retweeted the tweet. He has quite a few followers so this drove me some traffic and got me close to 100.
A bit more manual sharing and I was over the 100 line.
If you're producing content your payoffs come from the tails of a fat-tailed distribution. You're essentially holding out for the rare event, i.e a RT from someone with lots of followers. Essentially your subscriber numbers may increase like this: 2, 1, 3, 4, 0, 90, 40, 2, 2
You never know when this event comes along. So don't be disgruntled if it's slow for a few months.
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haha, awesome!
I made a small exclusive offer for subscribers. Offering an exclusive e-book with content relevant to my target audience did the trick. I managed to grow my list to 400+ subscribers within 3 weeks now. Partly thanks to one blog post that went a bit viral.
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Sure, here it is: https://www.michaelagreiler.com/code-reviews-at-microsoft-how-to-code-review-at-a-large-software-company/
It went viral on Hackernews.
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I've learned that anything free give away is a great way to gain attraction as long as you make your contact methods clear. I agree with you wholeheartedly.