9 months into a side project, 3 things to keep the growth steadily. And my metrics.

I launched Virtual Mojito in June 2020, during the period of highest demand for virtual event software and remote working solutions.

I am very grateful for all the support provided by my network and was surprised to see the project evolve from a simple article to a website where people save it in their bookmarks bar.

Before I tell you the 3 key takeaways, you should know some metrics and facts that are important to my project:

Vanity

Visitor: 40,754

Crucial

Product featuring: 203
Event listing: 384
Reader: 294
Founder story: 17

Involve my readers

Whenever I am not sure whether I am solving the right problem, I always go talk to my readers. I will select 3 readers from the Substack list and hear their concerns.

Sometimes they would suggest a new feature, feedback of my content or what they would like to see in the future. In the past 9 months, I managed to have an in-depth conversation with most of them.

Capture and display key metrics

I have a reminder in the checklist that reminds me to accumulate some metrics every month (same as what you see above).

I will also perform some simple segmentation and pivot tables to see if the growth is related to my marketing activities, such as outreach, social media content, or brand mentions.

Generate original content

Just like many information-driven products or list of X. People can find similar data points from many other sources. That's why I know it’s important to bring original content to readers from time to time.

In the second month of running the project, I introduced my Substack newsletter and an interview series with the founders soon after. After doing so, I can immediately see the spike, and people really appreciate the inside stories.

These regular routines seem very obvious, but they are really laborious to maintain, and now I use the same techniques in almost every other project.

If you are a maker like me, where you can only allocate a few hours per week for your project. Try to create small routines that are comfortable enough for you. Your little effort will gradually assemble into a huge impact you can't imagine.