a tiny milestone - My newsletter just reached 700 subs!
Hi Everyone!
just wanted to celebrate a small milestone.
It's been over a year since I quit my engineering job and started building my startup. To document my journey, I created a build-in-public newsletter to share news and stories about failures, and learnings. Recently, my newsletter finally reached 700 subscribers!
A few things I did to grow:
- regular share my newsletter on my Twitter (modest following)
- a few mini viral posts, which my subscribers shared on hacker news or other platforms
- Share quick bites on entrepreneurship communities
It's been challenging to show up weekly and share/write about progress on top of building my design tool, but I'm so glad I did it!
If you are trying to build a startup, definitely try to start a newsletter. It's one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.
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Congrats Wentin. 700 subs really is a great achievement :-)
I'm so sorry cos I'm going to be a massive a**hole here but it comes from a good place I promise:
Have you got any paying customers yet?
Your number one priority should be finding paying customers (lots of them) otherwise one of two things is gonna happen:
This is a problem that happens a lot with founders who offer a freemium or free trial of their product (something I talked about recently on here - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-freemium-free-trials-are-a-terrible-growth-strategy-for-startups-937542e2a1)
Obviously, an email list is not a free trial or a freemium product but it's close. It feels like progress but if none of them are paying you money its not really that useful for what you need right now (money money money).
Feel free to hate me for sh**ting on your parade here (and obviously, ignore me if paying customers are already flooding into your business) but I'd be remiss if I didn't say anything cos that's the point of the forum - helping others succeed.
700 subs is great, congrats!
With how many subs did you start initially? Did you ask friends and former colleagues if they wanted to receive the newsletter?
And what strategy did you use then to grow it?
Well done! I have looked at a few, they are well-written and detailed.
How do you utilise your newsletter for calls to action?
Do you use merge tags to personalise your content?
What's your open rate? If it's under 100 opens per month you can benefit from our free plan of 100 generated, personalised images per month. https://okzest.com/ I would be happy to discuss this with you, the aim would be to get higher engagement and increase your calls to action.