Ask IH: Email first startups - Are they feasible?
I came across this old post about email first startups from Ryan Hoover and thought it brought light to an interesting idea of giving birth to small businesses. The examples put forward are helpful but I am wondering whether it is still a thing in today's day and age.
Personally, I use HN Digest to keep in sync with the trending topics in the Hacker News community. They make money from ads in the email. Could be dream idea for any Indie Hacker 💭.
However I could not come across any other case like this. The google results point to a similar trend. One plausible reason could be that email is more a feature rather than a product. For example, the IndieHackers email digest or weekly emails provided by Fitbit, Pocket, Medium etc.
What are your thoughts IH ? Can you think of any examples of "Email first startups".
Might find some good examples here: https://gaps.com/six-figure-newsletter/
There are plenty of businesses where the newsletter is their main (if not only) offering :-)
Thanks @jrn .. I will check them out :)
I'm working on https://keto.fm, an email-first project.
Revenue is ad spots in the newsletter.
Growing the subscriber count is the entire challenge. We're trying out:
Ads are the quickest, especially if you already have advertisers already lined up.
However, you need a LARGE email audience for this (10K+) to get advertisers interested. And this is hard to do WITHOUT original, valuable content.
You have a few different avenues to choose from, and it really boils down to the niche you choose.
https://scottscheapflights.com/ is email first.
As far as I'm aware, tinymarketingwins.com also started off pretty-much email first.
I stumbled across a startup the other day aiming to make email-first products easy to set up (substack.com)- they're a cool team worth checking out :)
Aha !! Those are good examples. Thanks a ton 🤗
https://gohighbrow.com/ is one!
The product depends heavily on MailChimp Automation
Daily Coding Problem is a good example. Looks like @lawrence has been going for less than a year and already has $2k+ MRR.
https://www.indiehackers.com/@lawrence/how-we-bootstrapped-our-mailing-list-to-ramen-profitability-2-000-month-2c56b61985