💌 Building a newsletter for homeschoolers working 2hrs/day

Hello everyone,

It's been a while since I last posted an update here! I'm Aimen, a former software engineer who's now a full-time mom and a part-time creator.

Back in 2021, I joined Indie Hackers and shared about my project, Homeskoolers. At that time, my idea was to create a platform for homeschoolers, offering curriculum, resources, and reviews. Being a software developer, I thought that by building an application, users would naturally come.

But, I soon realized that I needed to either build an audience for the project or invest heavily in ads, and since I lacked the funds for the latter, I chose the former route.

Building an audience required writing, which I didn't feel confident about. But after reading interviews and stories of other founders, I recognized the importance of honing my writing and audience-building skills.

I spent most of my 2022 exploring digital writing, started a substack newsletter, joined Write of Passage by David Perell, and managed to overcome my fears of writing online.

Fast forward to 2023, I transformed my project into a newsletter for two reasons:
1)I didn't want to invest time into creating a curriculum platform without having any audience or users.
2) I was unsure how I could gather honest and genuine reviews about curriculums. I wanted to avoid having fake reviews on my platform.

So I started writing a newsletter and turned my site into a blog.

What is this blog about?

This blog now features interviews with families who homeschool or take unconventional educational paths.

To my surprise, I began to enjoy this process. Over the past few months, I've made some friends on Twitter, many of whom are homeschoolers. They generously shared their stories on my blog, allowing me to publish one interview per week in my newsletter.

Considering I'm a full-time mom to a toddler, I have an average of only 2 hours per day to work on my project.

Here's how my weekly tasks look as I make progress in small steps during those limited hours:

• Enhancing the website and newsletter design.
• Reaching out to people for interviews.
• Reading their profiles and crafting interview content.
• Posting interviews and sending them for review.
• Creating occasional marketing content for Twitter and Instagram.

Quick tech stack:

I am using the NextJS markdown blog deployed on Netlify and using the Tailkit library for tailwind components.

Let's talk about marketing:

Marketing has been a challenge due to my busy schedule, but I'm satisfied with the gradual progress I've been making.

Recently, I shared one of my blog posts on Reddit, which led to 100+ Karma and 8 new subscribers within 24 hours. This experience made me consider the Reddit homeschooling thread as a potential subscriber source.

And I know, I know, I know I need to create content for Twitter and Instagram. My plan is to write on Twitter and reuse that content on Instagram but I am too short on time and get distracted that I don't stay consistent with my strategy. Working on improving this now.

I hope things will be better when I publish the next update here.

Why am I posting it here?

For a while, I've wanted to share my journey and updates on Indie Hackers, but procrastination got the better of me. This post marks documentation of where I stand in building my business. Today, I logged in after months and felt so good reading my old post about this project, and reminded me of how it all started.

Also, Indie Hackers is where I learned about business and got inspired to start my own. Otherwise, I'd probably be working a regular software developer job today, never thinking about my own business, and not learning all those skills I picked up in the past year.

Vision:

With Homeskoolers, I'm kind of following the path Pat Walls took with Starter Story. I really liked how he started building his thing in Starbucks, working just 2 hours each day, and he made his newsletter bigger through Reddit. I read his blogs and keep up with his journey.

I hope I can do something similar and make Homeskoolers successful too. But no matter what happens, I know I'll learn a lot from this experience.

In the last year and a half, I've noticed a big change in how I think. I didn't know anything about things like no-code, content marketing, newsletters, email marketing, copywriting, and more – I didn't even know these were things. But now, after trying stuff for over a year, I even do freelance work in these areas.

I've got 5 interviews already published and more homeschooler stories are on the way.

I'm also taking marketing more seriously now.

Let's see how things go from here. I'll be back with more updates in a month or two!

Feel free to take a look at the newsletter landing page and the blog. I welcome your thoughts, feedback, and questions.

And yeah, I would really appreciate it if you share your feedback on my blog post thumbnails. I am a bad designer. Any feedback would help.

My previous issues: Homeskooler's CK Link

Thank you!