Day 2: How I got the first sign-ups for the new marketing newsletter

The official launch of Noise Cutters was yesterday, so it was also the first day to promote the newsletter.

Stats from yesterday:

• Visitors to the sign-up page: 32
• New sign-ups: 12
• Conversion rate: 37,5%

Total stats:

• Visitors to sign-up page: 48
• Total sign-ups: 20
• Conversion rate: 41,6%

I started the day by making the final changes to the sign-up page. It doesn’t look fantastic, but 70% perfect for an experimental landing page is good enough for now.

Reddit and Twitter

Then I wrote my first post about day 1, what my plan was, with a link to the newsletter. I shared this post on IndieHackers and Reddit.

I was fortunate enough that people sent out tweets about the newsletter as well. After it went live on Inbox Stash, the creator of the site - Paul Metcalfe - shared the newsletter on his own Twitter account. This brought some visitors to the IndieHackers post.

I also wrote a tweet about the thread that I posted on IndieHackers, tagging IndieHackers in it. This ultimately paid off later during the day.

Slack and Telegram

Since it’s a journey that shares as many insights as possible, I believed some other people in communities I am in might be interested in following it as well. So I decided to go to the Slack groups I am in and shared a link to my day 1 post on IndieHackers:

I did the same for a Telegram group I am currently in, with around 100 members, as it is mainly focused on people with newsletters.

After a few hours, the traffic on the website was still low. The post I made on Reddit wasn’t getting much traction and the post I made on IndieHackers was still somewhere off the front page.

Front page of IndieHackers

Right when I was talking to @HarryDry about maybe making some changes to how I am logging this journey, I checked out the IndieHackers website and found that the post was on the #1 spot:

Boom, we were going places. I was doubting whether logging this journey was actually a good idea since it didn’t really get any traction after a few hours. But reaching the #1 spot helped to get more people involved and ultimately it got 15 upvotes (and stayed in the top 5 for a few hours).

The tweet that I sent out earlier that day was also retweeted by Inbox Stash and IndieHackers. The latter has almost 30,000 followers on Twitter, so it drove quite the engagement towards the tweet. At the end of the day, I had a few retweets, comments and 14 likes.

Slow but steady wins the race

Things were slowly picking up, and the sign-ups started coming in. It definitely took a while to get things rolling. But once they did, it all paid off.

It may seem like these are small results. 12 Sign-ups may not seem like much. Neither does 32 visitors. But it’s only day 1. Momentum only happens when you take small steps every single day. In the end, 12 people signed up for something they had never heard of, created the day before.

So, the results are good so far.

The first email to the subscribers will go out this Thursday.

If you are interested in getting 3 handpicked high-quality marketing case studies (that actually teach you things about marketing) in your inbox every week, feel free to sign up for Noise Cutters at https://noisecutters.com