How are you growing your email audience?

Hi Louis,

Well, started mine earlier this month on May 13, https://before90s.substack.com, where I give timeless insights from pre-internet era companies.

Before creating the newsletter, I posted 2 articles here on IH and Reddit to see the reaction. I got some positive feedback and then moved to Substack

My sources of subscribers have been IH, Twitter and Reddit where I post regularly. It's been tough to acquire subscribers, but my strategy is to write interesting content, with unique point-of-view and generate some word-of-mouth to attract more people.

What do you think?

After going through Brennan Dunn's course on ConvertKit [1] , I decided to set up some basic segmentation and connect it to a free email course. I'm using TypeForm and ConvertKit to do it.

Here's how it works:

Every article or video tutorial on my site has a "singup for a free email course" button that sends them to TypeForm. It includes the following prompts:

• In order to best serve you, I have a few questions...
• How well to you know Elixir? (newbie, intermediate, advanced, expert)
• What best describes your role? (elixir dev, other dev, manager, indiehacker, student, other)
• What programing language do you know best? (free form text input)
• Excellent! I'll keep your background in mind when creating and sharing tutorials.
• Anything else you'd like me to know? (optional textarea input)
• To keep things tidy, please enter the same email as use on Alchemist Camp! (email input)

Once the user submits the form, I use ConvertKit's API to subscribe the user and store their preferences. Then they're added to a (still partially manual) intro course email sequence that depends mostly on how much experience they have with Elixir and also a little bit on what other language they know.

About 25% of my new email subscribers now come from this intro course. By my best estimate, between 1/3 and 1/2 of those subscribers would not have signed up without it.

[1] Great course, btw. If you don't program, you could use a different tool that can integrate with ConvertKit directly, including one he built, that's called RightMessage.

Getting your first 1000 users is going to be a grind, so don't discount social media. Find your competitor's Instagram, look for users who comment on their content, then like, follow, and drop a genuine comment on a photo for that user. Then you can pitch your newsletter!

~30 ish% refollow rate with this technique.

I started a new one 2 weeks ago but I have 0 experience and I actually need help to decide what to do, posted here:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/newsletter-noob-what-should-i-do-next-5ec19cf93d

My strategy to grow the subscribers number was to keep posting on reddit, facebook and quora. it took very little effort to hit 59 subs

so far quora has been the most effective one since it ranks higher in google and that will give you relatively a steady traffic to your answers and therefore your landing page

https://i.imgur.com/p8X73jj.png