📝 How did you get your first 100 subscriptions?

I launched my newsletter (theknowhow.substack.com) just about one month ago, and I passed 100 signups nine days after I sent my first email. Many of those early adopters were friends and professional contacts (I’m a journalist).

Self-promotion is not my forte, but I shared the newsletter on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, and also added the link to my email signature. I also shared it to a few private Slack groups and similar communities.

To my surprise, LinkedIn has proven most effective so far—it's currently ranking as the number one source of new visitors to my Substack. It helped a lot that a few other people shared my newsletter on LinkedIn, too.

I haven’t yet tried cross-promotion with similar newsletters, but that’s next on my list!

My newsletter has slightly over half that many subscribers. I got them by emailing friends and colleagues, tweeting, and submitting my newsletter to several directories.

Currently at 93, so almost on my first 100 🥳

1. Friends and family
2. Colleagues or ex-colleagues (private messages OR share on Linkedin letting them know about your new project)
3. As you mentioned, Twitter but also Facebook, Instagram, or wherever else you have at least a few people following you.
4. Building a reputation on IH by answering questions, making quality posts, etc. For me, this worked very well as people are always curious who are people commenting and thus end up checking their IH profiles (I do that myself as well haha)
5. I did a little cross-promotion with one newsletter and that alone brought me about 25 new subscribers.

All of these should be effective enough to get the first 100, after that not sure yet 😅

P.S. If anyone wants to check out, here is my newsletter: https://benasdigital.com/

I wrote a whole blog post on how I got 200.

TD;DR

• Initial Reddit are-you-interested post
• Regular blogging

Substack wrote about this here.

Really important to keep in mind that when you're first starting out, your goal is not to get to 100 or 1000, but to go from 30 to 31, for example. As the startup advice goes, "Do things that don't scale".

There was also a thread on Substack where people got their first followers and many were through things that don't scale. For example, the top comment says that his first 50 contacts were his gmail contacts. Other ideas include asking your subscribers to recommend your newsletter or reaching out 1:1 to people on Twitter.

The first 30-40 came via the DTC community on Twitter. These aren't folks I know personally but a crew of people that regularly show up on threads together discussing the DTC industry. The takeaway here: it's helpful and important to just get involved with and start contributing to communities that interest you...they'll support you.

Then, I started buying ad spots in newsletters. This was pretty effective and drove roughly 100 subs for less than $100 in spend.

If you can drop the cash, I recommend it. For me, it was important to understand (1) would the value prop of my newsletter resonate with strangers that fit my target? and (2) can i start to form up a repeatable acquisition mechanism with a reasonable cost?

I also subbed to https://growgetters.substack.com/ which looks interesting, just haven't read through much of it yet but plan to.

No-Code Briefs had its first 100 subscribers from Twitter and IH primarily.

some ideas in this thread https://letterstack.co/resource/thread-for-publishers-how-do-you-get-subscribers

And check out https://letterstack.co for articles on growing newsletter subscribers

@RichAwo here's how I got my first 100:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-got-over-100-subscribers-in-11-days-f8fc00e5a5

I'm not a Newsletter expert but stumbled upon this post yesterday you might find useful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-got-to-2k-subs-lessons-growth-strategies-and-process-6432eb6592