How did you get your newsletter to the first 1000 subscribers?

Crewcharge's blog is now at 1300+ subscribers.

• I usually post on blog.crewcharge.com (via hashnode)

• Repost onto Reddit and Facebook groups (after removing all promotions)

• Add the images onto Pinterest.

• Repost it onto medium and LinkedIn and Indiehackers.

I got 1000+ subscribers through LinkedIn within 4 blog posts, because

1. I was active on Linkedin for a long time.

2. I knew what I was writing or talking about.

3. I've been blogging for almost a decade.

Recently a post of mine went viral on Medium called the Steve Jobs bias (Google this 🤍) which no one read on Linkedin or hackernews.

So, to summarize

1. Leverage platforms and find what works for you. I hate twitter, I've never been able to resonate with anyone on twitter, and it's a waste of time for me personally.

2. Write content you know about, and make genuine observations instead of opting in for SEO hacks or reposting from other sites.

3. Write like a human is reading your blog, not a google crawler bot.

I've grown past 1300+ subscribers in little over a year as a father of two making content at night.

I have a few simple tips on how I did that.

• Provide value. Four gives before you ask someone to sign up.
• Make yourself discoverable. I found single link pages to be the easiest. (LinkTree / etc)
• Give people something in return. Free downloads, daily email sequences, etc.
• Don't force anything. Let people's natural curiosity bring them to you.
• Try to not "repost" or syndicate content across all platforms. Make content specifically for each platform and focus on one or two at a time.

I'm new to the IndieHacker scene and couldn't post this as a standalone post but thought it might fit with your thread. I've been outlining how I grew my newsletter list from 0-2000 over the past 6 weeks.
For context: my newsletter teaches people to use Excel's visual design features by sending them weekly xlsx template files and tips/tricks.

From 0-500 -- I started with 500 imported users from an old web form on my site, so I had a leg up from the beginning

From 500-800 -- On day 1 I added links to the newsletter from all my old blog posts related to my niche (Excel dashboards). I got about 200 sign ups this way over the course of the last 6 weeks.

From 800-1700 -- I did direct outreach to Excel influencers asking for advice, this lead to 3 of them posting or commenting on my content and had the biggest impact on my numbers.

1700-1800 -- posting short video content to LinkedIn and Youtube. Didn't get a ton of engagement but a decent number of people did get pushed through to the newsletter.

1800-2000 -- from various outreach to people in my network, referrals from existing subscribers, and other random sources

What worked the best:

• direct outreach to Excel influencers: these weren't pushy emails, they were genuine questions about getting started in the Excel space and asking what worked for them.
• adding links to the newsletter from all my old blog content: my content was already Excel-related and had a steady stream of readers.

What didn't work:

• Twitter social media posts were extremely ineffective
• LinkedIn posts only worked if they included useful videos about Excel, posts that were just about the newsletter got barely any impressions and very little engagement
• I tried writing a couple blog posts about the newsletter but they didn't perform well
• I did a small experiment with FB/TW ads, some hyper-targeted and more general. Neither lead to any conversions.
• Product Hunt launch - I put a lot of work into a PH launch that ended up not getting featured and lead to <20 sign ups. Not sure what went wrong but I've had other launches with far less effort that did much better.

I grew Zero to Marketing to 7.5k subscribers mostly thanks to Twitter.

People see my tweets on their feed, get curious, check my profile and click my link in bio.

For us, it was 90% Reddit. We created a lot of value posts and plugged our newsletter at the end, that's basically how we got to 1k.

But tbh, I think we could've been much faster. It took us about 2-3 months. I think on top of Reddit, we should've worked more on Twitter, cross-promote, get on other ppl newsletters/podcasts, etc.

Also, I think one could easily get 1k+ subscribers from a successful ProductHunt launch. I decided to defer a PH launch until after 1k though because I wanted to find sustainable distribution channels first. But in retrospect, I'm also not sure whether that was a smart move. I think that getting this PH kickstart can create some momentum that helps grow and maybe open up new channels, contacts, networks, etc.

How did you get to 1k?

Our team spend over 2 weeks to craft a kick-ass email course, and we gave it away for free. We promoted the crap out of it on every channel possible.

We went from 25 subscribers to 1000+ within a couple of hours. When the initial hype died, we had over 4500+ subscribers. Out of which we lost about 250 within a month (since the drip course was only 5 days long), but we converted around 65% ($25k+ worth).

-> Setup a niche based blog.
-> Do onpage and offpage seo to bring traffic.
-> Add a newsletter subscription popup form to collect emails.

With patience