How I crossed 2^8 (256) subscribers for my newsletter

My subscriber count flatlined around 230 for a week, and then I got another popular post on Hacker News that pushed me over the edge, seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43994765

Getting to this point has involved posting to as many channels as possible... without wearing out my welcome in any of them

My first 40 subscribers came from direct friends and my LinkedIn network.

I got about 150 subscribers from a single popular post on Hacker News, posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43461618 . A lot of the subscribers weren't directly coming from Hacker News, but several daily newsletters picked me up because of the Hacker News exposure. And obviously someone who subscribes to a newsletter has a higher-than-average chance of subscribing to another newsletter!

The remainder have come from regular posting on BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Substack notes, and starting to get search traffic from Google. And then this final post pushed me over the edge.

I've gotten no traction from the programming and technology Reddits (wow, the programming subreddits are so much angrier than every other subreddit where I contribute!) Twitter (I think I'm too small to try pay-to-play at this point). I've also not gotten any traction on IndieHackers, but I still like posting the milestones to have a developer log of the milestones that I've reached.

I've found that I need to post twice a week to grow. I had a period where I was sick and was putting less effort into posts, and another period where I was dealing with a mortgage and had to post only once a week, and my subscriber growth treaded water instead of gradually growing. Even casual visitors to the site can tell the difference between moderate and minor effort.

See you at 2^9