How to grow a newsletter into a community?

Hi Jordi!

Good question.

I turned my paid newsletter into a full-fledged community that's made me about $900,000 since 2013.

Here's how I would approach making the switch:

1. Create the community and post in it - use the simplest software possible (there's a reason people post on sites like IH and Hacker News... great option for that here)
2. Feed your email list these community posts - for a while you'll need to send your email list the posts and discussions you're writing. Ask them to reply in the community instead of to your email. Ask them to create their own posts.
3. Curate the best of the community content to your email list - once you get some good content being shared on the community organically, keep feeding it to the rest of your email list.

Have you tried that?

Congrats on the success so far, Jordi! I also grew a newsletter into a community and think it's a great route to take. The things that I'd focus on at your stage:

1. Publish great, focused content that appeals to your core reader - important to continue to grow your free list (probably more important than monetizing at this point if you want to build a community).

2. Start to establish a two-way relationship with your readers - that could mean asking them to reply to the emails, participate in polls and publishing the results, or hosting small meetups. Anything that involves them more in the creation of value and gets them to see you (and each other) as real human beings and not just email addresses will be helpful.

3. Decide what you want your community to focus on and start to outline the value that you'll provide to members.

Happy to chat more about this if you want to get in touch!

Hello Jordi,

First of all, congratulations on that amazing start! My interest for the stock market and the many sides of it has grown a lot since last year and that made me also start a newsletter a couple months ago with a compiled information of all IPOs going public on that week.

A few weeks ago I posted the exact same question here about how to start a community from a newsletter and I got a similar response from @toma13. What I start doing from these tips was to encourage my audience to reply my emails and also some polls I set for them, and that is working quite well.

I'm now in the ~250 subscribers and I think it is still too small of an audience to start a community. I'm also still trying to figure out who my audience is and what they are looking for (maybe they just want the "quick detailed brief" and don't want to connect with other people), so I just want to grow a bit more (like around 1000 subscribers) - and this is also my struggle at the moment.

This weekend I was quickly researching about tools to create a community and circle.so is the most hyped and bragged about at the moment but quite expensive, so I find a similar competitor called tribe.so which has similar features and a nice free tier.

I cannot really give any concrete advise as I'm on the same path as you, but feel free to get in touch and we can keep sharing some experiences!

P.S. You got yourself a new subscriber! ;)