33
15 Comments

How we got $125 MRR and 300+ subscribers before our newsletter even launched.

Hey everyone! I’m a long time lurker but decided to share some tips and tricks on how my co-founder and I grew our newsletter, Product Byte, to 300 subscribers and $125/mrr (5 paid members) before we even launched. 95% of what I’m sharing here happened between Sept. 1st, 2020 and Oct. 1, 2020 (which was our official launch date). My hope is to give you some tactical advice on how to grow your newsletter.

First off, what is Product Byte?

I’m going to briefly touch on this because I think it plays a role in why we were able to grow relatively quickly. Product Byte sends out 1-3 profitable, handpicked, and well-researched e-commerce products that entrepreneurs should sell online. Two things to take away from this -

1.) Our value proposition is that we’ll help you make more money online. I.e it’s an investment.
2.). We help solve a real problem. Currently, the product research tools on the market either make you do all the work, or they curate large quantities of average products.

If I were starting another newsletter, I would definitely try to position my content in one of these two ways.

How we grew it:

Facebook Ads: We’d heard a few other people say they were crushing it using Facebook Ads to grow their newsletter and we figured we’d give it a shot as well. For context, we didn’t have a large advertising budget, so the idea of spending money for subscribers wasn’t our favorite idea. We figured we’d spend $50 and see what happened.

Here’s what we did:

  • We created a lead magnet. We’d heard from multiple people that you should promote lead magnet rather than just the newsletter itself.
  • We used interests as our primary parameter for Facebook to find relevant people, creating some short ad copy, and our CTA sent them to the signup page on our website.

Results: We got 50 signups at about $.50/per sign up. We were stoked with these results. Unfortunately, when we looked at where all the traffic came from, it was clear these were low-quality emails, as our open rates were practically non-existent. 🙁

Facebook Ads Attempt #2: The lesson here is that we shouldn’t have kept our targeting to “worldwide”.

Here’s what we did with the remained $25.00:

  • We ran the same test, except this time only targeted tier 1 countries (USA, Canada, Australia, UK, etc..) and used the same interest targeting that we did previously.

Results: We saw about a $3.00/per sign up. Which was more than we were willing to spend for free subscribers. Ultimately, we decided to stop running Facebook Ads.

Reddit - This is one of the hardest channels to make work and not for the faint of heart. My first tip with Reddit is to keep the promotion to a minimum… like, an absolute bare minimum. Secondly, always lead with value. That said, some Subreddits are so anti-advertisement that even if you lead with value and add your link in a subtle way, you’ll still get your post removed or worse… shadow-banned 😱 all while getting flamed in the process. But, don’t stress it, it’s just part of using Reddit.

Here’s what we did:

  • Found 3-5 relevant subreddits
  • Looked at the top posts of all time and emulated their headlines and content
  • Created a valuable post (this was typically just repurposing our free content in a different format) w/ a clickbaity title (yep - this tactic still works!)
  • At the end of the post, or in the comments, we would say something like “if you liked this content, feel free to subscribe to my free newsletter Product Byte link

Results: In total, my co-founder and I have posted 4 times and each time made it to the front page of the subreddit for that day. Unfortunately, 3 of the 4 posts got banned after being up for a while - so we’re still trying to figure this channel out. But, these posts got us 100 free subscribers and 5 paid subscribers 🙌 That’s a success in my book.

Facebook Groups: Similar to Reddit, there are a number of niche communities that exist around e-commerce on Facebook. We saw this as a gold mine for getting potential users. First, we tried organic posts within the communities themselves.

Here’s what we did:

  • Found the most relevant posts in the group and tried to emulate those as much as possible.
  • Posted similar content as we did on Reddit (value add with little advertising).

Results: We got banned from almost every group we tried to promote within. We quickly learned the moderators had tight rules on promotion. Of the 7 groups we posted in, we were banned from 6 🙁.

Our next attempt was to reach out to the admins to get their approval before posting anything to get their approval. After messaging about 20 admins, 3 said no, and 1 said they’d let us promote to the group for $100.

Here’s what we did:

  • Looked through the group to make sure there were a good number of real people from tier 1 countries in the group.
  • Created a post that added value and used our lead magnet as a CTA.
  • Used comments as a way to keep our post "relevant". A trick we learned is rather than putting a link directly in your post, ask people to comment to get the post in order to get the lead magnet. We then went and direct messaged each one of them with the ‘secret link.’ While this does add some friction, it keeps the post boosted because of the engagement metrics.

Results: It turned out great! We got 200 free signups and 1 paid member 🙌 (which is not counted in total MRR because he converted after we launched). We’re really happy with how this went given that we were pretty skeptical going into it.

Where we’re at today

For the last two weeks, we’ve been really focusing on nailing our content and trying to convert free subscribers into paid members. We’re starting to do more marketing now, and are trying to discover new grassroots channels for growth.

If anyone has any tips on how to organically grow your newsletter, we’d love to hear them. One of the best resources we’ve found is Grow Getters - they’ve been producing stellar content on how to grow a paid newsletter, and I think the founder (co-founder?) is part of Indie Hackers.

I hope this was helpful! Feel free to shoot me any comments - I’m happy to answer questions!

  1. 2

    Love the concept, it reminds me of SoftwareIdeas by @Kevcon80 but for eCom instead of SaaS.

    Haha, always apply a Tier 1 filter to your targeting! This was one of the first things I learned when I started running ads. I personally got good results using Reddit Ads to acquire subscribers for my own newsletter.

    I wrote more about that topic here.
    Since then, I've managed to bring my cost per subscriber down to around $1 (but I'm no longer running ads since it's just a side project that I haven't monetized yet).

    1. 2

      I actually stumbled upon Kevin's story when I was in the process of building our newsletter. Reached out to him and he replied - super nice guy!

      I'll definitely check out your article - I'd love to get our cost per subscriber to a dollar!

      1. 1

        Yep, Keevin and I touched base a few days (weeks?) ago. Wishing you the best of luck as you continue to grow!

  2. 1

    Thanks for the share Kevin. Your experience is valuable.
    You have a typo in the link for GrowGetters, its https://growgetters.substack.com/ and it links to https://www.growgetters.substack.com/ in the post (maybe IndieHackers auto link).

  3. 1

    Good post Kevin. Thanks for sharing.

    Also, The pricing tab is not working on thank you page in chrome browser. You can look into that.

    1. 1

      Ah, thanks for pointing that out! I will check that out.

  4. 1

    Hey @keevinorourke, awesome article, and very relatable having also been silenced on Reddit on many occasions, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn Groups!

    Jumping in on the comments is another area we've taken to, and with that in mind, you may find this newsletter handy if you're looking to start doing guest posting to get a bit more exposure ;) - https://guestpostjuice.substack.com/welcome

  5. 1

    Thanks for sharing this! I’m putting Grow Getters on my list now. Are their authors here on IH?

    1. 1

      Of course - hopefully, you found it helpful!

      Yes, @CodieSanchez is one of the founders. Definitely recommend their newsletter - it's been really helpful for us.

  6. 1

    Great work, Keevin!

    Going to feature your story in my database of growth strategies at www.growthunt.com

    Keep them coming!

    1. 1

      Awesome - I appreciate that! Let me know if you need anything else from me.

  7. 1

    Appreciate you taking the time to share this!

    Can certainly relate with your experience across Reddit & Facebook groups.

    Often, the best strategy is to build your own community in advance so you can control the distribution channel.

    The only problem is that it's difficult to predict what niche you'll need to build in before you have a product idea.

    Looking forward to following the progress!

    1. 2

      Super interesting idea. We've talked a lot about building our own community - we may look into that more!

  8. 1

    This is hard work! I think you are trying to do too many things at the same time.

    This approach works best when people are actively looking for what you are selling. In this case, they don't know if the information will be good and if they will be able to use it.

    You should really take the long term approach of building interest by putting the spotlight on a problem, growing a following, then selling a product or service.

    If you are offering something valuable people will follow you on Social Media... Eventually, you will be the one charging for the promotion of a product or a service.

    Thank you for sharing your experience, this was really useful.

    1. 1

      Definitely valid points. At this stage, we're just trying to see what channels are going to work for us to grow. But, I agree with you, if we consistently produce great free content, we'll have a much easier time converting people on our paid offers - something we're definitely optimizing for!

      Thanks for the input.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 15 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments