I pitched my app to 3 newsletters, here's what happened within a week
I'm working on my app - www.haveibeenexpired.com - focusing on marketing, which doesn't come easy to me.
I decided to pitch my app with 3 newsletters in the space, whose audience will be very relevant. I wrote a short email to the people behind the newsletters, explaining what my app does, showcasing the HN thread I started about it that got some traction, and asking to appear on the relevant section in the newsletter where new tools are being presented to the readers.
One newsletter owner came back with some serious product feedback. They asked me to 'mature' the app in various ways, and make it more relevant to how they saw their audience. For example, allow more that just Google SSO to sign up, and more. I really appreciated this feedback, even if it means the newsletter won't have me on it just yet.
Another newsletter owner came back within a few days, and basically said that this is not quite relevant. Ok, I can't win them all! :)
The third newsletter owner didn't reply. I was planning on nudging them again within a week or two, but then - my app was featured on the next issue! Woohoo!
So if you are looking for some exposure, identify newsletters in your domain, and pitch to them. They have a tough job of constantly bringing news to their audience, and you can help them while they help you.
How did you go about pitching to them? Did you reach out via email?
Exactly. Here's the rough text of my email:
Subject: Pitch my side project for the ‘Tools’ section of <newsletter>
Body:
Hi <name>,
I was wondering if I could pitch my side project for your newsletter’s ‘Tools’ section. I’m talking about www.haveibeenexpired.com, which solves a problem almost as old as the web itself, and still encountered by many - the ever-surprising expiration of SSL certificates, especially those used to serve live production traffic.
I’m running with it for almost a year now, recently got some nice exposure on HN last week, and wrote about that experience. I’m seeking to spread the word beyond the 312 registered users I now have, and was wondering if this is relevant for your newsletter.
Compared to the plethora of monitoring tools out there, this one is employing Certificate Transparency to automatically detect hosts that need to be monitored in my users’ domains. This means that users don’t need to manually update the service with every new host they provision in their domain!
I have commercial aspirations for the project, but for the time being it is completely free.
Please let me know if this is something you’re willing to entertain. I’ll understand if not, as you probably have some policy on what can or cannot make its way to the newsletter.
Amazing, thanks for sharing this. I am planning on reaching out to some newsletters for my project, so I will try a similar format!
Good luck!
My thinking here was to put myself in their shoes. They need to fill the newsletter with news that appeal to their audience. I didn’t want to go down the sponsorship route, don’t have the budget for that. So don’t be cheeky, lay it out as it is, and let them decide. Don’t stop at 3 newsletter, I sure won’t! :)
I keep looking for relevant newsletters, and here's one that goes a long way to help such pitches / submissions to succeed - https://console.dev/selection-criteria/
Do note they just told me they have a 6+ months waiting list... Still, a lot of insight to how a newsletter maintainer thinks.
Thank you I will take a look!
I like your service. I have signed up.
Thank you!
What an idea, never think about it before. btw what's the story behind the app anton? I mean, how do you decide to build it and how do you find your customers?
Thanks for asking! I wrote about my motivation when I started in last April - https://adrukh.medium.com/a-side-project-that-i-actually-want-to-work-on-c06f5cc0aa5d
There are a couple more posts on my adventures around this project :)
what a journey, I have read it. "choose boring (the stack already mastered)" is my new go for creating my new venture. thank you adrukh. btw is the app still on heroku?
Thank you very much! I'm only beginning :)
Yup, still on heroku - a single dyno with a postgres instance and a redis instance.
wow, this is valuable lesson for me. once again, thank you adrukh
I used the free tier as I was working out the MVP. Once I launched it on PH, I moved to a paid tier ($7 per month for a single dyno that is always running).
For postgres and redis I started with the free tier, and then moved to a $9 per month postgres as the dataset grew (free postgres is limited to 10K rows I think).
So 2 paying customers should cover my expenses here :)
Ahhh good idea, will jot this down as a marketing option. Thanks Anton!
This is a great idea, I have been thinking about doing the same. How did you find these newsletters?
When choosing my side project, I followed the advice of 'solve a problem that you have'. I've been subscribed to relevant newsletters in this domain for a while now, so I just acted on what I knew.
Had I not known about them, I'd search for newsletters addressing my audience, subscribe to them, and figure out how they work - what info do they share with their audience, and how can I pitch my project to them.
I just googled for 'devops newsletter', and boy oh boy, there's a lot out there!
Good luck!
As someone above me said - cool service :)
I agree that forcing people to use SSO (as opposed to being able to use email/password) it a deterrent.
As a side note - in case it helps - this is what I see when I try to SSO via Microsoft: https://imgur.com/a/ZX4LY69
Thanks! Can we take this over chat (try the widget on my site), I'd like to get to the bottom of the SSO issue.
I'm not keen on the whole back-and-forth of email sign ups, have spent too much time with people typing the wrong address, security-prone password recovery methods, etc. You are right, I'm probably losing users over the strict SSO options. But I am also wary of the time I'd be spending to support email registration...
I agree that the support for invalid email or email going to the spam folder would be too much work for your site that will most likely have many free users.
Sure, chatting to you on your site now.
Cool service 👍
Thanks!