I reached 500 email subs and I'm more confused than ever.

Hey everyone,

Thought I'd make a recap post on how I've grown my tech careers newsletter, Career Fair, to 500 email subs. And also rant a bit on the direction of this project.

I realized that tech career advice is really old-school and quite boring to read. It's focused on resumes and cover letters, but the world's changed. No more suits or cigars. Remote work. All that jazz.

So about 10 months ago, I created a site dedicated to producing much more interesting and useful content within the tech career ecosystem.

My tagline for the site is: The content you wish your career center gave you

Some examples of case studies that have done really well:

1. Satya Nadella's Growth Mindset
2. How To Brag At Work
3. Motivators and Hygiene Factors

How I've Grown The Site

To grow the site, I've repurposed each case study for every platform and then added a CTA for my newsletter at the end. This has worked well so far.

On Twitter, I write long threads. On Linkedin, I create carousel slideshows. And on Reddit, I just post the case study in full.

One thing that has sped up growth is by linking directly to a dedicated subscribe page I've created. This page converts ridiculously well and it's because once someone navigates to that page, they've already read my stuff and deemed it as good. So all they have to do is enter their email. The page also has some social proof which is effective.

My open rates are around 30-35%. My target audience is software engineers, data scientists, product managers, and designers who are looking to grow their tech careers.

Why I'm Confused / Lost

But I'm quite confused now. And it's mainly to do with two things:

1. I rarely hear back from my audience. No one really replies to my emails. The open rate is fine (though also not as high as I'd like), but it's quite discouraging to pump out content with minimal feedback. And there's very little organic growth - I only see my subscriber count meaningfully increase once I promote each new edition every week. Surely...this isn't good?

2. I'm quite early in my tech career myself, so I often feel impostor syndrome about the topics I'm writing about. I don't want to be a "guru" - I just really like to write, put in a lot of work for each case study, and do tons of research. But I do feel like I'm an impostor at times.

My goal has always been to (1) Grow the audience to 10k email subs and then (2) Launch a Job Board to monetize. I don't really need to sell anything to my audience - I just need to build the supply side (i.e the candidate side) so that I can get the demand (i.e tech companies) and monetize.

I feel like I should keep going. I'm becoming a better writer, a better marketer, and hopefully my content will start to compound as I keep going. I've been doing this for 10 months on nights & weekends (I work a fulltime job) and I feel like my subscriber count can grow much faster now since the quality of my writing has improved.

Ways I Can Keep Going

It was @csallen who said that Your Whole Goal Is Not To Quit (link to great interview). And I feel like I can do two things to reduce the probability of me quitting:

1. Join a community of tech bloggers. I know Monica Lent (@momoko) runs a really good one at BloggingForDevs, so maybe I should join that and get some support.

2. Create 10x content. If my goal really is to get to 10k email subs, there has to be a faster way to get there than to just release case studies once a week. If I maybe invest 4-6 weeks into creating one amazing article, I could potentially gets a huge bump of subscribers at once. Reminds me of what Pete did.

Anyways. That's where my head is at right now. Any input much appreciated.

Shikhar