I went from 0 to 700 subscribers in 10 days, here's how.

First post showing Linkpunk to IH on Jan 3rd.

Subscriber count as of writing: 777.

First, I want to preface that this quick growth won't be attainable for every type of newsletter. However, I've now built two newsletters (a crypto newsletter that grew to 14K subcribers) and my most recent passion project Linkpunk so I'm fairly confident in my ability to get subscribers. So to build Linkpunk, here is what I'm doing.

1. ABL (Always Be Launching)

You need to be launching consistently. If your newsletter is targeted towards makers (everyone should do this anyway), you NEED to be launching on all the related platforms like ProductHunt, Indie Hackers, HackerNews, etc. If you’re product is targeted towards other groups, you need to find where those readers exist and launch there. Reddit is a great place to find almost any community you can think of.

Places on Reddit you can launch right now…

• r/SideProject

• r/EntrepreneurRideAlong

• r/webdev (Show Off Saturday)

In r/SideProject and r/EntrepreneurRideAlong specifically, feel free to share your updates too. If you just hit 1,000 subscribers, share that! These subreddits love learning about success and how it’s done. Just make sure to share the ups and the downs along with your learnings.

Other communities may be less welcoming to your launch, but if you follow the next point, you’ll probably be in a good spot.

2. Don’t sell first

Don’t be a salesman trying to get subscribers. The internet, especially Reddit, is good at sniffing motives out.

When you post to communities, you need to truly be authentic and offer value before asking for anyone’s email. Maybe you post a snippet of your content. Maybe you ask a question to spark up a thoughtful discussion. Sometimes you don’t even need to link directly to your newsletter before someone will ask “Link?” and boom, you can plug your newsletter without looking like a total slimeball.

But in order to offer value, you need to know that…

3. Exclusive content IS necessary

Gone are the days where you can simply curate news. You need to really convince people in a sentence why they should give you, a stranger over the internet, their email address so you can hit their inbox.

That’s why to really fuel growth, you need to find content that is absolutely exclusive.

With Linkpunk, I’m doing the legwork of finding really cool, unregistered domains that makers can use for their projects.

In my crypto newsletter, I used interviews to get exclusive content.

And if you are using interviews…

4. Leverage your interviews

Starter Story, No-Code Exits, Workspaces are perfect examples of newsletters that create a flywheel of growth from sharing subscribers’ stories.

If you get featured in a newsletter, you’re 100% likely to share that with your own followers or community.

Leverage that. Start creating content that spotlights others, even if it’s a little section, and give those subscribers a reason to share your work with the world.

And if they are sharing your work with the world make sure to have a…

5. Referral program for autopilot growth

Give readers an incentive to invite others easily. Morning Brew and The Hustle are both notorious for growing to millions of subscribers via referral programs. Study them. Make the rewards bad-ass and generate sustained growth through the most powerful type, word-of-mouth.

There are lots of no-code services that do this for you like SparkLoop or Viral Loops but it really doesn’t have to be that complicated in the beginning. Early on for our crypto newsletter, we manually tracked referral counts with a Google Sheet then sorted by most referrals to reward those subscribers.

But to grow fast you need to up the ante sometimes. That’s why you should…

6. Do giveaways for growth spurts

In addition to your referral program, you need to leverage giveaways. Once again, the newsletter greats utilized giveaways to grow quickly.

Morning Brew would give out Macbook Pros to their mostly-college subscribers. You need to find something that resonates with your audience.

If you cannot afford to buy giveaway gifts yourself, look to partner with a company. With our crypto newsletter, we would partner with dev teams and giveaway tokens, hardware wallets, etc. It’s a win-win situation because they get eyeballs on their product and we get growth from new subscribers.

You may have some strong churn after these subscribers come but that’s okay. If you’re offering valuable content, many will stay.

7. Build your own landing page

This might be a hot take. I realize that there are tons of Substacks that crush it. However, if you want to stand out from the bunch, you should build your own landing page. Just take a look at Linkpunk. It’s simple, quick to the point, and took a few hours to build. Shell out the couple bucks for a domain and start collecting subscribers there. If you do it correctly, I’m confident your conversion rate will go up.

Closing

These are tactics that I’ve followed and have had success with. If you’re reading this as a newsletter owner, feel free to reach out to me @kylesamera on Twitter and maybe I can offer some tips/help on how to grow. Plus, I always like connecting with other makers and hearing about what they’re creating. Happy Sunday and cheers to a productive upcoming week!