I'm going to hit 1000 subscribers with my newsletter soon. It's been an emotional roller coaster

Hi folks!

I launched my community research and business ideas newsletter exactly two months ago. I’m going to hit 1000 subscribers this (or next) week and I‘m absolutely stoked about that.

This is my first project as an entrepreneur, and let me tell you, it has been a wild ride emotionally. I wonder how many of you can relate to this.

When me and my co-founder (and friend) started, our expectations were low. We hadn’t put out much content when suddenly we got 200 subs in just two days, mostly as a result from a popular Reddit post. For someone so new to the newsletter business, this much attention blew our minds.

As you can imagine, we got a legitimate dopamine rush as our conservative growth expectations were suddenly flying out the window.

Well, it didn’t hold on for long.

In the weeks after, we continued growing, but at much slower pace. We faced self-doubts, although we were fully aware that the unexpected spike in subscribers was never sustainable anyway.

We continued to put quite a lot of effort into promoting our newsletter through posting on different platforms. Sometimes we were successful and got small subscriber boosts, but never anything close to the spike in the beginning.

Depending on the growth rate, we staggered between high hopes and disappointments, impatience and perseverance, self-doubt and gratitude.

(As you can see, we definitely need to learn to become more emotionally consistent, and less dependent on our current level of success 😂)

As we are now about to hit 1000 subscribers, feelings of hope and optimism definitely prevail, which is why we want to share this with you and encourage other small newsletter businesses to keep grinding.

We also want to share some of our key learnings:

• If your content is really good, it will get positive responses. However, there are many external factors at play, so try not to be too disappointed if sometimes you don’t get quite as much growth as you were hoping for.

• Having a co-founder on board turned out to be absolute key for me. I tend to have many (not too dramatic) highs and lows, both emotionally and in terms of focus. Two people can balance out what one person alone can’t. Also, being accountable to someone besides myself was essential to my level of productivity.

• Community research is awesome! After two months, we still absolutely love to learn and write about different communities every week.

• You get faster and better at what you do over time. This puts you in a position to help others, which is amazing.

Despite all these learnings, we’re still at the beginning. Soon, we want to diversify our newsletter content and broaden the scope more. Our goal is to help others understand communities' values, cultures and potentials.

We’re definitely going to keep you guys updated. If you want to know what exactly we’re doing in our newsletter, you can find it here

What about you? Are there more people in the newsletter business here? I would love to hear about your growth story, your struggles and successes. It would definitely help putting things in perspective.

Also, any feedback on the newsletter is highly appreciated! We want to improve our format and content wherever we can.

Cheers!