My newsletter reached 250k page views and 1000+ subs in 3.5 months with no audience

Hi everyone,

A few months ago, I set out to build a newsletter detailing success stories of bootstrapped founders and businesses that started as side projects. Since then, I've built my list of 1000+ emails and got over 250,000 page views.

Here are some things that I learned:

Building without an audience is hard, but not impossible

I finally get why people say you should have an audience for a newsletter. Building a list organically from zero is really hard. A lot of the time your tweets, posts, and emails will barely reach anyone or get a response. It's super demotivating and hard to see a clear path to success.

But that doesn't mean it's impossible. Good content will go viral anywhere. Posting on HackerNews, Reddit, and other targeted forums will put your post in front of new eyes. This post made the front page of HackerNews and drove over 50,000 page views to my newsletter

I have only 450 Twitter followers and 650 LinkedIn followers, but I've grown my email list at 2.5x the speed of either platform.

Start niche and expand broadly later

Starting a niche is great because:

• You define your audience early
• Content ideas can come more clearly
• Your newsletter becomes more unique

When you start out, it's easier for people to remember niche newsletters

Define your newsletter

There are different types of newsletters:

• Analytical, researched, and insightful (Not Boring, The Generalist, Lenny's Newsletter)

• News (Morning Brew, The Hustle, TLDR)

• Entertaining or motivating (The Browser)

Each type has a different approach to writing and content delivery. I do quite a bit of research on my end, which takes around 10-20 hours per piece

Choose the right software

People overlook this and say it shouldn't take too long. But I have a different experience. I've written newsletters before, and some platforms have very low email deliverability rates. I can't explain how many times they've gone to spam.

Overall, my top choices are Beehiiv, Ghost, and Substack. The deliverability, pricing, UI, features (recommendations, polls, etc), and overall analytics are the best on these platforms.

Ask your audience what they want to read about

Remember, you're writing to your audience. Find out what stories they want to read about and what interests them. Typically, I've done this in a few ways:

• I tweet about a few stories and see how they respond. I don't have many followers, but I still get ~10 people to respond

• I add polls at the end of every email asking people how they liked that email. After writing for a few weeks, I definitely get a better sense

• In my welcome email, I also have a poll for the type of story my audience likes. Ideally, as the newsletter grows bigger, I can segment my audience to only send stories of their liking.

Anyways, that's all the tips I have for now!

I just started my newsletter journey, and I'm definitely exceeding my own expectations with its success. I hope this helps everyone!

If you want to read my newsletter, check it out here