Need advice, How to launch a Newsletter and Grow as a proper business

Build your subscriber list and plan out your content in advance, including the frequency of your newsletter, the types of content you'll include, and any special features or sections you'll offer.

Have done this with Micro SaaS Ideas and eventually built Micro SaaS HQ and launched two SaaS products too.

Also launched Zero To Founder around building products, newsletters, Info products.

Here are my answers on what you asked.

• Keep it precise and easily digestible. Some of my newsletters are 4000 words. That's huge but some topics need lengthy ones. Otherwise, I prefer shorter ones that are easily digestible. Less of images and gifs unless they are really explaining anything. No one wants funny images/gifs just for the sake of it.
• Some platforms to launch - Reddit, IH, Betalist, ProducHunt.
• Yes, even with 1 published article it's okay but I would suggest you have to atleast 5-10 issues and then go for PH launch to make it look rich in content.

On a side note, respect the reader time. Even though the newsletter is free, readers are paying with their time.

Also, I would suggest you to stick to 'coding' instead of 'coding & life'.

I've just been through these questions too with The SaaS Bootstrapper.

I didn't opt for a "proper" launch, because I knew it would take me at least a few issues to try a few things and see what felt right for me. I'm glad I went that route, here's why:

I started my newsletter with a different title, and a more broad array of topics I was covering. After about 4 issues I realized I needed to narrow the focus/niche. As soon as I changed the name to The SaaS Bootstrapper, and decided to really focus on how I bootstrapped a SaaS to 7-figures, and sharing the journey of how I'm trying to do it again, it became much easier to write, and a lot more people started signing up, partly because the name of it is so specific. People immediately have a good sense of what it is about and whether or not they are interested. So that has been my biggest takeaway: niche down.

I also decided between long form or short form, what modules to includes, etc. The more of a template you create up front, the easier it'll be to write each issue.
I think the topics you write about help dictate some of this, and whether or not you include many images. And I think it's also a personal thing. What suits you, what are you best at, what do you enjoy, what are you most likely to do.

Good luck, and let us know when you launch!

Product Hunt needs to come much later.

This is because you need to maximize every eyeball that comes from there.

You have a better chance of getting more subscribers via Product Hunt if you have 10 -12 episodes out.

More content = More areas of Interest to capture people.

So before launching on Product Hunt.

There are some things that you need to do first.

The best advice that I would give you is to treat your Newsletter like a Startup.

Let me explain.

Most people start newsletters and just publish and hope to grow but publishing consistently is only half of the equation.

You need to grow your distribution with one or more of the following:

1. Guest Posts: do this after you have 3 - 4 episodes out. Reach out to big blogs in your niche and ask them if they accept blog posts ( Adam Enfroy has an amazing guide on this).

This would help you gain some subscribers from established platforms. Some platforms also pay you for guest posts.

2. Leverage Recommendations: Substack and BeeHiiv have recommendations features where you can get other newsletters to recommend you to their new subscribers.

Reach out to Newsletters that complement yours and get them to recommend you. For this to work, your content needs to be great and they also need to be Newsletters that you genuinely like the content because you need to be an avid reader and engage with their content too.

3. Social Media: Twitter, Reddit, Indie Hackers, and LinkedIn are some great platforms where you can drive growth for your Newsletter from. I will advise you to read @harrydry guide to this on the Marketing Examples website.

There are other tactics that you can use to drive growth, but these three are more than enough for a start.

You should launch on ProductHunt after a significant milestone that would help you maximize whatever attention that you get from there.

I think the most important thing is to deliver value to the customer

Are you setting up your own blog site as well? Or are you just starting out on Medium and IH?

As someone that pays only for some subscriptions let me add my 2 cents:

• I subscribed only when I have seen that there is a lot of valuable previous content.

• I subscribed for a newsletter for good and deep articles. Twitter is full of small, junk articles. The ones you receive by mail and pay for them, you want to make you smarter.

• All the subscriptions that I am paying for, I found them on twitter. Just found the good content on twitter (snippets) and wanted more.

Wish you the best!

I saw you plan on posting 1 article/week on Substack. I think that's a great cadence and platform to choose given it's ease of use and free startup costs.

I think the next biggest question is where to distribute.

Instead of Product Hunt, I'd actually recommend Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/) because there you can publish a link to your new article every week that it comes out.

You should also think about the platforms where the engineers/developers you're targeting are active: Reddit and Twitter are two viable options.

When you're thinking about those platforms though, consider the fact that you need to be an active member of those communities to see the biggest return. It's not enough to just publish your own content every week. You need to engage with other people's content and even share links from other newsletters/blogs.

Lastly when it comes to length and multimedia, I'll give you the advice I give to creative writers that I coach:

You're piece should be exactly as long as it needs to be and no longer.

Some weeks, you might only write 250 words. Others, you might write 1500. Let your subject dictate the length.

tap into popular narratives. if you do it effectively people will at least check out your content on IH, Reddit, Facebook groups etc.

it can't be all about what you want to write, you have to give people what they want so knowing this is crucial.

i like to use seo tools and trend reports to see what the hot topics are are test from there. i'd suggest you consider as well. there are also companies that do market research and send weekly trending niches/topics via email trends.co ($200/year) and explodingideas.co (free) both do this.

good luck.