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Newsletter launch on Product Hunt - a bit underwhelming results but reinforced our direction

We launched our newsletter on Product Hunt last week. Just wanted to share our experience with the community.

Newsletter setup

  1. We wanted it to stand on its own to create more opportunities for branding and explore different funnels. So we published it on a separate domain
  2. Used Revue as our newsletter platform. We wanted to use Substack but they don't have an API. Happy with it so far, although we'd have loved to see some more flexibility in styling and better analytics
  3. Revue doesn't have HTTPS support for custom domains. We solved it by routing it via Cloudflare
  4. Connected our Revue and Mailchimp accounts using Zapier to keep subscribers in sync

Expenses

  1. Domain name - USD 9
  2. Revue - USD 5/month (for upto 200 subscribers)
  3. Canva - signed up for free trial to get high quality image exports. Not converted to pro yet

Launch process

  1. Prepped our launch page a day earlier
  2. Made the images on product page using Canva and some more editing using photopea.com
  3. Launch time - Thursday, June 18 at 1:00 AM US time based on some best practices that we came across
  4. Posted in communities that we are part of
  5. Shared with friends
  6. Didn't reach out to any influencer for the launch since we wanted to try it out by ourselves first (we have more launches planned in the next 2-3 months)

Observations

  1. Initial upvotes started trickling in very early although the pace wasn't enough to make it visible in the top 20
  2. Product Hunt's ranking algorithm doesn't seem very straightforward and the ranks seem to be calculated every few hours. So getting that initial traction seems to be very important to retain your place in the top 10 or 20 for the rest of the day
  3. Almost everyone who upvoted subscribed to the newsletter
  4. Not many upvotes from my followers on the platform

Results

  1. Total 73 upvotes so far, 63 on day one
  2. Of the 73, about 15 are from our current subscriber base and a few our own
  3. 58 new subscribers

Next steps

Although our Product Hunt launch didn't go really well, it is still a validation and an encouragement in the right direction to keep pursing the newsletter. We are now exploring ways to grow it. Currently considering...

  1. Ads with limited budget on FB, LinkedIn and Twitter
  2. Try publishing all our issues on Medium as well
  3. Interviews with freelancers to be featured in our newsletter
  4. Getting it featured in other newsletters and curated newsletter galleries (letterlist.com, etc)

This newsletter is our way to sharing our constant learnings about the freelance industry with our audience. We keep exploring the space as part of our research and we thought it made sense to roll it up into a newsletter.

We are making Engineering as Marketing as one of our core growth tenets. We are builders first and foremost, so the idea is to keep pushing out small utilities and resources that can help freelancers while we work on our main product.

Thoughts/advice?

Would love to hear from you guys - any advice on how to grow the newsletter and what we could've done differently with our launch to reach more folks. Any ideas for little products that we can build for freelancers?

Happy to answer any questions.

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