Starting a newsletter as an indie hacker with a small audience 😱😱

So as you might've read from the title, I just started a newsletter.

Who am I?

I'm Amine, an indie hacker building side projects in public and I also wanted to grow my own newsletter like other people doing it.

Last Monday I shipped the v2 of my movie/show recommendation app MovyDick and yesterday (19/08/22) I built a quick & minimalist landing page for my next project: Youtalgo for Youtube users who want to 10x their watching experience by getting their own personalized feed without all the irrelevant recommendations.

And recently I decided to start my own newsletter...

I got no experience and no big audience (870 Twitter followers).

But how am I gonna know how to grow a newsletter if I don't start one and learn and take notes along the way, right?

Is it a really good idea to have a newsletter?

So many people on Twitter are praising the fact of having a newsletter and how you can OWN your audience and make sure to reach 100% of your audience instead of only relying on Twitter for example where the algorithm can sometimes show your tweet to only 10% of your audience or sometimes even less.

On the other hand on a newsletter, when you hit Publish the email is getting delivered to 100% of your subscribers and also I think the relationship you build with your newsletter subscribers could be STRONGER than with Twitter followers.

One thing that comes to mind now is how personal it could feel to get an email in your inbox from someone you're subscribed to.

You'll never miss it. Not like a tweet for example.

So what would my newsletter be about?

First of all let me tell you that I don't have a specific niche. So I think this might help since I can just write about:

• updates on my indie hacking life (projects I work on, feature releases, my process... )
• learnings from a podcast I listened to, a book I read...
• thoughts
• personal stories so people would know me better

I thought about starting a newsletter since long ago

The idea of starting my own newsletter came to me like months ago but I just didn't know which platform to go with: Sendinblue, Revue, Mailchimp... and also if there is something I could use for free because I am not sure if I can use one enough times in a month so I would have to pay for a monthly subscription.

Until I found recently about Substack.

So I set up my account without waiting.

At the time of writing this I am at 4 subscribers. One of them is only my other email to which I send my posts to make sure everything is working good. So technically I only have 3 subscribers 😅

I already published my first post yesterday, wanna read it?

I drafted titles for 5 of my next newsletter emails but it sounded more reasonable to write my newsletter post as just an introduction about me and my newsletter's goal.

You can read it here 👉 amineaouragh.substack.com

And also if you are interested, why not subscribing too? This would encourage me a lot to write more and better content 😊

Some newsletters I love to read

I am subscribed to some very good newsletters by some interesting people:

rankmakers.net by @robertodigital_: SEO strategies to grow your business.

lukenetti.com/newsletter by @luke_netti: Build a better website and a more profitable business.

The Saturday Solopreneur by @thejustinwelsh: Grow your online audience & business faster with 1 actionable tip every Saturday morning.

Cheers!

See you soon amigos!