Taking Paul Graham's advice and using a 10% WoW growth as a form of evolutionary pressure

I'm a software engineer at Commonstock (an awesome social network for investors, backed by actual track records, that's available on iOS for anyone interested), but in my free time I'm super passionate about Bitcoin and crypto.

My younger brother and I are in like a dozen crypto chats and constantly coming across tons of great resources--articles, podcasts, video interviews, etc.--so we decided to spin up a newsletter, "Grokking Crypto", that briefly highlights the best thing we come across each day (along with a few headlines and a "tweet of the day") that we could share w/ friends and family who are trying to keep up w/ all of the content being produced in the space.

This is not something we're trying to make money off of, but we thought it'd be fun to try and help people get more involved in the space and build something valuable from nothing (it's also pretty cool working with family on something). We have no idea where this will go, but we decided to take a page out of Paul Graham's book to target 10% growth, talk to users, and let that guide us. Right now we have 19 subscribers, which means we only need to sign two more people up next week. This doesn't seem scalable but compound growth is super powerful.

As PG points out in his essay "Startup=Growth", 10% weekly growth compounds to 142x growth yearly, which will equate to almost 3,000 subscribers by this time next year. Nothing crazy, but again this is just a fun side project. I also think it's a great philosophy to have so you don't get too discouraged by only a handful of users each week in the beginning. Below is an excerpt from the essay that I really liked for anyone interested, though I would definitely recommend leading the full article:

"If there's one number every founder should always know, it's the company's growth rate. That's the measure of a startup. If you don't know that number, you don't even know if you're doing well or badly...

The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it can actually discover startup ideas. You can use the need for growth as a form of evolutionary pressure. If you start out with some initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10% weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start. But anything that grows consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with."

The link is grokkingcrypto.substack.com for anyone who's interested in the crypto space (or simply wants to make our life a little more difficult by upping the number of people we have to sign up next week). It's totally free, and I would love any ideas this awesome community may have to make the product even more valuable!

All are also welcome to join the Grokking Crypto community group chat on Commonstock here: https://share.commonstock.com/share?invite=vdcZfV