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12 Comments

The Newsletters Trend...

Many makers are following this trend and creating new newsletters and websites around a newsletter... Im a little tempted in trying myself but seems a complete nightmare in terms of monetization, since its really expensive to scale... More users don't always means more "profit" but definitely means much more costs in the newsletter market...

What is your guys experience with newsletters?

Is there any newsletter around that is actually profitable? (excluding e-commerce and stock market newsletters...)

Everyone says that newsletters are amazing, and i agree with that, it's a great tool, but seems that most newsletters are a extra cost in a marketing strategy instead of a viable source of revenue...

  1. 2

    In my opinion, a newsletter is a way to create leads to your product or service. You need to generate interest and to find potential customers.

    Monetize directly a newsletter is really hard, the same like to try to monetize something from ads, you should have a big amount of subscribers to be able to generate some money.

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      I agree, that's why its a nightmare to make the project just around the newsletter... Its really complicated to make it viable with costs always increasing...

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    That's a really interesting topic. I'm thinking of pivoting the MVP version of my project (Diversifyn.com) that aims to be a (web) platform and community by starting providing some (resources) and content via Newsletter.
    However, I can't decide if I should start right from the day 0 charging for the subscription of the newsletter or add it later on...

    Definitely, I want to monetize the project (as early as possible since as a principle I don't believe in free projects), however, my doubts are similar to yours. I've looked into some tools (like ConvertKit, Substack or Revue) and the costs seems ok but the effort will be more around marketing/energy to generate leads to the newsletter instead to generate leads to the product itself.
    Any thoughts on this?

    1. 1

      I think its really hard to sell a subscription for a newsletter, but you still can make it work if you create enough value inside that newsletter...

      Also check Sendgrid, the prices look ok, im having difficulties in finding better...

      1. 1

        Well to be honest I thought exactly the same until I saw some numbers and the amount of people charging 5bucks per month for content (which sometimes it’s not even created by them) and they have some thousands subscribers. It makes us think. Or at least me lol

        Sendgrid, never heard, will def check.
        There’s also Mandrill.

  3. 1

    For $20 you can reach 1000's of potential customers.

    100% worth it if you have a good topic.

    1. 1

      where can I find this $20 for 1000 of potential customers? This seems cheap.

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        Talking about the costs of running a newsletter on mailchimp etc.

        You can run it using https://substack.com/ and will be free actually.

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          I've thought about doing a newsletter. However, we may be too early for this and what we need right now is a very active community. Guess i'll stick to reddit.

    2. 1

      yes, but topics like Entertainment is usually a really bad topic...

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        If you charge a subscription to the newsletter one paid user can pay for 1000 free users. So even then it makes sense.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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      AWS SES is probably an option but not all projects are accepted by Amazon....

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