These Indie Hackers used email courses to gain thousands of subscribers and make four-six figure sales.

Hey guys n gals!

I've spent 40+ hours studying 20+ email courses, participating in 7, and creating my own.

I'm weird, I know...

Anyways, I'd like to share what I've learned, starting with just a list of "success stories", so as to not jump in the deep end yet.

This began when I took Monica Lent's Blogging For Devs email course. The content was invaluable and the medium was engaging, so I decided to explore this strategy of email courses further.

Massive thanks to the many email course creators who have helped me, or people who just gave me advice!

Including @momoko, @alexhillman, @zerotousers, @AndrewKamphey, @csallen.

Here's a list of 7 email course "success stories"

Monica Lent - Blogging For Devs

• 4,300+ subscribers in 5 months, read more here
• 7 day email series as top of funnel for her newsletter
• #1 Product of the Day on PH!
• Her Blogging For Devs Community made $5,000 in the week after launch, 73% of new members were a part of her existing mailing list, much attributed to this email course

Amy Hoy/Alex Hillman - Year of Hustle

• 20,000+ subscribers
• 7 day email series
• open rate of 57.4% at the beginning and 46.5% by the end
• "when we launched it in 2016 it was the largest contributor to list growth we'd ever seen with a single effort (more than 4000 new subscribers at launch, growing our list by 30%+) and then those subscribers were directly correlated to $102,000 in revenue" - @alexhillman

James Greig - "7 Things You Should Do Before Going Freelance"

• 2,000+ subscribers
• 45% open rate

Kareem Mayan - SocialWOD

• The email course "drove tens of thousands of dollars"
• "Last email in the drip flow had a 25% clickthrough"

BuzzFeed - The 7-day Better Skin Challenge

• 25,000 sign-ups in its first 36 hours
• Higher than average conversation rates between 35-55%.

Wirecutter - How to Work From Home

• 30,000 of Wirecutter’s newsletter subscribers come from their email courses

InterviewCake - Coding Interview Crash Course

• 100,000+ subscribers
• Top of funnel for their newsletter and main service, a weekly question email list helping students study for their software engineering/coding interviews

If you've made it this far, and are interested in why email courses can be an effective strategy to increase conversions, I've written up some follow-up posts about this that contain insights, and aren't just a list of success stories.

Let me know if that sounds at all interesting to you!

To be honest, just not sure if people are interested enough to read that kind of content, so just leaving this post as a list of success stories for now :)

And if you're extremely perceptive, I said I studied 20+ email courses, and I've only listed 7 here. That's because most of the one's I took/researched actually sucked... I'd also love to share the common pitfalls for email courses if people are interested!