What I've learned from growing my newsletter to over 1,000 subscribers

Hey all,

today I wanted to share my learning from growing my newsletter to 1,000+ subscribers from scratch.

Some background

A friend and I decided to start a newsletter around August/September 2021. This was my second attempt at a business project after my first failed attempt (a wellness marketplace). While working on the project, I became aware of the many unknown unknowns that I hadn't considered previously. I also learned that getting a marketplace off the ground is extremely difficult for a noob like me.

Once I put the project on hold, I wanted to start a project with a narrower focus. When I was looking for new opportunities, I found The Embedded Entrepreneur by Arvid Kahl and fell in love with its community-/audience-first approach.

As a result, I jumped headfirst into online communities to look for problems people talked about, in order to identify promising business opportunities. I thought it would be cool if someone did this kind of research for me. That led me to the newsletter project:

CommunityValidated: Discover validated business opportunities in the fastest-growing online communities.

Our idea was simple: do the type of research we’ve been doing already, and share it in a weekly newsletter. The main differentiator from other business idea newsletters would be our method of identifying business opportunities: the audience-first approach. I thought the scope would be narrow enough for us as noobs and learn valuable business basics at the same time.

We started our newsletter on substack and started executing right away. Our first milestone was reaching 1,000 subscribers, which we achieved after two months. Today, I want to share the main lessons I learned:

1. Charge from day one

One of our biggest mistakes was delaying charging readers. We put a lot of time and effort into building this audience and provided a lot of value upfront. We should've considered ways to generate revenue from day one and started experimenting with them right away. Back then, I did not realize how important revenue was to bootstrapped founders, otherwise, I might have placed more emphasis on it.

2. Develop a sustainable business model

Finding a business model that could sustain us proved to be much more challenging than I anticipated.
We considered the subscription model, but it didn't seem appropriate for our product (see point 5). Lifetime deals could have made sense, but with lifetime deals by definition, you’ll only charge a customer once. The prospect of acquiring new customers in order to generate revenue didn't seem very appealing. Perhaps we should offer a paid, subscription-based community? We know how much time and effort communities require, so are we really ready to commit to this?

We looked at multiple potential business models but weren't able to decide on any. I think the learning here is similar to point 1: get out of your head and start experimenting.

3. Build multiple distribution channels

We received 80% of our traffic from Reddit. For the beginning, it was great, but a problem loomed on the horizon: you can't really build an audience or brand on Reddit. Though it's great for getting your project started, I believe the other platforms are better in the long run.

On Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms, you can attract an audience and build a personal brand. Growing there usually takes longer, but once you do, you can draw more people to your list. Reddit can be a nice kick-start, but I don't think it's a good long-term strategy.

4. Streamline your writing process

We spent way too much time on the writing process in the beginning. Content creation is the easy part, building your audience and brand on the platforms is the difficult part. We realized this a bit too late, and we should have allocated our time differently (e.g., less on writing our newsletter, more on building a Twitter audience, or working on SEO). We significantly reduced production times by streamlining the writing process.

5. Solve a problem that’s recurring

One of the biggest problems I see with our product is that it does not solve a problem that our readers face regularly. The problem we solve is finding valid business opportunities. But once we solve this problem, our customers are gone. It ties into what I said in point 2: charging a subscription for solving "one-off" problems just doesn't seem right to me.

When starting a newsletter today, I would aim for a space in which my content is useful to my readers every week, such as a newsletter that provides industry expertise for specific practitioners (marketers, programmers, etc.).

6. Set meaningful goals

Our main goal was to grow to 1k. But why? Because it sounds good, that’s it. You can use it to write clickbaity titles, but it isn't necessarily relevant to your business. Instead, we should have thought of the bigger picture: what are we actually trying to accomplish with this newsletter? Do we want to bootstrap this to become a profitable business? We never really clarified what we wanted to do with it, but by now I think this is crucial.
If we wanted to reach profitability quickly (which, in retrospect, should've been our priority), our goal should've been point 1: charge from day one. Not to get to 1k subscribers as quickly as possible.

7. Plan according to your goals and set milestones

By setting clear goals, one can plan and set milestones accordingly. Determine how you will measure success. If you do not reach your milestones according to your measures of success, then I believe you should come up with a new strategy. Of course, plans often fail, but at least they give your work structure.

8. PR Events

It's not really a learning, but I want to provide my opinion on PR events that give spike-y growth, e.g., ProductHunt launches. Until today, we haven't launched our newsletter on PH. Our thinking was that you can only have one PH launch, so PH won't drive organic traffic to your site. Instead of wasting our time with a PH launch, we thought it would be smarter to figure out sustainable marketing channels from the beginning.

This sort of worked out. But by now, I don’t have such a strong opinion on PH anymore. I think getting this traffic from PH very early can create important momentum. Additionally, you can build multiple smaller projects and launch them on PH to drive traffic to your main project (as multiple IHers have done successfully).

So, these are some of my learnings I had while growing CommunityValidated. With this post I wanted to share my learnings, and not write a “Here’s how you can do the same” post. Hope this was helpful to some of you.

Do you have any thoughts or questions? I'm happy to chat!

If you want, you can check out the newsletter here or connect with me on Twitter if you like.