ARK Watcher
Big bets by ARK Invest, delivered every weekday morning
For the past few weeks, we've been focusing on devising a monetization plan that suits our subscriber base and using affiliate links for products that we currently use to invest seemed like a good way to start.
After 2 weeks of trial campaign, we got one $30/conversion referral!
Growth has definitely slowed down since the shoutout that helped push to 4000, but incentivizing current subscribers to share by sending a sample of the Weekend Summary newsletter that subscribers with 3 referrals get, we were able to push our subscriber count to 5000.
Currently we are seeing around 50~60% of daily added subscriber count coming from referrals.
Reaching 5000 is a big milestone for us and definitely feel lucky to have such a loyal subscriber base!
With the help of another Youtuber giving a shoutout for the newsletter in one of their recent videos, we reached 4000 subscriber milestone! A bit less than our goal for this week (5000) but still incredibly fortunate to grow so fast.
With additional Youtubers in the pipeline preparing to provide a shoutout and by updating the referral program, I hope to reach the 5000 subscriber count milestone in a week or so.
Even with the sudden growth spurts, open rate is consistently around 45% with CTR at 40~45%.
Updated the landing page design to be minimal with iPhone device mockup.
After analyzing the traffic, I realized most subscribers viewed the emails on their phone so showing value prop of being mobile friendly for potential subscriber seemed critical.
Added a referral program to incentivize subscribers to share with their friends to gain access to weekly summary newsletter. Though there are several referral program SaaS options, there wasn't one for EmailOctopus that I could integrate easily, so I just built my own with AWS Lambda.
Preliminary data suggests that this won't be a huge driver of subscribers like it was for MorningBrew and the Hustle but will keep improving the copy to increase the utilization rate.
Long tail from the youtube shoutout helped to push the subscriber count to 2000 strong!
Fixed issues with broken links in the email and will do another follow up with other Youtube content creators for feedbacks to see if I can improve the newsletter for their viewers.
Building goodwill with micro-influencers seems like a winning strategy for increasing subscriber count early on.
When one of the early Youtube content creator I reached out for feedback showcased the newsletter in one of his videos, huge amount of his viewers and subscribers found the landing page and subscribed!
Note to self, make sure to have ample daily email quota at all times for automatic confirmation email and welcome email.
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Hey @shchoi22 congratulations on the new milestone.
I've just started a Founders network for cold emails to help founders get actionable feedback and advice for your cold emails from other founders. If you are reaching the Youtubers through a cold email, I'd love to have you on the network to help with your cold emails. The initiative is free to join :)
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Sure, just signed up!
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hi! @shchoi22.
I am interested in your newsletter and subscribed it .
I have a question,
is there any APIs from ARK Investment ?
if you don't mind I woild like to know where you have got the daily information from ARK Investment .-
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Thanks for subscribing! I'm scraping their daily EOD holdings csv, combining them with previously saved data and processing it for the newsletter email/full holdings list page.
I tried to use their trade data they send as well but found there were inconsistent data and not really helpful beyond what I could get from EOD holdings data.
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After cold emailing Youtubers and getting one of my colleague to share the newsletter to investing communities he is part of, I got to 25 subscribers with over 50% open rates.
I even got few Youtubers to reply back with valuable feedback to improve the newsletter.
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Hey @shchoi22 This is a interesting newsletter. I had to google who/what ARK watcher is and then understood about the newsletter.
I used to invest in the stock markets before I move to mutual funds due to lack of time to do research.
Out of curiosity, how quickly do you get the information of ARK investing in a company? The sooner the better I guess before the news become very public and the stock price would have risen already.
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ARK Invest usually updates holdings information few hours after market closes, probably around 8PM EST at the most. I believe all active ETFs have to report their end of day holdings publicly every day. So at the latest, you would be behind a day to whatever ARK Invest is up to.
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Hey @shchoi22 thanks for the reply.
I wasn't aware ETF's had to update at the end of the everyday. Is there any reason why it's only ARK and you haven't recovered other funds? Or is this something you have in the pipeline?
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Due to lack of audience I have in typical social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter, I resorted to gathering potential subscriber contact info in Youtube. By searching for Youtube channels discussing growth stocks (and specifically ARK Invest's picks) with emails, I got around 20 emails to start.
After cold emailing said 20 contacts, I got my first subscriber!
2 Comments
hi! @shchoi22
this is very interesting and i subscribe the newsletter.
but, this newsletter would be conflict with Ark Copyright and Trademarks in their terms-of-use page.
https://ark-funds.com/terms-of-use
it would be danger creating your work in legal gray areas .
what do you think of this matter?
I've read through the terms and not sure what you find that would be in conflict. The closest I've found is "You agree not to sell, distribute, publish, broadcast, circulate or commercially exploit Content in any manner without the express written consent of ARK" but their holdings data which I may or may not use (not the file that contains the holdings data) is not covered as "Content". If their holdings data itself is considered part of their "Content" then all brokerages, financial news outlets, etc must stop sharing their holdings data.
What Ark means by "Content" is their PDF white papers, research, holdings CSV/PDF files, etc, not the data it displays which is publicly available elsewhere.