Blogging for Devs
A community & weekly newsletter for developers who blog
My blog posts have reached well over 1M people, thanks to learning about SEO and content creation. I want to explain what I learned in technical terms that devs can understand and apply immediately.
In the last week or so, the Blogging for Devs community reached 300 community members!
About 100 are from the free beta period, and 200 are paid. The paid part launched in November, so that's about 4 months to reach this point.
Growth continues to be mostly from people taking the newsletter, and in March I plan to launch a newsletter referral program to help boost that a bit more :)
Twitter continues to be my main source of newsletter subscribers, along with mentions in blog posts, podcasts, and guides.
Planning to launch a newsletter referral program at the end of this month / beginning of next month, to hopefully double-down on Twitter :)
I've had a Sponsor page on my newsletter website for a while, but never actively sought them out.
Shortly after reaching 5K subscribers, a number of people got in touch about sponsoring (or affiliate deals, which I countered-offered with a sponsorship option 馃槆)
So on Thursday I sent the first sponsored email out, sponsored by Fathom Analytics.
And I've got three more sponsors in discussions! Pretty neat.
Forgot to post this milestone at the end of 2020, but Blogging for Devs reached 5,000 email subscribers!
Reaching this milestone took about 6.5 months.
It's now at 5,433 after some tweets that drove people to my profile, who then clicked on my pinned tweet to the newsletter.
I shared this on twitter, but the opt-in rate on mobile Twitter on the homepage (also the source of most traffic) is a shocking 31%.
My goal is to reach 20,000 subscribers in 2021, meaning I need to pick up the pace and add about 1,200 subscribers per month.
My next steps are growing organic traffic to the website, working on opt-in rate for pages besides the homepage, and launching a basic referral program.
After converting the Blogging for Devs community to paid (for new members) at the end of October, we've reached $1K in MRR.
A few metrics to color this number:
- Public launch on Nov 2nd
- 130 paid members (approx.)
- Most people subscribe to my newsletter (launched in May)
- 67 monthly, 32 annual, rest are lifetime
- Fewer than 5 cancelations so far
- $800 actually recurs monthly
- $10.8K total revenue
For now, the MRR almost covers the cost of running the community (tools + guests), minus my actual time 馃槄
But it does feel good to reach this milestone by the end of the year!
100 paid* members, couldn't fit that in the milestone title. In total, we're now 203 strong :)
"Thanks" (馃槀) to a random person for posting my launch breakdown to Hacker News. It's been on the front page for an uncomfortably long time.
So far Hacker News has compared my paid community to a pyramid scheme and the Tai Lopez garage video, but hey, if you have haters it means you're doing something interesting, right? 馃榿
My newsletter also grew by almost 200 people, and on Twitter it's like +500 followers for the week. What a bizarre experience.
Anyway, now I need to write my weekly newsletter!
Edited to add: To be clear, I've run the community for free for a couple months. I've also been running the newsletter behind it since May. It was my first day of charging all new members, not my first day of running it 馃槄
This milestone came after personally emailing about 60 people from the waitlist out of roughly 120. About 11 people signed up the same day they got the email.
(If you're wondering about the numbers, it helps that a decent number of people choose the lifetime plan)
People on the waitlist had to fill out an application form, so they were comparatively "qualified" compared to a list of random email addresses.
Very soon, within minutes, I'll be launching it to the full email list, with over 4,000 subscribers 馃槺
I have no idea how many of those subscribers who'd be interested already joined the waitlist or have been following as I build it on Twitter, but we will soon find out.
The soft launch was also a great way to get feedback on the landing page from members. This is the final version...for now :)
Okay, it's technically 5 months and 7 days. But yesterday, Blogging for Devs surpassed 4,000 email subscribers.
What moved the needle for the last 150 to this milestone?
One of the subscribers posted an article to Hacker News, with some of his SEO learnings from my newsletter. He also kindly linked and recommended to it readers in one of the first paragraphs.
His article reached #3 on Hacker News, and sent me a lot of new subscribers! (Thanks Maxime!)
My stretch goal for the year was 5,000 subscribers and this is looking more attainable every day 馃槺
So far, I've only told newsletter subscribers about the private community in one, semi-launch email.
This is back when I had about 1.5K subscribers (I'm now at 3.9K) and before it's since grown to about 100 members.
As part of a challenge I'm taking to launch a startup per month for a year (yes, in the most famous challenge in Indie Hackerdom), I'm building out the community in public.
Will be launching paid access at the end of October.
Here we go 馃檭
With the help of the Product Hunt launch, the subscriber base for Blogging for Devs has doubled in less than two months: from 1.5K to 3K.
Right now, 1,154 people are taking the 7-day challenge!
I know there are newsletters read by like, tens or hundreds of thousands of people, but I'm still pretty amazed that 3,000 humans have decided to subscribe.