citreae

Currently full focus on moving beyond the newsletters and setting up the structure that allows paying members to access the news, the community and the industry resources... while at the same time making sure that those elements cross pollinate. While it is fully clear in my mind, the execution is facing some hurdles.

The pressure of having members who have already paid is both stimulating and terrifying. But mostly the first.

Blown away, but have my first paying customers!

I announced the paid platform roadmap yesterday and did it in a proper pre-launch fashion: Embark now and you get a discount on the lifetime package.

Had the first paying customer in 21 minutes after that email and a couple more followed during the night and in the morning the next day.

Have a special ❤️ group of early supporters now to take extra care of in the coming weeks towards the soft launch and full launch. 🤞🏻

Through 1 banner exchange with another newsletter, I managed to reach my 200th subscriber. Took longer than expected, but also understand that I am focusing on a niche and have not put much effort in really reaching out to prospect subscribers.

For the paid platform on top of the I had a rough outline / roadmap, but was still anxious to set it in motion this early. It was actually the low number of readers that I turned into a reason.
Still it felt like a gamble to announce the roadmap towards the community and resources outlook I had in mind.

The planning was to launch the almost fully automated version of citreae. For readers there is nothing to shows that, but for me - the daily compiler / creator - it saves a bucketload of time generating it.

And while I had most components ready and working, in the weekend before launch I found that the automated interaction was not working properly.

With the Mailchimp template in place and an audience awaiting a first email, I decided to skip the whole automation part and compile the content on the fly by hand.
I am happy I did. I delivered and started getting feedback.

And while not with a backend flow according to planning, the execution towards the readers was there, appreciated and showing its potential.

Automated flow will be shared as soon as operational.

After posting on LinkedIn, Twitter and in my other newsletter (juicenews).

Although I was expecting to reach this number in a week, it is interesting to experience what it does to your confidence in a project. I always have to remind myself: What if you see those 100 people in a room in front of you? Makes you put that just a number in another perspective.

Shortly after announcing the launch via LinkedIn, somebody reached out and asked to be in the first edition.

I offered him to be the first sponsor immediately. Annnnd I also offered it for free.

To me it was important to have that spot filled and I hope that it sets a tone of what to expect in the newsletter for readers, as well as being an example to future sponsors.

Set up a flow for sponsoring that allows paying for 1, 2 or 3 weeks (with discounts on the latter 2) through Gumroad and redirects to the site's form for collecting the ad content, which is passed to a Airtable sheet for easy incorporation into a Mailchimp template.

Even when I am not fully finished with the preparations of a project I need to announce it. To put pressure on myself, to have a date to work towards and - in this case - to start building an audience.

Having another newsletter in the same space helped, having social media channels with some followers as well. Speed of signups was for me enough indication that the interest is there.