Crafted

Today I emailed my audience to let them know about the giveaway: a Homebrew Starter Kit from Northern Brewer.

Check out the landing page.

I decided to keep things simple and not go with a referral plan. I decided that my readers wouldn't need to do any extra steps to qualify for the giveaway. I hope this good-faith effort will make them more loyal and encrouage them to feel a part of the community I'm building. I asked them to share the letter with others - we'll see how it goes!

I just got an email from Northern Brewer that they'd be happy to provide a Homebrew Starter Kit for a giveaway on the newsletter!

I'm very thankful and honestly a bit surprised :)

I reached out to a handful of beer companies & brewer associations to inquire about sponsorship. Northern Brewer was the only one who replied favorably. They were willing to help me on my "exciting new adventure" even though I shared that Crafted was only a month old, with couple hundred subscribers, and didn't have much social media presence.

I was able to articulate that the community is growing and engaged, and that by giving away one of their products they'd win at least one new customer who's lifetime value would far exceed the cost of the kit.

Next step is to organize the giveaway. The simplest way would be to pick a subscriber. But I am also thinking about how to leverage referrals - for example an existing subscriber would get an extra "count" for every referral they made.

That's for later - for now I'm just happy to have something to offer my readers!

Yesterday I sent out 🍺 Crafted Edition #001 🎉

I wanted to first validate my idea before spending too much time on it. So I created a landing page and then scattered a few links throughout the beer communities of Reddit. Within a week there were over 100 people subscribed - awaiting the first newsletter.

Luckily, I found a brewer to interview to be featured in this first edition. Already I've learned several lessons that I can apply the next time I interview (for #002):

• Prepare an icebreaker to create the atmosphere you want
• Ask questions confidently & have more questions than you think you'll need
• Record the interview with some video-recording software (anyone have recommendations?) so you can easily go back, or even share the video content at a future date (💡 or turn it into a podcast, accessible to premium subscribers)

This was the final step that took me from "thinking about creating a newsletter" to actually having a newsletter. Now I feel the pressure to continue it week after week - but I'm looking forward to it 😊

A few days ago I posted about deciding between what to focus on first: getting subscribers or producing content? (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/which-comes-first-the-subscribers-or-the-content-6c83b2dfa7)

At the same time, I wanted to validate the concept of my newsletter before putting much time into it.

So I created a landing page on Netlify and linked the sign-up form to Zapier which fired emails to new subscribers and added them to my mailing list.

There was one last step: getting the news out. I posted across several beer-focused communities on Reddit about my newsletter that was launching soon.

3 days later, there are 30 people signed-up for the newsletter 🎉 🍺 This is great validation for me and spurs me on to the next step: content production. Now I have to find a few brewers who are willing to be interviewed (Let me know if you know any!)

Last note: I am well aware that this milestone doesn't mean that the newsletter will be successful. Heck, technically I don't even have a newsletter yet. I do believe that the lifecycle of newsletters depends on the quality of your content and not the size of your mailing list.

If you have 100,000 subscribers but deliver them no value, it means nothing. Today I have 30. So today I'm committed to getting a value-adding letter into the inbox of 30 people 💪 🚀

Honestly this is something I've been procrastinating to do for a while. As an aspiring product-owner, you always read wisdom like:

• don't wait to launch
• launch even when you aren't ready
• its better to have something and fail than to have never started

I've been sitting on my newsletter idea for months, but today I finally took the first (very quick) step to making it real: I made my landing page for Crafted at https://joincrafted.com

This is a small but significant step and I wanted to share it with the community :)