Growth Lessons

I got my first sponsor for the Growth Lessons newsletter! And actually got the money today. It feels good.

I started Growth Lessons on April 1st this year, and I've sent out 12 emails so far. It takes a bit of work each week, roughly 3-4 hours, and to be honest I was starting to lose motivation a little.

Thankfully someone who I've been in touch with on Twitter about unrelated stuff has just launched a product (mailswipe.io - happy to plug it again), and he asked if he could sponsor my newsletter.

It felt really good to actually get some cash in return for work I've been doing. The newsletter has 1400 subscribers now so I suggested $50 and he said yes.

This really gives me motivation to keep growing the subscriber list. More subscribers means I can charge more but the amount of work stays the same - it's a good formula to have.

I think the lesson from this is to let people know what you're working on and if you're looking for sponsors, tweet publicly (I did a few weeks ago) as people will see it and remember.

Last month was an exciting month of firsts. I launched my Growth Lessons newsletter almost without thinking, just to see what happened. I got 20 signups from Twitter, and then decided to do my first ever Product Hunt launch, which ended up getting me around 800 subscribers.

There's nothing like 800 random strangers to help focus your mind! I felt a responsibility to provide something of value, so instead of writing my emails based on articles or email exchanges, I began arranging video calls with founders so that I could really understand their business and what helped them to grow.

This is actually working out great as I get to speak to some really interesting people and am learning a lot myself.

Last week I had a call with a Twitter friend who was telling me about their podcast, and they encouraged me to start recording my interviews. As it happened I had an interview lined up straight after so I asked the founder if I could record it and he said yes.

I simply recorded it on Zoom and then edited the file slightly using Garageband, recorded an intro with some music (I couldn't stop thinking of Courtland's IH Podcast intro so it might have similarities), and then uploaded it to Anchor.fm.

So now, without much effort, I have a newsletter and a podcast. My goal is to continue them for at least a year and see what happens. I'm expecting growth to be slow, but at the end of the year at least I'll have 50+ interviews with founders which I can turn into an e-book.

This is pretty unbelievable for me. I've never had a mailing list before. I started Growth Lessons completely on a whim without any plan. Just to see if it had legs.

Thanks to Carrd.co I was able to make a landing page I was happy with (growthlessons.co) and a friend on Twitter who's launched on Product Hunt many times was kind enough to advise me on how to launch.

Before the launch I had ~50 subscribers, sourced from Twitter.

The PH launch got me 293 subscribers on the day, and then 162 and 138 on the two following days. A week later I had around 800. I'm guessing most came from PH.

Then someone I follow on Twitter mentioned Growth Lessons in his newsletter (~2500 subs)! That day I got around 100 new subscribers, and have just passed 1,000 (actually 1,055 at last check).

Still a long way to go to see if this is sustainable and can be monetised but it's a great start and most importantly I'm enjoying researching and writing the content, so I feel I can keep going for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for reading,
Kieran.

Yesterday I launched my new project, growthlessons.co, on Product Hunt. It's my first PH launch and I had no idea what to expect. Never wanting to be overprepared, I didn't do much research before launching, but I did get some tips from a Twitter friend who has launched several times, and he hunted the product for me.

Growth Lessons hovered around 4th or 5th place for most of the day and ended up in 7th with 307 upvotes. I didn't know whether this was good or bad because you only tend to hear about 1st place launches, but apparently it's good as I was on the front page for the whole day.

Most importantly, my subscriptions went from a modest 50 at the start of the day to 450 currently (and still growing). I'm now feeling the pressure to take the newsletter seriously and generate good content, but I'm confident I can deliver!

My key learnings from this experience were:

• Get advice from someone who's done it before.
• Don't stress too much, just try it, everyone's really supportive!
• If your content is good, you have nothing to worry about.