The Indie Hackers newsletter just hit 100,000 subscribers!

For years, we plateaued at ~30K. But two years ago, we broke through and never looked back. A few details:

• $0 on ads.
• No marketing.
• Only two part-time contractors: An editor and a graphic designer.

Here's how we did it!

The formula

Our newsletter didn't grow until we got serious about content quality, and it's no wonder! Today's attention economy pits us against Twitter, Netflix, daily "breaking news," etc.

Even in the startup newsletter niche, The Hustle, Morning Brew, and others have raised the bar. So, two years ago we decided that our newsletter needed to deliver value that was high-quality, immediate, effortless to consume, consistent, and novel.

Here's our formula for a high-quality newsletter:

Magazine-style issues that intersperse long-form educational content with bite-sized, fun content for quick dopamine hits.

We brought on a top-notch editor and graphic designer to make this format sing.

The playbook

The playbook we've used to get to 100K newsletter subscribers has three chapters:

1. Value optimization.
2. Community crowdsourcing.
3. Content partnerships.

Let's dive in a little deeper.

Value optimization:

Newsletter readers need immediate value or a lot of them will bounce. In the context of an email inbox, readers are in "make the stress go away" mode, not "read thoughtful content" mode.

Yet, our emails are long AF! So, each issue begins with a tl;dr summary of the entire email:

Originally, our newsletter took a lot of effort to read. It was basically a list of links to forum posts on our site. We were optimizing for clickthroughs and website traffic, not for value.

Now, we bring the forum content directly to our readers' inboxes, and growth is exploding. Here's a harsh reality about newsletters: You're only as good as your last performance. There's no 80/20 rule for consistency. You simply have to shoot for 100%.

We do three issues a week. The 2-3 times we've had mixed feelings about quality? Yeah, we skipped those issues.

Another harsh reality: Most tech and business newsletters get old quickly, even if they're high-quality. This is because they deliver a steady drumbeat of the same good content until it goes from good to stale.

So, we mix in tech news, unique founder stories, recent trends, and other novelties.

Community crowdsourcing:

Without crowdsourcing content from our community, we never would have crossed 1K subscribers, let alone 100K.

In reality, this isn't a thread about how I grew the Indie Hackers newsletter to 100K, but about how the Indie Hackers community grew the Indie Hackers newsletter to 100K.

It's for indie hackers, by indie hackers. Up to 20K amazing founders visit the Indie Hackers forum every day, and hundreds of them write cutting-edge posts about their startup journeys, learnings, failures, etc.

Then, our newsletter editor picks the best ones and polishes them for the newsletter. Credit and backlinks always go to the authors. In startups and finance, you're supposed to talk about leverage, so let me put it this way: There's no longer lever than a community whose incentives are aligned.

Partnerships:

As our newsletter's reach has grown in recent years, other elite content creators have taken notice and agreed to join forces.

These days, one out of every five content sections in a given Indie Hackers newsletter comes from an influencer like Dru Riley, Harry Dry, and Steph Smith, with our news section coming from Priyanka Vazirani over at Volv.

And that's that! Thanks for reading, subscribing, sharing, and commenting. More exciting things to come!