Alts Club

Over the last few months I've been digging deep within myself to understand what I want to really spend my time on with the limited amount of time I have. For further context, I only get about 2 hours a day to work on side projects. Essentially this means I can effectively work on 1 project at a time to have any real chance to succeeding.

I've seen success before with multiple 4, 5, and 6-figure exits in the last couple of years. I've really started to hone my skill in understanding product market fit and founder market fit.

Unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that I don't think building a newsletter and a membership around alternative assets is for me. I do love this space and have multiple investments around alternative investments, but after building up small community, sending out multiple newsletters, and generally living within this space I've realized it's not what I want to spend my free time on.

It's been a hard decision since I have pout in over 100+ hours on this project. But in the long term it's not the biggest failure (I've had bigger).

Thus I've decided to put Alts Club up for sale. I have multiple people excited already. The current price I have it up for is around $1500, which I believe is very fair.

I think this time around I'll work on a micro saas idea. I always love just sitting down, listening to music, and coding.

My last post on IndieHackers was on June 23, 2023 regarding the rebranding from Investing Cafe into a more niche subject of Alternative investing called Alts Club.

However it's been over a month and I haven't made much progress. I should be at least writing one full blog post (2k+ words) every single week. However I've only published one blog on investing in watches, granted it was one of the best, most detailed, and longest blog posts, the quantity is lacking.

I feel much of it has to do with my doubts. I can only really dedicate at most 2 hours a day (on a good day!). To launch something meaningful and profitable I'll need at least a whole year or more. For me it's always a struggle in my mind on if I'm using my few hours as best as I can on projects.

From what I've seen there is a market for alternative investing. I know @stefanvanimhof personally who's had amazing success with Alts.co. For me I just need to stop worrying that I'll fail and just keep pushing.

My goal for August is to at least get 3 blogs written and to build my newsletter up from 268 subscribers to 500.

Hello IndieHackers,

I haven't done an update for a while not since I was quite bust with a complete rebranding of my project. Why you may ask? I was realizing the scope of my project was too large. I wanted to cover Stocks, Bond, and Alternative Assets. All of which could easily be a business on its own.

After consulting a few people within the niche content site and digital products space, they all said that I needed to niche down. Out of everything Alternative Assets range a bell with me more. My portfolio is 85% alternative assets.

However, even Alternative Assets is a very broad field. So I decided to only focus on the following assets.

⌚ Watches
🃏 Trading Cards
🍷 Wine & Whiskey
🧱 Lego
🖼️ Art
👟 Sneakers
🏡 Real Estate
₿ Cryptocurrency & NFTs
🌐 Domains
💻 Content Sites
🗞️ Newsletters

I may end up removing Domains, Content Site, and Newsletters since that could be all be considered digital. I guess even Crypto could be removed. But at that point if all we're left with is collectibles, then I should focus my content site on that.

I had another guy tell me that he'd pay $5/mo to get 5-10 alternative assets opportunities per week. I thought this would a pretty solid idea too. It gives something new to see every week.

After taking into consideration all of the feedback I decided to rebrand to Alts Club. I'll be focusing solely on alternative assets.

I think the niching down will help me find my audience much easier. Trying to find someone whose's interested in Stocks, Bonds, and Alternative Assets.

I may even condense down further into either collectibles, real estate, or digital assets.

What does everyone thing?

Hello fellow IndieHackers,

This is the 4rd week of sending my newsletter Investing.cafe.

I'm getting used to the format of the newsletter so it's only been taking roughly 4-5 hours per issue.

Here's my weekly breakdown:

• Check my RSS reader daily for the best news
• Check other newsletters I'm subscribed to
• Check Twitter daily
• Thursday morning I'll update the 7-day market summary with the most recent index data
• Save off any investing related memes to be used for the Meme of the Week

This week is the last week of sponsorship for my current sponsor, I'll be reaching out this week to see if they'd like to renew for another month. I'll leave the price the same.

Last week I had 42 subscribers and this week I have 65. Grew by 23 subscribers.

The growth is quite slow so I decided to change my copy up a bit.

Out of the 739 visitors so far to the site and 65 subscribers, that gives me about an 8.7% conversion rate, which isn't horrible but I'm aiming for 20% which may be high since most companies are hovering around 10%.

I also started realizing that some of the confirmation emails that subscribers get when they first subscribe was landing in spam. This has me a bit worried since it could be significantly lowering my subscriber count. I use Ghost as the CMS which uses Mailgun to actually send the newsletters. I'm going to be researching into this issue more a bit and see what I can do.

I also added a few more companies to the directory. I'm trying to only add companies that I really like or have some sort of good affiliate program. I'm saving off reaching out to bigger companies until the site gets a more traction.

Overall I'm happy with the growth especially since I'm only dedicating about 10-14 hours per week on the project.

Hello fellow IndieHackers,

This is the 3rd week of sending my newsletter Investing Cafe. After my first issue was sent, I reached out to my current sponsor and asked them if they'd like to go for a month at the same price.

Since I'm currently starting out I didn't want to charge something outrageous, just enough to cover the costs of my tech stack.

They luckily agreed! Another $80 in the bag. At the end, I'll ask if they'd like to renew again, no price increase. Currently I'm only at 42 subscribers, which is great but not enough to really charge anything more than $20 per issue.

How am I growing?

• Tweeting as much as possible with my Twitter account
• Cold outreach to potential subscribers

What will I try this week?

• More cold out reach
• Perhaps try posting on other forums or Reddit without seeming too spammy

I also added another revenue stream. @kintulabs has been creating standalone directories, which I thought would be a solid idea to add to Investing Cafe, especially given how many new investing platforms and tools are out there. I'm currently either adding products that have affiliate links or if they pay the $299/year fee to be listed.

I met with one potential client for the repository but they said they wanted to see some data before they commit. They said they'll give me a special link I can use. Then in 3-6 months we'll meet again to discuss if it's worth it.

Overall it's a very slow process to get started. But worth it!

This Thursday I'm sending out the first newsletter for Investing Cafe. There are only about 20 subscribers so far, mostly friends and family, but I've managed to land my first sponsor!

I landed the sponsor by send out a tweet on my Twitter.

The sponsor is only $20 but it does prove that a newsletter around investing does have the money to support sponsors. This is amazing validation to see.

What are the next steps?

1. Send out the newsletter
2. Reach out to the first sponsor to see if they'd like to sponsor again (yay recurring revenue!)
3. Tweet out again about finding another sponsor ($20)
4. Send another newsletter!

I'm going to keep doing this while I build the online community up.