juice news

Was just looking at my dashboard in Mailchimp and darn. It's really time to shift this thing around.

Am working on a Juice News Pro version with some additional features to justify the price tag. And a news "classifieds" section that allows parties to buy a slot for offers, demand, vacancies and for-hire profiles.

This is kinda scary actually, but I need to shift gears and get ready for the next phase.

📧 I am setting up Sendy on Lightsail (AWS) to become the (cheaper) solution for maintaining and growing my mailinglists
🎨 I am creating new templates for my mailings with more dynamic elements to address different segments and groups
⚡️ I'm bringing my own tools for curation to the next level, closer to being to able it as SAAS

And I think I need to document this journey, so here is the beginning of more regular updates on the IH forum. 💫

Mostly because I wanted some swag for myself, I decided to add some t-shirts for sale in the PS of my newsletter.
Had added some nice and related juice and orange designs to Cottonbureau and put the images in the newsletter with the text: Love juice news? Buy a t-shirt.

Very unexpectedly (did not think the audience would go for anything that could not pop a collar) I saw sales and reaction on the very first day.

I made the decision to add un-branded designs as well as the newsletter's logo, so people could make clean pick... while the commission would be beneficial for me anyhow.

So far the first $20 in swag-commission has been made. Curious to see where it goes. Am aware of the saturation, so adding new designs is essential. At the same time Cottonbureau will give exposure beyond my newsletter, so it might do even better than expected.

Exactly 5 years ago, November 7th 2014, I sent out the very first edition.

In Numbers

Over those 5 years the juice news list accumulated 2061 contacts, with currently 1562 subscribers. 499 unsubscribed and 452 were automagically cleaned (We call that natural pruning). I have sent 1208 newsletters... which is an average of 4.6 newsletters per week. Country-wise, for the past editions of juice news, 51.9% was read in the USA, 7.8% in Brazil, 5.9% in Germany and 5.7% in the UK. In general, the newsletter is mostly opened on mobile devices (54.3%).

We all gotta start somewhere... the first edition of juice news was sent out to a whopping 22 subscribers on November 7th 2014.

It was really out of frustration and irritation that I started this: Due to increased fees for 1 highly biased and overpriced online and hard-copy food magazine, I thought to myself: "Oh heck, I'll do it and I'll do it for free."

It started really simple and really small and in essence it never changed much... as soon appeared that many readers like "simple" and "small".