I reached two big milestones this week. Over 6K subscribers, and I just published the 100th article on my website since I started my little writing experiment back in the summer.
Here are some of the things I learned:
- Consistency beats strategy. Picasso created more than 50,000 works of art, but only about a hundred are considered masterpieces. Following the Pareto rule, most of my traffic comes from a small subset of articles. To this day, I still have no idea if an article will perform well. It's a bit like fishing. By writing every day, I maximise the chances something will hit a chord.
- You don't know what you don't know. Instead of spending lots of time researching the best ways to grow a newsletter, I just decided to get writing. I only did research when I was confused about something or felt like something could be optimised, on a "need to learn" basis.
- Communities are powerful. I can attribute most of my success to sharing my articles on Hacker News, Twitter, and Indie Hackers. By contributing to these communities, I create a virtuous circle where I get feedback, improve my content, and attract more people with relevant interests.
- Newsletters are making a comeback. Since I started my newsletter, I've discovered a whole world of indie writers, publishers, and content creators. I think there's a whole audience to serve there, driven by the passion economy, and indie hackers would do well to explore it.
- It's okay to not have a plan. I didn't have one when I started this experiment. I just knew what I cared about and who I wanted to help. Now, I have a much clearer idea of where I want to go. But it only happened because I put the work in first to connect with the right audience.
I wrote a bit more about my experience here if you're interested, and I'm gifting a one-year Audible subscription to one random subscriber today at 4pm GMT / 8am PST through my newsletter to celebrate these milestones! ๐ฅณ