MakerList

Hit this milestone a while ago, but decided to share this now.

I recently moved to a bi-weekly-ish cadence for sending out MakerList. I found that I was spending too much time curating articles + writing up the newsletter every week.

It may seem like it's not that much work to write a weekly newsletter (it's only 52 times a year!), but spending an entire day every week working on it can be quite draining!

Anyway, I'm pretty happy with my growth so far. It's been slow but consistent. My main objective with this newsletter is to provide value and to support other makers, not necessarily to make a profit. And I think I'm doing pretty well in that regard!

Here's to 300! 🎉

After about 3 months of writing weekly for MakerList, I've finally reached 150 subscribers. 🎉

It's been a bit of a slog to get here. I always feel as if my newsletter is growing more slowly than other newsletters.

But some people say that the first 100 or so subscribers are the hardest. I hope that's true, and things will pick up from here 😄

Really excited to share that I finally reached 100 subscribers for MakerList after almost a month of working on it!

I had pretty steady growth up until 70 subscribers, but after that it leveled out for a while until one of my posts on Reddit got some traction. With that, I was able to get to 100!

Here's the breakdown of where I got my subscribers from, ordered from most impactful to least impactful:

1. Indie Hackers (you guys are my target audience after all!)
2. Reddit (mostly through one post that I made which got a lot of traction)
3. Facebook groups
4. Twitter, Startup School, other sources (just a handful, haven't had much luck with these channels so far)

Now on to 200! :)

I sent out the second newsletter issue for MakerList a few days ago (which currently has 73 subscribers).

Here are the stats for the second issue:

• 61% open rate
• 23% click rate

So far I think the newsletter is doing quite well! My goal is to reach 100 total subscribers by the end of the month. It would be awesome to hit that :)

It's been a little over a week since I started working on MakerList, and I'm happy to announce that it has reached 50 signups!

The first issue was sent out to 23 people and got 160 views, a 57% open rate, and a 31% click rate! The second issue will be sent out this Friday to more than double the number of people, so I'm pretty excited to see how that goes :)

I sent out the inaugural issue for MakerList yesterday. If you're curious, you can read it here.

I had high hopes yesterday when I was going to bed. Perhaps they were a bit unrealistic. I had what I thought was a great marketing campaign set up, and I was expecting signups to just come flooding in.

Alas, marketing never really works the way you want it to. The reality is that normal people don't really care about you or your product. They don't care about the hours you spend obsessing over every little detail. They have their own lives to live and their own problems to worry about and they are more than content to just live in the status quo--which means ignoring you.

So all the value that I thought I was providing on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter was just a minor blip in people's lives. It's rarely a big bang thing, and today I relearned that lesson. I keep relearning it with every product I make, and eventually I'll internalize it.

Marketing is a continual process. It takes hard work, time, patience, persistence to keep on doing it. To be genuine and to keep providing value with your marketing. Not being spammy but actually being real--to genuinely want to help people with the product that you have. That's what marketing is.

And eventually, by continuing to provide value to other people, little by little, you will begin to extract value back. You'll get feedback, thanks, those little words of appreciation that show that you're on the right path. And the money comes when you're genuinely helping people.

I've gotten a little of that with my first issue. I've gotten likes on Facebook, words of appreciation from people who enjoyed the first issue, some new signups, even a Twitter heart from Pieter Levels who was featured in the first issue. It's super gratifying to see these kinds of things (especially from Pieter--he was one of the reasons I got started with indie hacking in the first place!).

But yeah, I just have to remind myself that things are going to go slowly most of the time. If I keep providing value, little by little, in no time at all I'll look back and marvel at how far I've come.

Really stoked about already getting 10 signups for https://makerlist.cc! The first issue is only coming out this Friday, so I'm excited that people see enough value in the newsletter idea to sign up for it without even knowing what it's going to be like 😅

I'm really hoping that after I send out the first issue, signups will pick up!

I launched my new landing page for MakerList today! https://makerlist.cc/

It's an overall pretty simple page, but I think it looks nice. I built it using Tailwind CSS, and it was my first time using it. I've used Bulma and Bootstrap in the past, but I think Tailwind is probably the nicest CSS framework I've used. It takes a little bit of getting used to, since it's based completely on adding utility classes, but it provides so much flexibility, and not needing to write extra CSS is great!

I got the idea a few days ago to try starting a newsletter - it's something a bit different from developing a product, and I've always really loved writing and reading, so it seemed like a perfect fit.

I noticed that there isn't really a dedicated newsletter for indie makers to uplevel their businesses. There are specific newsletters for things like product and marketing, but not really a holistic newsletter that covers everything that goes into running an indie business.

So I decided to create MakerList. It's a newsletter that sends you five curated articles every Friday in order to help you grow your business and take it to the next level. It's designed for busy makers who don't have the time to sift through all the bullshit that exists on the Internet in order to find the gold. Instead, we deliver the gold directly to you :)

It's still in the very early stages, but if you're interested, check it out here: https://makerlist.substack.com/

The first issue will drop this Friday. If you have any other friends who would be interested in this, I'd love it if you shared it with them!