I can sponsor myself 😅
by GraemePrototypr Weekly newsletter has been running for a few years now, and the project is sustainable through sponsorships.
At the same time, I've been building another product, "Letter", an email creator for designers. This is the tool I actually use to build the Prototypr newsletter.
Funnily, this week, instead of getting a sponsor, I added a Letter banner as the sponsor slot, and had 20 new signups (+ around 80 clicks so far) ...from my own newsletter, built with the tool that is appearing as the sponsor.
Lesson is, if you make multiple products, see if you can connect them to grow from eachother. Once Letter is launched, maybe it can be a regular paying Prototypr sponsor.
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Hell ya man! This is one of @robwalling tactics. If you build your own audience first, it makes launching a project a lot easier. Good luck on your new project!
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Thank Shane! On the downside, Prototypr has suffered from me working on Letter - very challenging to balance 2 products
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Congrats, this is actually a tactic from the old days, we called it 'traffic trade'. So, you can not just traffic trade within your own props but also find similar businesses and offer them traffic-trades (the super old guys from ad agencies call this barter).
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cool, do you have any references to this stuff?
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not really, decades ago, there were systems pushing traffic back and forth thru ads in a way that every participant gets the same traffic he generates for other people. was a good way to increase traffic
IDK if there are still such systems in place. they also quite easy to fool nowadays with fake traffic, so yeah...
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Nice.... been doing the same on my lower tech side projects recently.
My DIY pizza restaurant I just took over bought food from my expat food delivery service and setup a bouncy castle from my party rental business outside the restaurant.
All 3 of those businesses are about to start using my review management software that is very close to relaunching (back to tech!)
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haha wow that’s a proper operation!
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That's amazing Graeme. Congrats buddy !
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Love this :)
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Did you create the second product with this kind of interoperability/marketing opportunity in mind? Is this the start of a suite of products? :D
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Not initially - the 2nd product was just made to help run the first one.
I don't think it's that simple to build an audience, then make a product just to fit it..because then the purpose of the product can become selling to an audience, whereas Letter's purpose is to solve a problem.
I needed to speed up my newsletter process, cos it could take me 4 hours to make one newsletter. I think I'm just a bit lucky they fit together quite well.
For a suite, maybe in a year or 2 lol!
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Congrats!
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It's awesome to read @graeme - I've been following Prototypr since I begin the UX self-learning journey. Thank you so much for curating amazing content.
Letter sounds cool. Excited to try and good luck on PH!
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Cheers Felix, glad Prototypr has been useful for self-learning early on! What do you make of the Medium subscription now, do you think it affects self-learners?
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You’re welcome! I always wanted to be a subscriber, however still not. I realized their premium content are really subjective and sometimes worst that normal content.
I still read medium, but now I spend more time on newsletter and platform like Prototypr, UX Collective and Sidebar.
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Thanks for sharing this, it's been a tricky one because the subscription model was a change that I hadn't expected when starting the publication.
It's been good for making things more sustainable, but to improve the issue you mention, I've been working to improve the quality of content published in the Prototypr medium.Also, Prototypr 3 is coming soon too, so which will always have content separate to medium, and free for anyone to read with the help of sponsors
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Congrats Graeme! This is super exciting :)
I've been a follower of Prototypr on Medium for long. Thank you for all you do for the design community. Would love to chat about possible collab one day.
Also, we've been looking for a new email tool for our 7k+ designers community, so I'll definitely check Letter out!
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Hi thanks a lot! Sounds cool, you can get us on hello[at]prototypr.io with collab ideas, and we can see what works 👍🏽
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