Refactoring

Super happy that in just one month 🌀 Refactoring was able to cross 200 Subscribers!

Especially because I don't have a big audience on social media, so I had to fight for every single subscriber 😅

These subscribers come from a combination of:

• Linkedin (lots and lots — best channel so far)
• Word of mouth (hard to quantify, probably a lot)
• Indie Hackers (a few tens, amazing conversion rate, you are the best 🙏)
• Twitter (more than a few)
• Reddit (hit or miss)
• Hacker News (really few)

I also tried some little budget on Reddit and Twitter ads, without almost any effect.

I became gradually faster at writing so I felt comfortable at increasing my pace to weekly posts, up from bi-weekly that I started with.

I write now a post every Friday — I believe this is the best way to keep a connection with my audience and to create a proper habit of reading.

One article about managing maintenance and bug fixing got to the front page of Hacker News, and generated a big debate!

The post generated about ~4000 views and brought 30 subscribers.

I wrote a post on IH as a retrospective of this experience.

During summer I managed to write 4 articles to kick-start the newsletter content, committing to a bi-weekly cadence to test whether that could be a sustainable pace!

After some further refinement, I launched 🌀 Refactoring in late September, sharing the link with friends, family, colleagues and on my (almost non existent) social media.

Quickly raised some ~20 subscribers from there 😊

Inspired by the teachings of online writers such as David Perell, I decided to start writing a newsletter.

The newsletter would serve multiple purposes:

• 📚 Personal growth: It is a public commitment that would force me to read and write more
• 🤝 Network: It is a way to share my thinking publicly, helping me building network and reputation
• 💰 Income: Taking as a benchmark other successful newsletters such as Lenny's, it is something that could eventually become, one day, a revenue-generating product.

I still didn't know what the newsletter would be about. I decided I would look for my personal Ikigai while writing the first 3-4 posts (pre-launch).

Inspired by the amazing How To Take Smart Notes book by Sönke Ahrens, I started taking structured notes about my readings.

I quickly grew my personal Zettelkasten to a collection of ~200 permanent notes, and got motivated to read and write more. I eventually started a daily journal, which reinforced the habit.