Rocumentaries 📼

I bit the bullet, wrote the first email in 5 years, and hit the send button.

The open rate was ~42% with a ~10% click rate. Happily this was double the industry average 20% open rate. (Seem to recall the open rate always being surprisingly high, and not sure how useful the industry average is as a benchmark!).

Since then it appeared in Kevin Kelley's (co-founder of WIRED) Recomendo substack and Cool Tools blog.

The mailing list has doubled to 3250+ subscribers and the site has received 32k visits in the first month after relaunch.

Going forwards, I'm hoping to find ways to grow the mailing list and bring the newsletter back on a monthly basis, as this feels more realistic.

It would be awesome to monetise the project in the future and ultimately, it feels like the size and retention of the mailing list will determine the likelihood of this.

I'd also like to level-up the brand. I used to use a fun animated logo mark that looked like a VHS tape being ejected. So it would be cool like to create a stronger visual identity and bring some of the fun back.

Thanks so much for reading!

Please subscribe over at https://rocumentaries.com

And say hello at:
humanjpg.com
twitter.com/thehumanjpg

🫶

I recently decided to reactivate the project.

It just felt like such a shame to let it fall by the wayside given how much people seemed to like it. The site continued to receive traffic with zero marketing and the mailing list had silently grown to over 1,600 subscribers in the background.

I needed a way of rebuilding the site in a scalable, easy(easier!)-to-update way.

It suddenly occurred to me that I could potentially rebuild the site as a Notion database and turn it into a site via Super.so. ⚡️

I exported the entire catalogue of documentaries as a JSON file, converted it to a .csv, then imported it into Notion. Cleaned it up, went back through the catalogue and manually added images for every film. I used Notion's AI feature to help write some of the descriptions — they weren't amazing, but useful as a starting point to edit.

Then I hacked the default theme CSS to pieces to create the rails. Despite the fact I'm a designer, I resisted the temptation to go far beyond the vanilla Super theme (will get to this in the future!) 🍦

I then migrated the mailing list to Mailerlite, as I preferred the pricing and product experience.

Slowly, over time, the site became hard to maintain. It was hand-coded on a flat file CMS but this became hard to manage.

I became busier and was distracted by other projects and ideas. Writing a weekly newsletter and adding documentaries is surprisingly time-consuming, and I couldn't find the time to setup automation.

Eventually life happened and I just left the project to simmer on its own. Traffic and subscribers continued to come in, particularly from Asia. But more and more slowly.

I had been collecting emails since launch.

I then started a regular weekly newsletter using a product Revue (subsequently acquired by Twitter, turned into their Subscribe feature I think, then was shutdown).

It was a great product as created a back catalogue of newsletter issues on their site, that people could browse. They added it to their showcase which really helped attract more subscribers, alongside all the traffic it received from Product Hunt. 📈

That autumn, during my spare time, I built an MVP. I'm not really much of a developer, but know enough to build it on Statamic — a flat file CMS with a lovely templating language.

I flooded the site with documentaries that I enjoyed and slammed it on Product Hunt.

To my amazement, it was #1 on Product Hunt that day and received over 1,000 upvotes 😮🏆

Things that helped:

• The animated logo mark helped to attract attention 📽️
• Ryan Hoover — the founder of Product Hunt commented on it 🙏

https://www.producthunt.com/products/rocumentaries#rocumentaries

I was tired of endlessly trawling through my favourite channels trying to find great documentaries to watch, only to be disappointed most of the time.

Why can’t I just go to one place that shows me a curated list of the best documentaries?

I started a list of the best documentaries I could find and kept turning this idea over in my mind.