🍷rootstocks

Today it starts for real. The very first edition of rootstocks was just sent to 278 recipients, who will be able to read the interview with professor and winemaker Francisco Carrau from Uruguay.

https://rootstocks.substack.com/p/francisco-carrau-bodega-cerro-chapeu

With this first edition I have created also the first leverage that I will use to spread the attention for rootstocks over multiple platforms and in specific target audiences.

No first paying customers yet (as I gave all current memberships away for free), but am hoping that that milestone is not far away either.

When I had the idea I also quickly came up with a game plan to grow a mailing list even before launching.

Advantage was that I already have a mailing list with 1500+ subscribers, oriented towards the fruit juice industry. And wine essentially being grape juice... they were a good target.

On top of that, I immediately mentioned that rootstocks would be a paid-subscription newsletter, BUT the first 250 subscribers would get a free life-time membership.

It worked better than expected and those first 250 subscribers - hopefully - will also be the ones that help spread the word once the first editions become available.

Due to a couple of podcasts that mentioned different services as well as build-from-scratch solutions, I decided to not waste time building a too complicated mash up of different services, probably connected through Zapier. Although that is also how I have my other newsletter running, for now I wanted to focus on growing it, providing good content and having a pay structure that simply works.

Because of the above I quickly settled for Substack. I set it up to be all ready for what was to come.
For some reason I decided to do the initial contact and collection of the first email addresses with Carrd, Zapier and GSuite... mostly to give the @rootstocks.org domain its credit.

May not have been the wisest of choices, as Substack ask a very high price ($50/m) for setting up a custom domain... so for now that will ask from the initial subscribers to also accept rootstocks@substack.com as from address, but we will work that out later.

Seeing how Substack is developing and how it has a lot of options for gifting subscriptions and discounts, it is really is a good choice and the 10% seems reasonable... for now.

There is this ratio between registered yet inactive domains in your portfolio against the ones that actually portray an active project... Quilty as charged, so I wanted this one to see a different course. And although the brain train of idea was already moving, it only came up to speed after having found the - for now - perfect domain. rootstocks.org was actually found rather quickly and you might understand from the name that it did not take a difficult brainstorm to get there.

When you look at the basics of winemaking, the very basic is in the ground, the rootstocks from which eventually the vines will grow.

After registering I quickly started drafting and brainstorming on what it would look like and which format would suit that most.

As starting point it will be a - mostly text-only - paid-for newsletter.