Software Testing Weekly

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."

This week has been absolutely amazing!

Software Testing Weekly has been recommended in two LinkedIn posts by very influential people in software testing community which, along with other promotion on social media, gave me in total 800 unique views and 200 new subscribers. That's 25% conversion rate!

It clearly shows the power of recommendation. Audience's trust is everything.

I know such spikes don't last but it still feels amazing to see such interest. After all, I got in a week what I was on average getting in 8 weeks.

The total number of subscribers: 755.

Here I'm reaching another milestone! Definitely not as quickly as I hoped at the beginning, but it's good to see better growth again.

Once I got back the @QANewsletter Twitter account, the reach and engagement vastly improved. This contributed to a significant acceleration in growth and the curve started lifting up again. I got a few mentions on external sites, too, which contributed to increased interest in the newsletter.

I'm glad I'm here now. Looking forward to hit the next milestone of 1000 subscribers!

After nearly a month of suspension, Twitter has finally apologised for this incident and unlocked the account.

It's a relief — but trust me — I was losing hope to get it back at all.

In the meantime, I had to be more creative about my marketing.

1. I used my personal account (with only 180 followers) to continue announcing each issue of Software Testing Weekly. It was roughly 50% as efficient as the original account. Better this than nothing though!
2. I tried some advertising on Facebook, spending just £7, but it barely drove any results. From 20k impressions, I got only a handful of visits and no sign ups. I assume my target and my ad was not good enough. But hey, it was interesting to try, at least I learned how Facebook ads work.
3. I did another LinkedIn post and that got some attention, too. Not as much as the launch post, though.

As I expected, the growth stalled and I'm only at 366 subscribers. The curve is flattening but I hope the worst is already behind me.

In short, I've lost my main marketing channel!

I've never used any bots, not even third party software to manage my account and follow people, but the automatic Twitter algorithms claim otherwise.

I've tried contacting Twitter several times already but the only message back I get is "wait for resolution". Because of the COVID-19 chaos, I'm afraid their response might take some time to arrive...

Not the best day for Software Testing Weekly.

It took a few weeks to get here, but Software Testing Weekly just passed 300 subscribers!

There was a slightly exponential growth at the beginning and steady linear growth over the last few weeks. This has been the result of several efforts, including a blog post about top software testing newsletters, engaging Twitter posts and word of mouth.

So far so good! Now I'm just hoping that the growth line will at least stay like this. 🤞

A small company related to software testing industry reached out to me on Twitter asking if it's possible to pay for getting their article featured in the newsletter (as a sponsored link).

(You read it right, they directly asked to pay. They didn't ask to just feature their article for free, as many others would do. They understood how it works. I have tons of respect for them.)

After exchanging a few messages and sharing payment details, two days later I got the very first $50 transferred to my company's bank account.

First money made online, ever.

I AM SO AMAZED!

PS. I will pay for two months of hosting, cool!

The first milestone is reached! 🙌

It took me just two weeks to go from 0 to 100.

Here's how I did it:

1. Twitter post — Even though I posted on a newly created @QANewsletter account and retweeted my personal account, having just 150 followers at the time, the word spread quickly and that gave me around 20 subscribers.
2. LinkedIn post — My rich network of over 1000 connections was made up mostly of recruiters, but that didn't stop the post from getting over 3000 views and getting another 20 subscribers!
3. Facebook group post — I reached out to the owner of a 30k active Polish software testing group and asked what the best time to post was. He suggested a time slot and said he will approve it at that time. Great shot, that drove another 60 subscribers.
4. Reddit post — I posted in a couple of software testing subreddits and that gave me around 10 subscribers.

Given the fact that my goal was to reach that number in three weeks, I call it a big success!

This is a big day!

After two years of fiddling around with the idea and making excuses not to actually do it, I found beginning of 2020 as a good time to finally give it a go (New Year's resolution, you know).

My main fear was that I would not be able to find enough high quality news each week.

So I spent a few hours browsing through the web and building an RSS feed using Feedly (its recommendation engine helped a ton) where I followed all software testing blogs I possibly could.

Then I went through the news from that week, picked the most interesting ones and wrote down a draft of the first issue in Notes app.

Feeling somewhat confident about the draft and my news sources, I've decided to commit. I setup an account on Curated, connected the domain, pasted the draft and... launched by sending it to a list of 1 subscriber — myself.

This is how the very first issue of Software Testing Weekly looks like: https://softwaretestingweekly.com/issues/1

It feels amazing, because I wanted to create it for such a long time. And I created it, because I wanted to read it.

I solved my own problem.

I stole the idea, in fact.

(Don't blame me, I got hugely inspired by Austin Kleon's book: https://austinkleon.com/steal/)

I found the epic iosdevweekly.com newsletter led by Dave Verwer and I was fascinated about the quality of that project.

It made so much sense — I thought — why not try to do the same in software testing space?

And so, on that very day, I bought the softwaretestingweekly.com domain.

But it wasn't until nearly 2 years later that I moved on to put in the work and launch the first issue...