Switch Weekly

Launched the third annual State of Switch survey. This extensive questionnaire (powered with Typeform), asks a wide range of questions around Nintendo Switch ownership, games bought, hardware quality, etc.

This continues to be a worthy endeavour, as not only do the results make for some interesting reading, but it also exposes the newsletter to a whole new audience. This year over 10,000 people filled it out, resulting in over 5,000 new subscribers to the email list.

After much deliberation I launched a Patreon page for the newsletter. I had a handful of subscribers reach out to me over the years asking if there was a good way to support the work I was doing — so that's what spurred me on. Having people actually get in touch and say they want to support your thing is huge.

But in all honesty, I actually sat on the fence about launching a Patreon for months — but I figured it was just best to just get it out there and see how folks responded!

I had no grand expectations of course, but even just being able to cover my costs would be awesome.

I started the Patreon with a couple of incentives, such as a pin-badge, access to a community chat room, etc. Good to be mindful here of not offering too much and that becoming its own thing to take care of. This is a supplementary thing.

For the second year running I ran the State of Switch survey, asking questions about Nintendo's platform. This year saw the survey gain a lot of traction on Reddit, with over 15,000 respondents. As a result I gained several thousand new subscribers. I shared the results first with my email list, and then on my site and YouTube. https://switchweekly.com/survey2019

After some 121 issues sent using Mailchimp, I had finally grown the list to a point where I had to start looking at alternatives (to avoid putting my hand in my pocket each month to send the newsletter).

At around the 5,000 subscriber point, it made sense for me to look at other options, and after a fair bit of research I landed on Sendy. It's a service that uses Amazon's cost-effective AWS SES for sending, and in comparison to MailChimp was a far cheaper choice. With MailChimp I was looking at spending around $50 p/m — with Sendy/Amazon this is now more like $3 p/m.

Two years in, one hundred issues sent. This issue went out to exactly 800 subscribers.

To mark the occasion I gave away some Switch Weekly branded pin badges (made at Sticker Mule) to the first 20 or so subscribers who replied to the issue asking for one — this has a couple of benefits — it builds the reader relationship, and it also gets folks replying to your from: address, which is good for your email reputation.

One thing I saw a couple of other newsletters doing was running surveys as a way to engage their potential audience/niche. As such, I decided to run my own asking questions of Nintendo fans.

The first State of Switch survey was launched just before the Nintendo Switch's first 'birthday' - so it felt like a good time for owners to reflect on their thoughts. I asked questions about hardware, software, services etc.

Used Typeform for the survey (plays nice on mobile and was easy to set up). I saw over 1,500 responses and gained a sizeable number of subscribers as a result — I asked for an email at the end of the survey with the promise to email the results once compiled.

https://medium.com/switch-weekly/the-state-of-switch-survey-2018-2b69edd34710

🚀 Reached out to Nick Frost (@thinker) who offered to hunt this for me and he also provided a few pointers on what to include. He shared advice on what to include, best time to post, what sort of comment to leave, etc. Gained several new subs as a result.

A small milestone admittedly, but it's important to note that this was a very slow and steady start, with the only promotion being organic via my own following on Twitter (I had around 1,300 followers at the time). I would tweet out each issue, and send the occasional tweet reminding my followers the newsletter was a thing — on reflection, don't be afraid to self-promote more often. Twitter moves so fast, people won't mind.

Some three days after launching the site I sent the very first issue of Switch Weekly to a handful (14) of subscribers. It featured a round-up of opinion pieces, news, and videos discussing Nintendo's then-upcoming new console. The first issue (and subsequent 120 more) were sent using MailChimp.

With a domain and MailChimp account set up I started out building the list and doing some promotion. Part of that included setting up a blog, and the quickest way to do that at the time was spinning up a Medium publication. I did that, announcing the newsletter was a thing, and invited people to sign up.