Tailwind Weekly

After a year of hard work and being somewhat consistent, I reached 1000 subscribers!

It feels a bit surreal, just in January I had like 20 people reading every issue and most of them were people I knew already, that we're past 1k I get even more motivated every week to write and promote TailwindCSS.

I also started thinking more about monetizing the newsletter, I already found my first sponsor (Polypane), and I'm also experimenting with classified ads and promoting resources I think could help frontend developers via affiliate links.

I'll see how that goes. Overall, a pretty amazing first year!

Here I had 135 subscribers but so far I only shared the newsletter on my personal twitter. Some people started messaging there to add a link to their project or video, that was related to Tailwind. People were taking notice.

But I didn't want to use my personal twitter to just post about tailwind, I had other personal interests too. I have been an avid reader of the Vuejs weekly newsletter for years now, they were pretty much my initial inspiration for the newsletter, so I decided that if I wanted Tailwind Weekly to grow and then it had to have its own twitter account, just like Vuejs news did.

So I created the account and after failing to produce a logo I was happy with I decided to just order a logo off Fiverr. Figured they could do it better than me and it could do for a while. The order came back and I loved the logo, it looked pretty nice.

Everything was set. I removed my personal twitter from Revue and added the Tailwind Weekly now, and in yet another copy-cat effort, I looked at how Vuejs announced each weekly issue on its account, I saw they used emojis, they mentioned the people or tools they featured and I decided to do that too.

Here's the first official tweet: https://twitter.com/TailwindWeekly/status/1261642623166578689

Things were moving forward!

When I first started the newsletter I only announced it on the official discord and to some friends. It was very very small and a part of me wanted to keep that way. Fewer people to embarrass yourself in front of, I thought.

Then, after each issue I sent, some friends on the discord left me encouraging messages saying that they really liked the content I was sending. I still kept it an open secret until I passed 40 subscribers.

I thought that, since 40 people were actively reading my work every week then maybe it was good enough to post it publicly and that week, on issue #11, I connected Revue to my personal twitter account and let it post automatically when the issue sent. That tweet only got 1 like haha. But nobody complained.

Then the coronavirus thing got more serious and I took a break for a while, had a kind of writer's block, and was dealing with a lot of anxiety because of the quarantine situation. That break took 1 month. I felt much better and decided to go back to work and started actively tweeting each issue every week, gaining 1 or 2 subscribers every day or so.

Then, it happened. For the first time, Adam Wathan, the creator TailwindCSS, retweeted my announcement of that week's issue. In just 1 week I went from 58 to 133 subscribers (that's a ~129% gain) and got a ton of followers to my personal twitter profile.

I felt validated, I thought that if Adam thought this was good enough to share then it had potential.

I was mulling over the idea of creating a newsletter for Tailwind but didn't know if people were interested. I started researching possible solutions to host and send the newsletter. I found Revue and saw it was pretty cheap, just $5/month. I figured if it didn't work out I would just lose $5-$10, no big deal.

So I signed up for Revue and created my profile page, customize it to use colors of the Tailwind palette, and just used Tailwind's logo with a different background color, it was a pretty low effort, to be honest.

Once that was up, I sent this message to the #showcase channel on the discord:

hello everyone, I want to share my big idea/side project for this holiday season, a TailwindCSS newsletter! You can sign up here: {newsletter-link-here}, I'll be sharing news, tutorials, articles, talks, resources and websites made with Tailwind, with you through there

During that week, I got 21 subscribers, I was hooked! 21 people wanted to hear what I found around the internet that was tailwind related. Felt pretty motivated!