Take the Leap 🏔️

TL;DR: If you're here for the post and not for the story: you're welcome.

Didn't you just say that your post got deleted?

I did, but I got it back.

How?

By removing all references to my newsletter. 💀

In my post, I begin by sharing about my experience of transitioning from law to software development. However, at the end of my original post, I spoke about take the leap 🏔️.

Yes, I read the rules: "In our subreddit, we define 'self-promotion' to mean 'sharing a link to some tutorial or resource you created'. It is ok to promote a tutorial or resource as long as it is shared tastefully, is reasonably high quality, and does not cross the line into being spam."

It seemed fine to me.

But what the mods didn't like that it was my first post in the subreddit.

Nevertheless, the first 24-hours were spectacular and I genuinely enjoyed exchanging with others in the comments/DMs. Also, the number of subscribers nearly doubled from this post.

Subscribers: 53 (+89%)

After a couple of issues and making sure that the essentials were solidly in place, I decided to publicly talk about take the leap 🏔️ in two forums for which I had the highest expectations:

• Chingu: a Discord community specifically for aspiring developers building projects together.
• The student association's blog for the CS master's that I'm currently undertaking. This is what I wrote.

I had the highest expectations because I believed that if I could find a decent number of subscribers, it was in these two places.

This got me only 1 subscriber.

Why it failed
Short answer: I have no idea.

If I dig, I'd say it could have been my approach. None of these were drafted as "launches" necessarily. For the blog post, I introduced myself and then plugged my newsletter at the end. For the Discord community, I explained who I was, and then I requested feedback.

I thought that these were better approaches, since I feel that the stereotypical "Subscribe now!" kind of approach creates more aversion than conversions.

What's next
Now that that's done, there are still a few other places that I haven't launched and that I intend to:
-Reddit
-LinkedIn
-Product Hunt (yet to confirm if this would make sense or if it's even possible)

Also, after hating on Twitter a little bit, I've been working actively on growing my Twitter audience. This got me the most subscribers this week. Or at least I think, which brings me to the other important thing I need to get to: tracking conversions.

GA4 is in place, but I still haven't been able to connect the source from where the user came from and the subscription action (if you know how to do this, please reach out!).

Now, for this week's numbers:

• Subscribers: 28 (+11)
• Open rate: 64.71% (-6.72%)
• CTR: 29.41% (-0.59)

The first issue of take the leap 🏔️ went out on April 14th, 2023.

The numbers on April 21st, 2023 looked like this:

• Subscribers: 17
• Open rate: 71.43%
• Click Through Rate: 30%

Before launching, I learned from others and I didn't buy into the "if the product is good enough, people will come" mentality; instead, I have been reaching out to people directly and providing value (with the occasional plug) through different mediums. However, with all the effort that I have been putting into this, I still thought that more people would come. Not a reason to stop, though. On the contrary. Now, I feel more curious as to how to make it work.

Three days ago, I launched take the leap 🏔️. It is a bite-sized newsletter aimed at helping new or aspiring developers (e.g. career changers, students, recent grads) get into tech.

I am a law school graduate turned software developer. After I completed law school, I decided that I would do whatever it took to land a job as a software developer. There is nothing supernatural about me that could have given me an unfair advantage. I’m just a regular human being and, today, I see many folks trying to get into tech making the same mistakes that I did.

Pretend you are an aspiring developer and you land on this page: what's keeping you from subscribing?