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2400 subcribers for my FOSS-oriented newsletter

My newsletter "Le Courrier du hacker", is weekly digest of Free and Open Source Software news in the French-speaking community https://lecourrierduhacker.com/

I recently reached the 100th issue of my newsletter and I seized the opportunity to communicate as much as I could about the newsletter. I had good new arguments: with 100 issues, I was proven the newsletter was persistent. And we also reached 2k subscribers some weeks before the 100th issue so I had two major points to communicate about this newsletter.

Since then, almost 20% more signups happened, so I guess people were interested in joining a persistent newsletter of almost 2k subscribers already.

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    Hey Carl,

    congrats on your achievement! 🙌 I recently also started a Newsletter, it is called The Creative Abstract and it is a weekly digest about design and other creative fields, featuring useful tools, apps, software, resources, books, and podcasts for creative people.

    Since you have reached 2,000 Subscribers I am curious if you can share some insights or tips what has worked for you while growing your subscriber list? My newsletter currently has 30 Subscribers, which I got through facebook groups mainly. My recent strategy is to start blogging about my side-projects, since I love writing, and advertise my Newsletter through my blog posts. Also I think the design community is pretty strong on twitter, so I have to test some things out there.

    Would be great to read some insights from you! 😊

    Greetings

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      My main advice is: tell the world about your newsletter, using the available communities, e.g already-existing community websites, dedicated subreddits, social networks and of course (you should have!) a blog.

      Using already-existing community websites is what generated the most signups to my newsletter. But telling people about it on my blog helped a lot too. I had a big influx of signups when someone posted the link of my newsletter on r/France, the most crowded french-speaking subreddit. About social networks, each time I publish a tweet, I have maybe 0 or 1 or 2 signups. Not much but that's an automated tweet.

      After reaching 1k subscribers I started to publish the archives on social networks (Twitter, Mastodon) through a dedicated website and it also increased the number of readers, even if they don't subscribe directly to the newsletter.

      Hope it helps.

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        Wow big thank you, those are some crazy good tips. Thank you so much!

        I will definitely check out some more communities of Facebook and Reddit. And my first blogpost will be online soon. I think the first 100 signups are really hard to get, since after that you have the possibility to get some more attention through word-of-mouth of your already existing subscribers.

        Thank you again, your answer was incredible helpful for me!

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          You're welcome ;)

          With time you get some signups from word-of-mouth but you always have to communicate about your newsletter on a regular basis if you want to grow fast.

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