The "Courrier du hacker" newsletter
French-speaking weekly digest of FOSS news in a newsletter
2019 was a great year for my newsletter Le Courrier du hacker https://lecourrierduhacker.com 🚀 Here are some results:
👁 open rate 52%
🖱 click rate 33%
📈 went from 1790 subscribers to 2480
🏢 found 3 sponsors (the first ones!)
💰 earned 1193,33€ before expenses
💸 spent 516,74€ this year
💰 Earned 676.59€ after expenses
GoaIs for 2020 :
🐒 definitely have to move from Mailchimp
🍯 find a repetitive way to attract sponsors
📈 at least double the number of subscribers
My Newsletter "Le Courrier du hacker", a weekly digest of French-speaking news about Free and Open Source Software community, is my latest profitable side project.
It started to be profitable some months ago and it's time I start to report revenues about it. I made a profit of 196€ in November with it, sponsored by one company.
- Revenue: 233€
- Profit: 196€
- Sponsors: 1
In order to compare, October I got a profit of 337€.
2019 is almost finished, I have to think about goals for this project for 2020 :)
-
1
That's awesome man..! Keep it going.
Also, i am developer, a technical person and a entrepreneur, if you have any idea you feel to discuss or do want my help. Feel free to reach me.
When you run a job board, a really classic business model is to sell packs of job offers, 1, 5, 10 or more. Given the fact it's not a subscription model, it's not easy to know if the customer is satisfied with the service... except if he buys again for his next recruitment. And it just happened with linuxjobs.fr and a big client, really famous in France. That's quite an achievment in my opinion and I wanted to share this small victory with everyone!
Keep up the good work, results will follow!
-
1
Having an enterprise-like clients always feels great. ☺️ Congrats on success, Carl!
-
1
That must be a great feeling, to have your own product being validated by a big client!
I have a question regarding how you source your jobs:
Are you scraping job boards to find jobs which match your niche, or hand selecting them from other major job boards? Or do the companies go to your site to manually post a job?
Great work again Carl!
-
1
the companies pay to use the service, buy packs of job offers (1,5,10 or 15) to display their job offers on linuxjobs.fr
The service started in 2015, was free to use until 2017 where I thought the audience was big enough to switch to a pay-to-use model. I started at 49€ for the pack of 1 job offer (the price-per-unit decreases if you take a bigger pack) and today the price is 150€ for the same pack.
-
-
1
Repeat business is the best - revenue and validation. 👍
-
1
Thanks! I think the same! Finding the process to repeat your sales is quite tricky though.
-
-
1
Congrats :-)
-
1
Thanks!
-
-
1
Well done Carl, that's great. I'm sure this will lead to other big clients soon.
-
1
Thanks! I have already all kind of clients and some of them already bought twice. But this one is a really famous newspaper in France and associating linuxjobs.fr and their name is a really nice operation :)
-
-
1
Congrats man!!!
-
2
Thanks! Not a big victory but small ones also deserve to be celebrated ;)
-
-
1
Congrats! Keep up the good work indeed! :D
-
1
Thanks! I will!
-
-
1
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
-
1
Thanks! I think so too!
-
One month and a half after the first one, a second company chose to sponsor my newsletter "le Courrier du hacker" https://lecourrierduhacker.com/ , a weekly digest of the Free and Open Source Software News in the French-speaking community.
A few days after reaching 2,400 subscribers, I seize this opportunity to communicate. I think it is related because I started to include in my different communications that I was looking for sponsors. And this is the second times that my sponsors tell me that he contacted me because someone (a subscriber I guess) told him I was looking for a sponsor.
So it's not just a coincidence anymore, seems like a business-model :D Only kidding but it seems I found both my sponsors telling my subscribers I was looking for sponsors.
The first sponsor paid for 3 weeks and this one wanted to test if the sponsorship was beneficial for him on one week.
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.
-
1
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
-
1
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.
-
1
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!
-
1
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.
-
-
-
Very happy to share that the "Le Courrier du hacker" newsletter, a weekly digest of Free and Open Source Software news in French, reached 500 subscribers on both Twitter and Mastodon https://lecourrierduhacker.com/
Lots of people are not really fond of emails and prefer following the newsletter content directly through social networks.
I exported the archives from Mailchimp to a website and now share links to new archives on social networks. It generates between 500 and 1,000 visites to the archives each day.
So from my experience it's great to offer also the content of a newsletter through social networks.
Comment