Yesterday The Slice received it first coffee, in fact, two! We also passed 500 subs, which I'm really stoked about. For the next 2 months, I'll be focusing my efforts on ONLY organic growth via cross-promotions and content marketing. The end goal being 1000 subs.
I also made a big change in my most recent issue, in the way I curate the content that goes out weekly.
So because I showcase a lot of products from Indie Hackers, Product Hunt and Owwly, I used to do a lot of cold outreach to the founders and let them know beforehand that they will be featured and I also used to get a lot of emails and DMs asking to be featured.
This week I scrapped the cold outreach, and I just added who I liked and people found out on the day if they were featured or not. From now on I'll be doing that and if somebody does email or DM me about being featured I will consider them depending on the product they want to be featured, and long term it will be fair.
I do intend to add paid sponsorships to the newsletter, but I think I'll do that once I hit 1000 subs. I've been experimenting with non-invasive ads that flow with the newsletter and are in cohesion with one another as I don't want to take away the experience from reading the newsletter, but more like making the sponsorship section an "add-on" to the newsletter itself.