The Slice

A weekly email of good reads and tools for bootstrappers.

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The Slice was created as a way to showcase new and emerging products that founders can use in their own projects, but sadly a lot of them fall in the abyss and don't even get the time of day so I created The Slice.

November 4, 2021 SOLD!

This is kinda been a month and a bit in the making, but the newsletter that I have spent the last year and and 8 months making has been acquired.

I felt that that it was for me to let go and make room for new and better projects, but I'm also excited to see how the new owner does. Really ecstatic, and it was a journey and half, that taught me a lot.

August 2, 2021 It's been a while. Here's where I'm at.

It' s been a while since I last made an update, but a lot has changed...well kinda.

The newsletter is still growing strong, and I'm now at roughly 1720 subscribers. I will admit that the rate of new subs has decreased a lot, but funnily enough, the overall quality of my subscribers have increased. My open rates have gotten way higher, as well as my CTR, but I'm really okay with this!

According to my email software, I'm gaining on average about 50 to 60 new subscribers a month which may be small, but mind you I really dont do a lot of promotion besides cross-promotions and a lot of word of mouth (which explains the higher quality subscribers)

In terms of monetisation, the newsletter still makes around $350 to $400+ a month which I'm still blown away by considering its a smaller newsletter.

Other major changes that I have made were

  • format
  • pricing structure
  • booking sheets
  • addition of over gifs

It's been great, I've been enjoying the process, I try and not take myself too seriously because I'm just having fun writing and shipping this newsletter each week.

Currently on issue 59!!!!

March 27, 2021 My newsletter makes $350 MRR now!

So it's been a while since I last made an update on how the newsletter is going.

  • From my sponsors and classifieds, I now make a monthly revenue of about $350, which I'm pretty stoked about.

  • I tried to add an automated booking sheet for my sponsorships but decided that I'd rather just stick with the manual process, so I turned it into a calendar instead! Check it out here

  • I removed the gifs and opted for art instead.

There is actually a good reason for this. Mostly because the gifs made the newsletter too big.

November 10, 2020 1K Subs!!

So today The Slice surpassed 1000 subscribers and absolutely thrilled!

It's taken a bit of time, many sleepless nights, and a road full of doubt, but its finally come to this day.

  • 100 ✔️
  • 500✔️
  • 1k ✔️
  • 10K 👀

Here's to the next 1000.

Best.
Nic ❤️

September 9, 2020 3 paying sponsors!!

Last week I announced on my newsletter that I’ll be accepting paid sponsorships for each issue of the The Slice in the form of non-invasive classified ads that will be at the bottom of each issue.

After the newsletter was sent out I had about 7 enquirers which quite literally made day, and as of today, 3 have made a purchase and will be on my first ever issue with a classified section!!

I see that a lot of newsletters don’t quite get this right, but I hope to not take away from the reading experience of the newsletter, rather, I’m going to try and make the classified section part of the reading experience itself.

August 8, 2020 500 Subs + 2 Coffee's

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.

July 27, 2020 Surpassed 400 subscribers!

Today I have just surpassed 400 subscribers. Pretty stoked about that.

I must admit, it has been difficult at times to create growth, but I have been experimenting with different channels lately, and the one that probably worked the best is cross promotion, and I was actually surprised as to how well this actually worked, so moving forward, I’ve made this an emphasis.

If my growth carries in the way it is now, I could probably be expected to reach 1000 subs within the next 2 month hopefully.

July 13, 2020 5 Consecutive Issues.

So last week Friday marked the day where I had sent out 5 consecutive issues of The Slice, and its been great to see such awesome growth over the last 5 weeks.

One of the things that I have found difficult is finding solid products to feature, I've tried to stray away from just featuring anybody. I started doing this "filtering" process after #003 of The Slice and seemed to have done quite well, but I thought maybe about implementing a Google Form, to make this process easier.

But so far so good, I have seen a little slow down in growth over the last 2 weeks, and that's probably because I have been posting a little less on Indie Hackers, but I have now identified the channels which work best of me, namely;

-Reddit
-Indie Hacker
-Twitter
-Hacker News

I still have yet to try any paid channels, but I'm a little sceptical of that due to the quality of subscribers I could potentially get, and maybe growing organically is the better option for now

June 22, 2020 Got 109 subscribers in one week.

So when out my first issue of The Slice, it went out to 31 recipients, on Friday when the second issue went out, it was to 140 recipients. A feat that I really did not expect to happen.

For those interested, I really didn't do anything special apart from identifying where my audience is and that turned out to be on;

-Reddit
-Indie Hackers
-Closed Facebook Groups
-Twitter

A lot of it was actually outreach, as my newsletter is focused on other peoples creations, I find myself sending out a lot of emails, Twitter DMs, Reddit messages, and so on. So I think I can owe my substantial growth to that!

Today is currently Monday and at the time of writing this, I have 159 subscribers that will be receiving the next issue on Friday.

June 12, 2020 Released the first issue of my newsletter!

Today was the day the first issue of my newsletter came out.

My newsletter is still small, but that doesn’t really bother me, I’m just happy that I followed through with something and I’m looking forward to the week ahead and getting ready for issue #002 to come out next Friday.

My feedback seems good, but I feel the need to add a blog section to my newsletter, as I just have a barebones Landing page. But I’ll get there🙏🏻

About

The Slice was created as a way to showcase new and emerging products that founders can use in their own projects, but sadly a lot of them fall in the abyss and don't even get the time of day so I created The Slice.