Blasted past 1,000 signups already
by Colin BartlettI can't believe it's only been a week since we started VimTricks, our Vim email newsletter. Yesterday, an unknown source of traffic started blasting our registrations up again like a rocket ship past 1,000 and we are at 1,177 right now. The growth has been pretty mind blowing to me, as I expected it to take months to get here.
I scrambled to add Google Analytics to our Substack page and then was able to see that the source was another email newsletter called the HackerNewsletter, which appears to be based on content submitted to Hacker News. I had previously submitted VimTricks to Hacker News but it got very few upvotes and never made it to the front page. Suffice to say, that is definitely our target audience so anything we can do to somehow get back to the front page of Hacker News would be huge.
Our original goal was to get 5,000 users and then think about monetization, but we are definitely already thinking about it. I do feel like we need to prove out the concept a bit further though. And the toughest part will be how to keep some level of value for the free users but provided much more value to paid users.
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Considering the audience are vim users, what are the possible ways to monetize?
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Sponsorships, paid subscriptions (more frequent tips? better tips?), or maybe just cross promoting my other products which are also developer-focused.
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Do you think that affiliate programs can be useful for you? I am building a list of affiliate programs started by SaaS companies. But I don't know which type of content creators are most interested in affiliate programs.
My listing site: www.afftable.com
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Amazing congrats. Luck always comes to the prepared.
What do you think made VimTricks onto the newsletter?
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I don't know, a good question! I am going to assume Hacker Newsletter is human curated, because they can't just take everything that is posted on Hacker News. So maybe the Hacker Newsletter curator is a Vim user and somehow spotted us? In any case, it's got my wheels turning about other newsletter that might be able to feature ours. Anything that reaches developers and technical folks could be a great source of sign ups.
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