VimTricks

Email newsletter and courses about Vim, the text editor

Under 10 Employees
Multiple Founders
Founders Code
News & Magazines
Writing

I've been using VIm for a decade and it has drastically improved my developer experience. But I'm still learning, and I needed a source for tips and recipes to improve my productivity.

June 12, 2020 Launched a new landing page!

When we first started VimTricks we went with the easiest and quickest platform we could to get started: Substack. We're still using it (for now) to send emails, but we quickly became disappointed with its lack of customizability. Specifically, the Substack landing pages are pretty weak, have the same tired old design, and have a link right on the homepage to click past the signup and read the content for free. Not great.

So I built a new landing page and launched it to Heroku, where we post everything else. I'm no designer and it took a bit of work to get right, but I think it looks great! (Much of the design come compliments of a free Bootstrap template.)

I mined all the feedback emails I received for real quotes from real users and plastered the page with that. I'm hoping this simple "social proof" will help induce people to sign up.

Any feedback on the page would be greatly appreciated!

June 9, 2020 Featured in a Podcast!

After starting VimTricks less than two months ago, we were just featured in the inaugural episode of the Newsletter Crew podcast. It was a really fun experience to be interviewed by @yaroslawbagriy for the podcast. For one, it's heartening to think someone is actually interested in what you are doing, and that you may have information or insights that could be useful to others. But even further, it just gave me a chance to reflect on what we had built and how this really feels like just the beginning with VimTricks. There's so much more I want to build, more content to write, and many thousands of more subscribers to reach.

April 25, 2020 Blasted past 1,000 signups already

I 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.

April 19, 2020 675 Signups in One Day

Exactly 6 days ago, we launched VimTricks, our free email newsletter with tips about the Vim editor. We really had no idea how to promote it, so we've just been sending the link around to close associates and friends. We got 5 registrations over the course of the week. I had thought about posting it to /r/vim on Reddit but was exceptionally nervous about sounding like a spammer.

When this conversation came up on IndieHackers yesterday, a kind soul (thank you, @pupeno) posted it unprompted to Reddit and we got a surge of signups. In fact, we got 675 sign ups in less than 24 hours. Both Andy and I are totally blown away with the response and now we're incredibly motivated to write content for our newsletter.

Our goal has long been to get 5,000 people signed up to a free newsletter. Our napkin math was that if we could get 5,000 free users, we might be able to get 10% of those, 500, to pay $5/month for a better version. That would be $2,500/month, which is about what our main product, StatusGator makes today. The goals are arbitrary but they are something to work towards.

Thank you to everyone here in this community for the support, it's hugely inspiring!

April 16, 2020 First user sign up!

A modest milestone by any definition, but we had our first user sign up for VimTricks, our email newsletter about the Vim text editor. It came when a colleague asked me for help with Vim, which I promptly provided. And then I immediately recommended he sign up for our free newsletter. He loved the idea and gave the feedback that it needs a searchable archive as well.

I think that could end up being a premium feature, if we ever decide to go paid with it: Maybe tips more often plus access to a searchable, filterable archive.

I know it's not much, but it's something: 1 user down, 4,999 to go to meet our (somewhat arbitrary) goal of 5,000 free users.

April 9, 2020 Launched our email newsletter!

More than 2 years ago, Andy and I started a blog called VimTricks. It was a place for us to share tips, tricks, recipes, plugins, and helpful hints about how to use the Vim text editor. Both of us have been using Vim for a long time and we found that no matter how much we learned, there was always more. Furthermore, each of us had our own routines, customizations, and plugins that we used to do the same work. Whenever we pair programmed, we learned from each other. So we began sharing our tips to each other via a public blog.

We've long thought about changing the format of these tips and tricks to an email newsletter. Instead of having to check a website regularly, Vim tricks and tip would trickle into your inbox every week.

So we finally launched it! VimTricks is, for now, a free email newsletter. Our goal is to amass 5,000 passionate Vim users who want to receive tips and tricks twice a week. Who knows where it will go and if there will be a way to monetize it. But either way, we know that it will help us grow as Vim users by documenting what we learn throughout our careers and sharing it with others.

About

I've been using VIm for a decade and it has drastically improved my developer experience. But I'm still learning, and I needed a source for tips and recipes to improve my productivity.