2020 Retro: Growing an email list on Twitter

Today's the day! Almost 8 months after launching this newsletter, today is the first time I'm sending it to over 5,000 people 😱

Blogging for Devs is not first email list I've built.

But it is the first one I've grown primarily through Twitter, instead of organic traffic and SEO.

That's why this week, I'm sharing a retrospective of how each side project and blog post in 2020 contributed to growing this newsletter, and how you can try those strategies for yourself this year.

And, in some cases, how my experiments totally didn't bring the results I expected.

I hope you find it interesting, useful, and actionable. Let's go 🚀

First off was the launch on Twitter.

Having 42% of visitors not only subscribe to an email list AND confirm is outrageous. And it's never been as high since. Here's why I think it worked:

First, I gave people a deadline to subscribe.

"The 7-day kick-off challenge starts THIS WEEKEND." It creates a sense of urgency without being fake or exclusive.

Second, I launched a free email course. Not "My next posts in your inbox". This helped make the value more obvious than your average newsletter.

Yes, it takes way more work. Did I tell you I spent 3 solid weeks working on those 7 emails? 😅 But the effort paid off.

Next, it was Summer. Also known as, my 2020 Trough of Sorrow.

I'll be honest with you: it was a hard Summer for me.

I turned 30 in the middle of the pandemic, had my lowest month of income from my projects (a whopping $538 in June), and took 4 weeks off Twitter to ponder my existence — all in the same month!

What kept the newsletter growing passively in that time was two main things:

1. The custom Thank You page. Most people don't customize their "Thanks for confirming your email" page, but adding an "ask" there for people to share helped keep it going.
2. Word of mouth recommendations. People started sharing the newsletter with friends and colleagues. It made (and continues to make) a huge difference!

At the end of the Summer, a friend mentioned to me that his best launch on Product Hunt was actually a newsletter.

So I thought, "Why not try Product Hunt? What's the worst that could happen?" 🤔

My key learning from Product Hunt was this:

Product Hunt isn't a place to launch your product for the first time.

It's a place for you to launch second. After you've got a critical mass of people who can leave kind reviews and can upvote your product based on their personal experience with it.

And interestingly enough, even while being on Product Hunt, about 20% of people who subscribed still came from Twitter.

They just saw the tweets about Product Hunt 😜

A month and a half later, I started a Twitter thread on the paid complement to this free newsletter: The Blogging for Devs Community.

Although I'd privately launched the Community to subscribers of this newsletter in June, I almost never talked about it publicly. I wanted to grow it super slow and get it right from the beginning.

But after the announcement, a lot of people who joined the waitlist ended up also finding the newsletter. Double-win!

An evergreen Tweet thread for sharing updates on a project works great for a few reasons:

1. Gets the initial message visible to people multiple times
2. Provides a preview of what you're building, before they subscribe
3. Encourages you to tweet more frequently (which is something I'm personally very bad at)

What's important is making the initial tweet look as good as possible (and including a link!) so you get the most mileage out of it.

After that, I had some, err, unexpected attention from everyone's favorite online club of haters: Hacker News 😅

It was a bit dramatic.

First, it started picking up dozens of visitors at a time. Then it disappeared from the homepage, because someone flagged the post. I wrote the moderator of Hacker News to get it reinstated.

It eventually reached #3 and drove 10,000 visits to my personal blog.

Drama aside, getting the story of the community out to a bigger audience led to some great personal connections.

Don't underestimate the power of Hacker News. Even if you don't want to participate in the comments. It's still an amazing way to get exposure for whatever you're creating.

Focus on the HN lurkers who found you on the front page, love what you're doing, and don't waste their free time hating on stuff ;)

From there, the year was coming to a close. And I was so close to the arbitrary milestone of 5,000 subscribers 😆

What brought me over the finish line was support from friends. Joe Previte referred over 40 people to this newsletter with his tweet.

Then Benedicte Raae, Ashlee M Boyer, and several others brought me to 5K with their retweets and endorsements. It was really nice 😍

It's probably surprising when you don't see the results yourself, but your tweets and referrals really do make a huge difference.

By the same token, it's a great way to support your friends who are blogging or building a product. You don't have to be "internet famous" for your words to matter. Genuine, unprompted, public recommendations are worth their weight in gold.

After that, one more win took us well and truly over the top.

With just days to spare, I published my 2020 Retrospective as a Twitter thread and as an article called No Prize for Doing It The Hard Way.

Both resonated with people more than I could've hoped for, and brought about 200 people to the newsletter.

If you're one of them, then hello and welcome! 👋

So, what didn't work out?

The big thing I tried this year but hasn't brought sizable results so far is Blogging for Devs Trends.

It's a place to discover tech blogs written by individual developers, ranked by whose articles are generating the most discussion on Twitter.

The launch brought a lot of traffic, but hasn't led to a proportional number of subscribers. Organic visits are trending up (ha!), so I've got hopes this will still be a worthwhile investment. I'll keep you posted!

Oh, and I'm planning to try launching it on Hacker News soon, so wish me fortitude (or send a stiff drink 😜).

7 lessons 2020 taught me about growth

1. Early growth is slow for everyone. I started with ~9K followers on Twitter. And it still took over 7 months, 2 launches, and 26 editions to get here.
2. Format, positioning and copywriting make a huge difference. It helps you stand out when everyone else is following the same trend.
3. Launch multiple times as you build momentum. A step-by-step approach can help you refine your message and build support.
4. Build growth loops into your product. Think about how each person who tries it can lead to more people trying it. Sometimes it's as simple as a Share button.
5. Don't be afraid to try high exposure platforms. Hacker News and Product Hunt are both very powerful, if you're willing to try and see what happens.
6. Ask for help! Don't put people on the spot, but if you invest time in being there for people, they'll surprise you with their support in return. Boom, you're internet friends :)
7. Create something great, then invest in distribution. Syndication is easy, but repurposing content as we talked about in the last edition can lead to outsized results.

I hope this gives you some specific tweaks or ideas for growing your newsletter or blog in 2021.

Thanks for reading! And as always, if you're looking for feedback, encouragement, or an answer to a question, I'm just an email away :)

Let's make this our year,

@monicalent

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