Growing First 1000 (this newsletter) to 10k Subscribers
Today's case study is about how I grew this newsletter. We talk about every strategy I tried, what worked and what didn't .
Apr 7 |
Growing First 1000 (this newsletter) to 10k SubscribersToday's case study is about how I grew this newsletter. We talk about every strategy I tried, what worked and what didn't .
I have been sitting on this for a while…but there are now over 10,000 of you reading this newsletter. I still can’t believe that 🤯. So today our case study is on this newsletter 😁. Before we got started, Partner shoutout to The Premoney List
My First 2 subscribers.
So actually, I never told anyone I was starting this newsletter. What I did was that I subscribed two of my friends (Shoutout to Jawad Shriem and Mohammed Bahaa) without them knowing…wrote my first issue..pressed send and just waited for their feedback. I kept refreshing every 5 seconds to see if any of them opened it, I would go back to my phone and check my messages, hoping one of them had seen it. Long story short, they didn’t :(. I realized needed more than two people to test this with. My first 10 subscribers
The Journey from 2 ->10 was relatively swift. After not getting any feedback from my 2 subscribers, I wanted to expand the test. What I did was going through my email history ( I think I went 2 years back) and saw who I interacted with that fits into the “early startup founder” archetype. I then replied to those email with something along the lines of:
I emailed 217 people and got 11 new subscribers. Now I was ready to release issue 2 about Slice. From 10 to 100 subscribers
I wrote the second issue about Slice, I think this one took me about 13 hours. By the end of it, it was 6am in the morning, I pressed send and before I went to bed, I posted the link to Hackernews. I didn’t think much of it, it was just something I read other newsletter writers do. I got tens of thousands of views, but only 117 subscribers (I had no sign up CTA in the actual article). I learned my first lesson about writing a newsletter…always have a CTA😁. But the high from going to bed with 14 subscribers and waking up to THIS is not something I can put in words. I think it was one of the best moments of my life. This is when I decided that maybe this newsletter thing is something I should take more seriously. From 100 to 1000 subscribers
😿 What didn’t work? To change things a little bit, let’s start with what didn’t work. So at this point I thought all i need to do is post my newsletter in places were that lot of influential people in the tech community visit regularly. The first place that came to mind was Product Hunt. I launched the newsletter there (for the first time) and it went terribly. I took screenshots of my articles, and linked the launch to my substack. I put in 15 minutes of work, and got what’s it worth. 😻 What worked? Okai now to the less depressing stuff… what worked for me to go from 100->1,000. The first thing was a second HackerNews feature, this time on my Doordash issue. It was about 3-4 weeks after my first Hackernews feature and this time got me 219 (vs 117 the previous time) new subscribers (even though it got 1/5th of the traffic …but this time I had a CTA to subscribe 😉) The second thing that worked really well for me was Twitter. Primarily three tweets. This reply got me 170 subscribers alone! To this day, I have no idea how. The other one, was a retweet from @Joshua cofounder of DoNotPay. He somehow discovered the issue I wrote about his company and wrote me a nice thank you note and retweeted it from his account and the corporate account. That got me 73 new subscribers. The last tweet that actually worked out really well for me was this one below. Kinsey, for those of you who don’t know, at the time was the host of Business Casual from Morning Brew. I wrote a snarky email to all 66 people that left their emails on this tweet with the subject line “Who leaves their email on twitter?” I made some sarcastic comment about how they should subscribe to First 1000 instead. I got *screaming voice* 31 SIGN UPS.
If I am being 100% honest, the second thousand was the hardest. There was a period of 42 days in between when I got my first 1k subscribers and hitting 2k subscribers where I only wrote one issue, and it was performed horribly. So many of the things that worked out for me before were just out of my control, I got featured twice on HackerNews, Guy Kawasaki tweeted and made a Linkedin post about the newsletter. This period was just mentally draining. Even the things that worked that were within my control were spammy. My stomach ached every time I had to go out there and “plug” the newsletter in a random online space….I just felt that I took this newsletter as far as I could.
So I started to experimenting with some of the concepts I had written about at the time. After the screenshots thing worked out, I took a page out of the Morning Brew issue and replicated their referral program. The only thing I changed at the time, was just changing the location of it in every issue (sometimes I didn’t even add it), so that people to become “blind” to it and subconsciously learn to skip it (shoutout to Tyler for sharing his tips on how he built referrals for Morning Brew)
These two mini-products got me 347 new subscribers (one month later, I got a warning from Linkedin so I had to stop doing that. It was so much fun while it lasted though 😅). and this is the story of how I got this newsletter from 0 ->2k subscribers. If you would like me to do Part 2 on going from 2k->10k, hit reply and let me know 😉 What the First 1000 community is working on
Sencha Credit: The debit card that builds credit with a stock rewards program.
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