Future of Discovery - New blog post

This morning I published How The Sample drives thousands of newsletter subscriptions. I feel like the title makes it sound cooler than it is, but I mean, we do generate over 2k subscriptions for other newsletters every month, so I guess it’s true.

Anyway, the first half of the post is an explanation of what The Sample is/how it works, with a little behind-the-scenes stuff, and the second half is a bunch of charts and metrics. (My favorite chart is the last one with all the green dots).

Our churn rate is kind of high (8% per month), so we either need to figure out how to reduce it, or roll with it and make sure we can get lots of new subscribers cheaply. That latter option might actually be pretty doable. We’re experimenting with Facebook ads again, and we’ve been getting new subscribers from it a lot more cheaply then before. No idea why. We just need to see how well we can make the money back from paid forwards (see the chart with all the green dots), and then find out if we can profitably scale up the FB ads.

I still have plans to do some more open-source coding, once this next section on my todo list is finished, although that section seems to never actually disappear. But, maybe it’ll happen this time! Just need to refactor our server code… In seriousness, I really would like to have a good workflow that lets me read and write good stuff regularly without distracting me from the startup too much.

Jacob