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31 Comments

My React newsletter made €27,300 in 2022 - Ask me anything

Hi newsletter crew!

I didn't have time to write a long 2022 retrospective post, but I plan to write one.

My This Week In React newsletter (targeting senior React & React-Native developers) made 27300€ this year.

Last year, it only made 4k€, which is a significant increase!

I tried to make everything public (growth, turnover, ad spend, experiments...). What is currently not public is not because I don't want, but because it takes time to publish things in details.

Public links:

Some quick key learnings this year for a sponsorship-based model:

  • It's not worth creating great content if you don't spend as much time promoting it
  • Running paid ads is definitively worth it, and it takes time to get good at it
  • For the same list size a daily newsletter brings much more cash than a weekly one
  • Increasing the email frequency also increases the subscriber lifetime value, a very important metric
  • The higher the subscriber lifetime value, the higher you can spend acquiring them with ads

For business model and other interest reasons, I'd like to increase my email frequency to twice a quite as soon as possible. For that, I will need to learn to delegate tasks.

I still have a lot to learn but I think I now understand the newsletter business model much better compared to last year.

As I'm planning to write a much more detailed retrospective, I'd like to ask you if you have any questions that you'd like me to cover.

Thanks

  1. 3

    Subscriber here :) Nice stats!

    Do you have any good pointers or resources on how to start with running ad campaigns? How did you know what copy to write, which platforms to target, etc?

    Thanks!

    1. 2

      Great, hope you like it ;)

      I don't have any particular pointers apart from being interested to learn and experiment. I follow marketing newsletters and SEA experts in what they recommend, try to adapt this to my dev audience, and focused on Twitter/Reddit first as this is where devs are most likely to be.

      Some experts have interesting recommendations that I try to follow, for example this video where Matt McGarry recommends using testimonials/memes in ad copies. I tried that recently and it seems to work on Twitter too (see my other comment about that).

      1. 2

        Cool, thanks for taking the time to answer!

  2. 3

    Super interesting learnings. Thanks for sharing them.

    What channels (social, search) do you run ads to acquire subscribers for your newsletter?

    1. 1

      Thanks :)

      I started my newsletter by posting daily on LinkedIn almost 4 years ago now (in French). I used LinkedIn quite actively in the beginning to grow the French list. Since I started the English version my newsletter is now localized in 2 languages and the English segment is growing much faster. I'm mostly using Twitter and Reddit to grow the English newsletter segment (paid and organic).

      I also have some google search ads but the results are not so great unless the search query is exactly the intent like "react newsletter" or something. I plan to do some display/youtube ads more in the future but creating ad assets is more time-consuming here.

      I can't say Twitter/Reddit performs better because I'm not an ad expert and I didn't invest as much time in all the platforms. My feeling is that serious devs are usually hanging out on these platforms more so it feels natural to start with those. Pretty sure it's possible to get new subs on Facebook, TikTok and others but will the open rates be good after a few months? 🤷‍♂️ I target more senior devs and I don't know many experienced devs spending a lot of time on TikTok.

      1. 2

        Thank you so much for a thoughtful response.

  3. 2

    I'm starting my newsletter using substack. What are you using? Do you recommend it?

    1. 1

      Hey

      I'm using ConvertKit. It's expensive but more powerful in terms of automation, tagging, segmenting, subscriber scoring... It's far from perfect but probably more advanced than Substack for what I want to do.

      I recently started using Substack as a cross-posting blog platform: https://substack.thisweekinreact.com/. I don't send emails from the Substack newsletter but only try to benefit from Substack network effects. Within a month it led to a hundred new subscribers so far. I also created this Substack account because I needed to import my older Revue content somewhere, otherwise, it would have been lost, so it's also some kind of "archive" for me. Apart that I can't say I'd recommend Substack unless you run a paid community newsletter maybe.

      For me the most promising newsletter software is Beehiiv. It's quite new but I see the platform evolving at a very fast pace. I may switch from ConvertKit to Beehiiv if it continues.

      1. 2

        Thanks so much! Heard good things about convertkit and seeing lots of Beehiiv recently. promising!

  4. 2

    Awesome work! I run clientside.dev and I'm in a very similar niche so this is inspirational

    Of that $27k, what percentage is profit in your case?

    1. 1

      Thanks :)

      Apart paid ads and some SaaS software most of it is revenue;

      I didn't do the math but I think I spent around:

      • 1000€ on ConvertKit ESP (before summer 2022, I used Revue for free but it was a bit limited
      • 200€ FeedHive Twitter tool
      • 4000€ in paid ads

      I'd say around 22k€ profit.

      That doesn't take into account the time I spend on this: 2 days a week. In the end I lose money because my time is precious (experienced freelancer with high hourly rate). But things compound so I believe it will be profitable in the long term, and I learn many new business things in the process so that's nice too ;)

  5. 2

    Inspirational! Thanks for sharing

  6. 2

    What would it look like if you did what you outlined at the end of your post? What would that bring you?

    1. 1

      It's hard to answer but I guess I'd have a larger email list that grows faster and I would be able to create a second more editorial weekly email that would permit me to double the revenue per subscriber. I'm not someone that goes all-in on something risky, so for me, it's reasonable to take my time, and learn this business progressively. All the steps and mistakes I made were important to learn the lessons I have learned today, and it's unlikely I would have figured this all from the start.

      The truth is, I initially had no intention at all to start a newsletter business. It happened naturally over time. I started posting on LinkedIn daily in 2019 and the goal at that time was just to improve my personal branding and increase my freelancing rates. There are even days when I wonder if I really want to be a newsletter operator and if this even project is aligned with my life goals.

  7. 2

    Hey Sebastien, huge congrats on the nearly 7x increase in revenue YoY!

    I'm curious how you're managing your ads, and if you've hired any help with your newsletter (virtual assistant, growth marketer)—or if you have plans to?

    Also wondering:

    • what channels do you get the best results (growth) with promotion?
    • what are your top 3 growth tactics?
    1. 2

      Hey Dylan thanks ;)

      I'm managing my ads myself manually when I have time as part of the few hours I invest every week in newsletter growth experiments. I don't have a VA or any help for now but may try to get someone to help me design good ad creatives. In the beginning I mostly focused on the technical setup to have proper conversion tracking, so that I can at least compare some platforms using a similar (quite shitty) ad creating.

      Although I don't have any help, I still listen to newsletter influencers sharing advice online, like Matt McGarry.

      2 months ago I notably created more efficient ads, some are performing quite well.

      My idea is to target directly the audience of the testimonial author, I'd like to do this more in the future but it requires the explicit consent of the author first afaik. This is also something I'd like to do with Youtube ads later. If a Youtuber is famous and gives you testimonial + consent, it should probably be easier to turn his own subscribers into yours if subscribers see a positive testimonial from someone they already like/follow/trust.

      Using Twitter + weekly threads + the Revue integration (+ pollinate.email, because I'm using ConvertKit ESP to send emails) has been the best growth hack. Now that the integration is gone it is getting harder to get email signups from Twitter, despite my start/mid/end thread CTAs to sign up.

      Something that worked well is also to ask email subscribers to retweet the thread. I'm using an URL https://slo.im/thread that I redirect to the latest Twitter thread, and there's always a CTA in my emails to ask for a retweet. Over time it's working less and less but I still get a few readers that constantly retweet my threads every week.

      I used to post on Reddit my weekly newsletters but it didn't work much in the beginning. More recently I started to post a good sample of my newsletter natively to the platform as a comment, and I get much more upvotes. A low additional effort with a good ROI. Examples with many upvotes:

      I'm mostly using Twitter/Reddit/ Google Search ads for now, not much experience with other platforms so far so can't really tell. Senior devs are usually on Twitter/Reddit. I tried Quora ads but it didn't work at all. My intuition is that running paid ads on platforms you are already present organically is good because people see your organic content, and then you can plug your newsletter with ads.

      Not sure it answers your questions, let me know if you need me to explain anything else 😄

  8. 1

    Are you able to live off the income it provides?

    1. 1

      No, I also work 3d/week as a contractor for Facebook 😄

  9. 1

    Just congrats!!

    I'm working on launching a newsletter in business and fitness industry. All those were great learnings!!

    Q, if you want to acquire you first stranger subscribers, what would you do now?

    1. 1

      Thanks!
      What do you mean by stranger subscribers?
      If you post content in English online you should get subscribers from many different countries.

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        Strangers I mean people I don't know (no friends, family, etc)

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          I would just hang out where my audience is and try to provide content that interests them until I find "info" market fit.

  10. 1

    Yeah Ads are good! But I think sponsorship is more effective in my case!

    1. 1

      🤔 not sure to understand what you mean. Do you mean sponsoring other newsletters? I do cross-promotion for sure (free).

  11. 1

    Good numbers! Saw your promoted posts on a few platforms and was wondering if you could share your experience there? (which platform is the best, value for money, etc) I'm thinking about promoting my blog and wonder if I'd create an IG page or focus on increasing my presence on Twitter.

    Also how do you find which posts to include in the newsletter and how much time it takes? And if you need some extra content for the newsletter, feel free to contact me ;)

    1. 1

      I have no particular experience on IG, particularly with dev content. For me, Twitter and Reddit work fine. If your posts are good you can try to promote them more aggressively there, not necessarily with paid advertising. I'd focus on Twitter first. Try to make some real friends here and add interesting comments to larger accounts. Tools like BlackMagic.so can help a bit.

      Keep in mind most dev newsletter authors (including me) are happy to receive link suggestions, so a good way to get started is to create a list of people to contact whenever you publish something new. We all have a different editorial line so it does not mean we will always include your content, but we'll take a look for sure. Tip: add an RSS feed to your site, or create a newsletter. Not doing so makes it hard for me to notice when you publish something new.

      I use this Twitter-filtered chronological view to do my weekly curation: https://twitter.com/search?q=list%3A1462723878950690817 %2Bmin_retweets%3A5 %2Bfilter%3Alinks&src=typed_query&f=live
      For which I maintain this Twitter list of +1.7k profiles I try to follow: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1462723878950690817

      1. 1

        Thanks for the tips! Btw, I do have an RSS feed for my blog: https://claritydev.net/blog/feed.

        1. 2

          Then you have to make this feed discoverable with an SEO meta: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/blog/feed" title="My site RSS feed">

          1. 2

            Damn, I was pretty sure I had that meta link, but apparently I didn't :D Thanks for the hint, should be fixed now :)

  12. 3

    This comment was deleted 9 months ago.

    1. 2

      Thanks :)

      So I have to crank up the number of blog posts I am making.
      That's only true if you have a sponsorship-based newsletter model like me.

      Some daily newsletters are making a ton of money. I'm a big fan of Dan Ni from TLDR, you'll find a few posts from him there. This recent case study is also interesting: https://growthinreverse.com/tldr/

  13. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

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