How I grew my newsletter to 2,000+ subscribers in 6 months

Hey there,

Charlie here 👋

In June this year, I decided I wanted to embark on a new venture.

I work as a Product Manager in B2B SaaS and build my own products on the side. But this time I wanted to start something non-technical and more creative as an escape.

I decided to start a newsletter sharing growth strategies, marketing tactics and product development tips for people building SaaS products of their own.

This post is a breakdown of how I grew it, what worked and what didn't + some details on the current revenue model and future plans.

For context, I had zero existing audience before starting this and was dedicated to sticking to 100% organic growth.

Here's the newsletter: IdeaHub

And here are some high-level stats as of today:

• Website traffic to date: 14.2k
• Email subscribers: 2029
• Words written: 12.3k
• Monthly revenue: $250
• Monthly costs: $100

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What worked

Indie Hackers

Each week I adjust and repost my articles here and include a link back to the original. Doing this can drive anywhere from 100-300 clicks when working well and usually 20 or so newsletter subscribers.

One thing I'm super grateful to everyone in the IH team for is getting featured in the IH newsletter which is sent out to ~ 70k readers. This was completely organic and I was honoured to be included! This one link brought around 250 visitors and 100 subscribers over 3 days.

In total, IH has accounted for roughly 30% of all traffic and subscribers.

Dev.to

Dev.to is another blogging platform but more focused to technical writing. Again each week I would adjust and repost my articles to fit the style of the site.
But in particular, what worked well was making use of tags. It's really powerful on dev.to.

There are a few tags (#watercooler and #discuss) that have dedicated slots on the homepage. So instead of fighting through the crowd of posts I just curated some additional posts to fit into those tags and got a lot more traffic. Most posts to those tags would bring in 20-30 subscribers each time.

On the whole, dev.to has contributed roughly 20% of all traffic and subscribers.

Collaborations

As I didn't have any audience to start with it was difficult to find people who wanted to collaborate with me. Plus if you both only have small sites neither gets much value from it.

But as I grew the email list what I could offer others became far more valuable. I started reaching out to other sites to swap links and over time that has brought in \~ 100 new subscribers.

To anyone starting a newsletter, I would say hold off collaborating with others until you have at least 1,000 subscribers.

Reddit

Focusing on SaaS and other tech-related subreddits I would mainly comment on other people's posts who are looking for advice and to try to first and foremost offer some help to them.

Then if it makes sense to do so I'll include a link to my site. I also always try to include another resource alongside mine so that people have a choice on whether to read mine or not. This has worked well and I've had 99% supportive feedback from people with very little backlash from self-promotion rules.

I've met a few friends on Reddit along the way too and set up calls with them where we have shared our ideas and journeys.

Overall Reddit has brought ~ 30% of all traffic and subscribers.

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What didn't work

HackerNews

I've heard of people having a lot of success with reposting content on HackerNews. But for me, it just didn't seem to work :(

I would repost each article on the main thread but never seemed to be able to get past the first page. There isn't a lot of 'creative license' on HN as you only really get to write the title, each post is just a link.

So I struggled to figure out how to best bring my tone of voice without sounding like engagement bait.

Overall I got about 500 website visits from HN but not many converted to subscribers.

Socials

I started a new X account for the newsletter and started posting each day. I found it hard to get traction and it seemed like there was a change to the algorithm every week that would affect my reach and strategy.

It seemed like a big time investment to keep on top of it and mostly not worth it considering the other channels I had already built up.

Overall I gained ~ 300 followers and about 50 of those became email subscribers.

SEO

I didn't do any intentional SEO for this project as I've mainly been focusing on posting on sites that already have high traffic.

I think this is a big reason I was able to grow faster than most as it can take time to build up SEO but using other sites you can start to get traffic pretty much instantly.

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Monetisation

Recommendations

Currently, I receive ~ $1/new subscriber through recommending other related newsletters as part of the signup flow.

It's a nice thing to have in the background but only scales by growing the newsletter faster so will likely take time to increase.

Sponsorships

I also run email sponsorships at around $100 each where I add a featured section to an email. This should scale nicely as the email list grows.

I mainly get leads from the existing subscriber base and also from Passionfroot where I run the sponsorships. I get about 1 slot booked a month right now.

Affiliate

I also have a very small portion of the revenue from affiliate products. This hasn't worked as well as I thought it would but I may try this more in the future.

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Next year

Next year I plan to keep writing each week and building out more sponsorship infrastructure and processes to make the process smoother and hopefully bring in more leads.

I also am thinking of launching a paid subscription where I would send an additional, more in-depth email each week.

I hope this is interesting to those starting newsletters. If your interested in SaaS yourself then definitely check it out here.

Cheers