Bootstrapping a Newsletter Reader App to $2k/MRR

This week I'm interviewing Mauricio from Newsletterss, a newsletter reader app currently doing $2,000/month. Here's the interview:

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

I was 19 when my college friend and I co-founded our first business idea. We started off as hosting resellers, continued building websites and years later we were selling online applications to modernize and streamline processes for the government of Colombia where we both got our Computer Science degrees.

After a good stint with our first company, I decided to pursue my master’s degree abroad and moved to Spain. While I was there, I joined a very famous (now defunct) social network as a software engineer and learned a lot.

During those years I met my now wife, who was also studying abroad. She decided to return home to the US and I followed her. Once settled in America, I co-founded my second business project which failed after less than two years. It was like Uber for package shipping but it was too early and the world was not prepared for that.

Now I spend my days as an engineering manager helping teams build communication apps and working on various side projects. The most recent one is Newsletterss, an app for reading newsletters that also creates an RSS feed of your inbox and lets you use your favorite reader.

What motivated you to get started?

I consume a lot of information on a daily basis, and newsletters make up a considerable percentage of that. I didn’t want to mix my personal emails with breaking news, recipes or other interesting topics that are not as personal as email. Also, email apps are focused on productivity, I wanted an app that felt nice for consuming, not producing content, and because I couldn’t find one that met my needs, I thought it was a good idea and decided to start working on what is known today as Newsletterss.

What went into building the initial product?

I built the initial email processor over a weekend as a prototype, mostly to prove my idea. Most email service providers are focused and do a really good job with outbound marketing email, but finding one that offers a good inbound solution has been the most challenging part to this day.

Once I built the prototype, I purchased a website template and put together a landing page and a web app. I also hired a web developer contractor who helped me with CSS and layout. I’ve been programming in Go for the past 5 years, and that’s what I used for the backend as it allows me to be hyper productive. The initial version of the application had Postgres running on Google Cloud as the data layer, but it was expensive to run a Postgres instance 24/7 for an application with zero users so I decided to try Google Datastore and I still use it to this day. It has its downsides but it allows me to scale the app faster and at a reasonable cost.

After building a decent web application, I started tinkering with Swift UI in order to build a native client app. I was super productive at the beginning laying out the app’s foundation but once I needed to build more advanced stuff, Swift UI became a roadblock as it would take me a lot of time to get things done. I pivoted to a more pragmatic approach and gave Flutter a try. After two months I released the first version of Newsletterss for iOS on Valentine’s Day while having dinner with my wife. She was the one who pushed the “release” button.

How have you attracted users and grown Newsletterss?

I am a terrible marketer, seriously, awful. But I’ve been trying to get better at it, even though I don’t enjoy it as much as developing.

As many do, I tried launching on Product Hunt during my first days and it was a total flop. I’ll give it another try in the future, but the initial experience wasn’t what I expected.

One of the things that brought some early users was participating in the 100 users in 100 days project. It was a twofold idea that encouraged founders to work on user acquisition, while giving them exposure at the same time. I ended up in fourth place.

The App Store has been my main source of customer acquisition with a moderate investment. Most users come via Apple Search Ads where I take what I call a residual inventory approach, it consists of bidding much more less than the recommended amount for keywords that may not be the most relevant for your product. Eventually, the search ads algorithm will display your ads when there’s a shortage in inventory.

The ad spend using this technique has had a positive return throughout most of the year, but I’ve noticed its effectiveness decreasing in the past months. I attribute this change to multiple factors, including the increase in customer acquisition cost after Apple released App Tracking Transparency, and to companies increasing their ad spend at the end of the year to remain competitive during the holiday season and/or meet previously defined acquisition goals.

I have also tried interjecting in random twitter conversations for specific keywords that I follow, and that has brought some users as well. I’m currently trying to grow our Twitter handle @NewsletterssApp with newsletter recommendations every now and then for people to try.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

I have a subscription-based model with a free tier. Free accounts have some limitations, such as the amount of items you can have in your inbox and messages being auto-deleted after a certain time. My main objective right now is to continue improving and growing the app and getting it to a point where its set of features satisfy the initial concept of fulfilling readers as well as content creators' needs.

What are your goals for the future?

I’m building a newsletter reader app, but I also want to build a platform for content creators, a place for writers to reach new audiences and amplify their ideas. I want to focus on both publishers and consumers and make sure that I build a product that satisfies the needs of both groups equally.

If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

Mobile first, skipping the web application and putting all my efforts in building the native apps. In hindsight, the web app was a little distracting but it also helped me prototype the idea and get early feedback from early adopters and friends.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

We have not reached the age of the "peak newsletter" yet. Platforms such as Substack, Revue or Facebook Bulletin are just in their beginnings and newsletters will only grow from this point forward. All these platforms are solely focused on the creator experience. I want to appease to the other side of the equation, and those people are the readers.

Where can we go to learn more?

Check out our website, as well as our iOS and Android app. Also feel free to follow us on Twitter.