How We Scored $125 MRR and 497 Followers Pre-launch

Hey Hackernoon family! I havent contributed an article in a long time but I wanted to share how we grew our newsletter, Product Byte, to 497 subscribers and $150/mrr (6 paid members) before we even launched.

95% of what I’m sharing here happened between Sept. 1st, 2020 and Oct. 1, 2020 (which was our official launch date). My hope is to give you some tactical advice on how to grow your newsletter.

I’m going to briefly touch on this because I think it plays a role in why we were able to grow relatively quickly. Product Byte sends out 1-3 profitable, handpicked, and well-researched e-commerce products that entrepreneurs should sell online. Two things to take away from this -

If I were starting another newsletter, I would definitely try to position my content in one of these two ways.

Facebook Ads: We’d heard a few other people say they were crushing it using Facebook Ads to grow their newsletter and we figured we’d give it a shot as well. For context, we didn’t have a large advertising budget, so the idea of spending money for subscribers wasn’t our favorite idea. We figured we’d spend $50 and see what happened.

Here’s what we did:

We created a lead magnet. We’d heard from multiple people that you should promote lead magnet rather than just the newsletter itself.We used interests as our primary parameter for Facebook to find relevant people, creating some short ad copy, and our CTA sent them to the signup page on our website.

Results: We got 50 signups at about $.50/per sign up. We were stoked with these results. Unfortunately, when we looked at where all the traffic came from, it was clear these were low-quality emails, as our open rates were practically non-existent. 🙁

Facebook Ads Attempt #2: The lesson here is that we shouldn’t have kept our targeting to “worldwide”.

Here’s what we did with the remained $25.00:

We ran the same test, except this time only targeted tier 1 countries (USA, Canada, Australia, UK, etc..) and used the same interest targeting that we did previously.

Results: We saw about a $3.00/per sign up. Which was more than we were willing to spend for free subscribers. Ultimately, we decided to stop running Facebook Ads.

Reddit - This is one of the hardest channels to make work and not for the faint of heart. My first tip with Reddit is to keep the promotion to a minimum… like, an absolute bare minimum. Secondly, always lead with value. That said, some Subreddits are so anti-advertisement that even if you lead with value and add your link in a subtle way, you’ll still get your post removed or worse… shadow-banned 😱 all while getting flamed in the process. But, don’t stress it, it’s just part of using Reddit.

Here’s what we did:

Found 3-5 relevant subreddits. Looked at the top posts of all time and emulated their headlines and content created a valuable post (this was typically just repurposing our free content in a different format) w/ a clickbaity title (yep - this tactic still works!)At the end of the post, or in the comments, we would say something like “if you liked this content, feel free to subscribe to my free newsletter Product Byte link”

Results: In total, my co-founder and I have posted 4 times and each time made it to the front page of the subreddit for that day. Unfortunately, 3 of the 4 posts got banned after being up for a while - so we’re still trying to figure this channel out. But, these posts got us 100 free subscribers and 5 paid subscribers 🙌 That’s a success in my book.

Facebook Groups: Similar to Reddit, there are a number of niche communities that exist around e-commerce on Facebook. We saw this as a gold mine for getting potential users. First, we tried organic posts within the communities themselves.

Here’s what we did:

Found the most relevant posts in the group and tried to emulate those as much as possible. Posted similar content as we did on Reddit (value add with little advertising).

Results: We got banned from almost every group we tried to promote within. We quickly learned the moderators had tight rules on promotion. Of the 7 groups we posted in, we were banned from 6 🙁.

Our next attempt was to reach out to the admins to get their approval before posting anything to get their approval. After messaging about 20 admins, 3 said no, and 1 said they’d let us promote to the group for $100.

Here’s what we did:

Looked through the group to make sure there were a good number of real people from tier 1 countries in the group. Created a post that added value and used our lead magnet as a CTA. Used comments as a way to keep our post "relevant". A trick we learned is rather than putting a link directly in your post, ask people to comment to get the post in order to get the lead magnet. We then went and direct messaged each one of them with the ‘secret link.’ While this does add some friction, it keeps the post boosted because of the engagement metrics.

Results: It turned out great! We got 200 free signups and 1 paid member 🙌 (which is not counted in total MRR because he converted after we launched). We’re really happy with how this went given that we were pretty skeptical going into it.

For the last three weeks, we’ve been really focusing on nailing our content and trying to convert free subscribers into paid members. We’re starting to do more marketing now, and are trying to discover new grassroots channels for growth.

If anyone has any tips on how to organically grow your newsletter, we’d love to hear them. One of the best resources we’ve found is Grow Getters - they’ve been producing stellar content on how to grow a paid newsletter.