How we grew our newsletter to $125 MRR and 300+ subscribers before we even launched

[echo73]

Hey everyone! I’m a long time lurker but decided to share some tips and tricks on how my co-founder and I grew our newsletter, Product Byte, to 300 subscribers and $125/mrr (5 paid members) before we even launched. 95% of what I’m sharing here happened between Sept. 1st, 2020 and Oct. 1st, 2020 (which was our official launch date). My hope is to give you some tactical advice on how to grow your newsletter.

First off, what is Product Byte?

I promise this is relevant. I’m going to briefly touch on this because it plays a role in why we were able to grow this 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 -

1. Our value proposition is that we’ll help you make more money online. I.e it’s an investment.
2. We help solve a real problem. Currently, the product research tools on the market either make you do all the work, or they curate large quantities of average products.

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

How we grew it:

Facebook Ads: We’d heard a few other people say they were crushing it using Facebook Ads 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:

1. We created a lead magnet. We’d heard from multiple people that you should promote lead magnet rather than just the newsletter itself.
2. 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 tried with the remained $25.00:

1. We ran the same test, except this time only targeted tier 1 countries (USA, Canada, Australia, UK, etc..).

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 (how meta) - to be clear, this is one of the hardest channels to make work and not for the faint of heart. That said, it’s an amazing place to find highly engaged people within your niche and provide value to those people. My first tip with Reddit is to keep the promotion to a minimum… like, an absolute bare minimum. Secondly, always lead with value.

Here’s what we did -

1. Pick 5 subreddits and monitor them closely. My co-founder and I would spend about 30 minutes at the end of each day looking to see if anyone asked questions about product research in that subreddit.
2. Reply to them by first adding value (ie answering their question thoroughly and going above and beyond)
3. At the end of our comment, we’d say something like (if you’re looking for more help feel free to subscribe to our free newsletter *insert link*).

Results: In total, my co-founder has commented on dozens of posts, these comments have got us 100 free subscribers and 5 paid subscribers That’s a success in my book. I’m going to say it twice because it’s so important - the only reason this worked so well is that our comments were actually valuable - not just spam promotion.

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:

1. Found the most relevant posts in the group and tried to emulate those as much as possible.
2. 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, 16 didn't reply, 3 said no, and 1 said they’d let us promote to the group for $100. Here’s what we did:

1. Looked through the group to make sure there were a good number of real people from tier 1 countries in the group.
2. Created a post that added value and used our lead magnet as a CTA.
3. 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 - we decided to do this for our post.

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.

Where we’re at today: For the last two 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 newsletter.

I hope this was helpful! Feel free to shoot me any comments - I’m happy to answer questions!

 

[mathwiz03]

@echo73 Damn, well done. I respect the hustle and impressed you pulled that off before you launched. I've been thinking about newsletters for a while now - they seem to be picking up steam. It's nice to have a peek behind the current and see what worked and didn't work.

 

[echo73]

@mathwiz03 Appreciate the support. The whole reason I got into the newsletter business was that I found it fascinating as well, especially as a non-technical person.

Give it a shot man. I've learned a lot in the process!

 

[isrod]

@echo73 I really like how you broke down what worked and didn't work.

For facebook ads, what I do with my clients is never to cast a wide net. The more targeted the better.

 

[twointwomillion]

@isrod I strongly (but respectfully) disagree with that.

I think that if one sucks at creative they have to target well because you're essentially forced to locate the people that are already on board with your value prop.

However, the real money is in being good at creative because solid creative is able to CREATE customers and not just locate them.

Here's a quick guide on better creative: https://www.younglingfeynman.com/essays/copyfornoobs

 

[kowon]

@echo73 Great share - thank you. And you just got another subscriber.

 

[echo73]

@kowon Glad you found value in it! And, see you in the emails then. Actually sending one out today, so feel free to reply and start a convo if you're so inclined to.

Best of luck!!

 

[613jono]

@echo73 How much money have you spent on this project so far

 

[b%E1%BA%A1ch0933]

@echo73 Congratulations! Thanks for sharing your story, was really insightful. Also, cool idea!

 

[echo73]

@b%E1%BA%A1ch0933 You're very welcome! Glad you found it valuable. I too think it's a cool idea

 

[lesnock]

@echo73 This is really cool. I'm super curious about the tech you use. Do you just use mailchimp or something else? Thanks!

 

[echo73]

@lesnock There are tons of tools out there. One of the bigger one's is Substack, but you can also get away with using Ghost as well. There are more solutions emerging every day it feels like haha.

But, yes, we use Mailchimp for the time being. Probably going to move to a different platform in the future, but for now it works pretty well for us.

Hope that helps.

 

[vshock]

@echo73 What is your next step? The hustle you put in feels so relatable.

It’s super hard and expensive to reach out to users in the niche especially if you’re a blog and such.

After 300+ subscribers how do you grow to a million or more?

Is it word of mouth? SEO? How does it work?

I’m curious because I lack experience and don’t know what happens after the first stage

 

[echo73]

@vshock Just gonna keep it a buck fifty with ya - we're still figuring that out.

Normally, once you figure out what marketing channels are working for you, you just scale up that channel. So even if you're spending money, as long as it's profitable, it shouldn't matter.

SEO is a long-term play, and something (at least with our business), we're not sure makes too much sense. We think creating guides / content around ecommerce in general could work, but we're in a highly competitive industry for content (as you mentioned) so the time investment almost feels like it's a bit of a risk.

So, long story short, we're still trying to identify which marketing channels we want to double down in. Then, the next phase is just figuring out how to scale that channel. Word-of-mouth and referrals seem like a good next step, and also once we start generating a little bit of money we can start experimenting with more risky channels (influencers, sponsorships, etc.).

The other option is creating more value inside of our own product to increase conversion rates.

What are your thoughts on that? Would love to hear them!

 

[vshock]

@echo73 What you say makes practical sense. And seems like the missing key that I was looking for.

You are always looking for the customers who are hungry. Find the way to tap into them and scale it if it works.

This reminds me of the adoption curve. I guess I have to look up real examples with the curve and what are common methods of people getting to know what you do. (Ex. How did apple or other niche companies grow?)

Out of who do you reach out, how you reach out, and how many you reach out, scaling answers the quantity. Developing new products and honing would be modifying what you do and therefore who. Tapping existing market by differing or buying more expensive opportunities to reach out would be how.

 

[balu111]

@echo73 Sounds very interesting, but what is a 'lead magnet' and what does MRR stand for?

 

[echo73]

@balu111 A lead magnet is something you give away that is of value in exchange for an email address.

MRR = Monthly Recurring Revenue.

 

[elad55]

@echo73 After I confirm registration I get a 404

 

[echo73]

@elad55 That's odd - I'll send you a DM. Thanks for showing your interest though - puts a smile on my face!

 

[twointwomillion]

@echo73 Fascinating! Rooting for you. Couple of questions:

1. How'd you create the website? Looks hella good.
2. Why were you so stoked with the FB group results. Seems like CAC is about the same as FB, it's more intensive, and it's not scalable.
3. Do you have a guestimate of your LTV?

Since you're early in your journey read this: https://www.younglingfeynman.com/essays/advice