26 Newsletter Growth Channels – And How They Work
Ideas to grow your list.
Related Link:
35 ideas on how to grow your email list for free – ConvertKit
Growth
The Million Dollar Content Flywheel King
Greg Isenberg interviews Case Kenney of New Mindset, Who dis?
Big Ideas:
► Making $5.5 million from selling journals.
► How he grew his podcast.
► His Creator flywheel – Organic content >> Create a journal from it >> Market the journal with paid ads >> Promote the podcast >> Promote social >>.
► Using email drip campaigns for further upsells and promotion.
► How writing books gets publicity and drives customers for his journals.
► How Jack Butcher uses free products in his store to get people into his ecosystem.
via @alx_zoo_
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How Survey Tool Doopool Got their First 1000 Customers
First1000 has an interesting article on how Doopool grew in the early days. Here are some notes:
- They had their first MVP completed in 4 days and tested it in a co-working space to get feedback.
- In the early days, they mistakenly focused on a feature that customers didn’t want. They just wanted an easy survey tool.
- Cold calling and direct sales was what worked early on.
- Outreach with tools that fake personalization and use gimmicks to be humourous didn’t work.
Business Lessons:
- Starting a business is difficult. It’s likely that the founder has to be the first salesperson to make calls and get meetings. That is a very common start to most successful businesses
- Gimmicks to make it look like you are doing something personalized can be interesting early on, but can also be irritating.
- How fast can you get a MVP out to for initial feedback? 4 days is awesome!
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How ConvertKit got their first 1000 customers
ConvertKit is now making $22m ARR and is on an exponential growth trend.
The company was started in 2012 with a Web App Challenge. The premise was to hit 5k/month in monthly recurring revenue in 6 months.
Two of the restrictions that the founder Nathan Barry imposed on the idea was he could only spend $5000 of his own money and he couldn’t spend more than 20 hours a week on the idea.
The company was started in 2012 with a Web App Challenge. The premise was to hit 5k/month in monthly recurring revenue in 6 months.
Two of the restrictions that the founder Nathan Barry imposed on the idea was he could only spend $5000 of his own money and he couldn’t spend more than 20 hours a week on the idea.
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How to Grow a YouTube Channel
DoYouEvenBlog.com has a massive post on how to build an audience on YouTube. There is detailed advice on keyword research, finding topics to post about, and strategically managing all the content you are creating. The YouTube training is solid, but there is also a lot to learn about SEO and online businesses. Sites like DoYouEvenBlog, TheBlogStarter, StartaBlog, Ryob, can earn tens of thousands of dollars per month with long-form, optimized content that ranks in search engines. Website hosting companies can pay up to $250 for a new referral so “start a blog” topics are very popular and competitive. Are you creating comprehensive content and building backlinks for your niche? Do some searches around the key pages on sites like DoYouEvenBlog.com to see the business model for yourself.
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7 Lessons Learned From 5 Years Operating and Growing SaaS Companies
Sujan Patel shares his insights running multiple companies.
1. The Product is the Marketing
If people don’t love your product, then nothing else matters: you’re going to struggle growing your business.
2. It’s Harder to Fix the Marketing Than Fix the Product Traditionally, buying SaaS companies was all about buying under-marketed, under-performing SaaS companies and growing them…But now it’s almost inverse, because software development is a little more binary compared to marketing.
3. Churn Stems From Activation
Churn is ultimately all about user experience.
4. You Can Still Beat the Big Hitters Without a Huge Budget
5. Less Is More
Want to know how to destroy your user experience? Quadruple the number of things your product does.
6. Healthy SaaS Businesses Are About Growth, Profit & Operational Efficiency
7. Don’t Skimp on Hiring Experts
1. The Product is the Marketing
If people don’t love your product, then nothing else matters: you’re going to struggle growing your business.
2. It’s Harder to Fix the Marketing Than Fix the Product Traditionally, buying SaaS companies was all about buying under-marketed, under-performing SaaS companies and growing them…But now it’s almost inverse, because software development is a little more binary compared to marketing.
3. Churn Stems From Activation
Churn is ultimately all about user experience.
4. You Can Still Beat the Big Hitters Without a Huge Budget
5. Less Is More
Want to know how to destroy your user experience? Quadruple the number of things your product does.
6. Healthy SaaS Businesses Are About Growth, Profit & Operational Efficiency
7. Don’t Skimp on Hiring Experts
Go to Link
A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups
Here is another more focused take on customer acquisition from Dan Hockenmaier (founder of growth strategy firm Basis One and former director of growth marketing at Thumbtack) and Lenny Rachitsky (a former product lead and head of consumer supply growth at Airbnb).
For consumer companies, there are only three growth “lanes” that comprise the majority of new customer acquisition:
1. Performance marketing (e.g. Facebook and Google ads)
2. Virality (e.g. word-of-mouth, referrals, invites)
3. Content (e.g. SEO, YouTube)
Here is their 3-Step Framework:
1. Validate that a lane is right for you
2. Commit the necessary resources to give the lane a real shot
3. Scale the investment to become world-class
via indieletters.com
For consumer companies, there are only three growth “lanes” that comprise the majority of new customer acquisition:
1. Performance marketing (e.g. Facebook and Google ads)
2. Virality (e.g. word-of-mouth, referrals, invites)
3. Content (e.g. SEO, YouTube)
Here is their 3-Step Framework:
1. Validate that a lane is right for you
2. Commit the necessary resources to give the lane a real shot
3. Scale the investment to become world-class
via indieletters.com
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TOOLS: How to Use Software to Scale to 1000’s of Subscribers
Grow Getters shares how they use online tools to promote their business.
Here is a list with brief summary:
QuuuPromote: promote your content to people in your niche. Lemlist: automatically customizes emails with unique images, tracks opens, clicks, and responses.
FindThatLead: finds verified email addresses.
Notion.so: multi-purpose content management system, used for content calendar, shared idea space, subscriber tracker dashboard, etc.
Here is a list with brief summary:
QuuuPromote: promote your content to people in your niche. Lemlist: automatically customizes emails with unique images, tracks opens, clicks, and responses.
FindThatLead: finds verified email addresses.
Notion.so: multi-purpose content management system, used for content calendar, shared idea space, subscriber tracker dashboard, etc.
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Growing a Newsletter to 42k Subscribers, Making $1m per year, and Launching a $2m Investment Fund
Packy McCormick of the Not Boring newsletter reflects on his phenomenal success over the last year. Here are some of the topics he covers:
*Growing his newsletter from 500 subscribers to over 42,000.
*Starting a $2 million Investment syndicate that has invested in fourteen companies.
* How he makes more money through sponsorships than he ever has in his full-time job.
* Why he chose the sponsorship model over paid subscriptions.
Big Ideas:
* There is a big boom in investment syndicates now. An investment model like this has become much more accessible to those with an audience. We will see many more creators having their own investment funds.
* Quality content wins. Sponsors pay Packy thousands of dollars to get a detailed analysis in his newsletter.
*Growing his newsletter from 500 subscribers to over 42,000.
*Starting a $2 million Investment syndicate that has invested in fourteen companies.
* How he makes more money through sponsorships than he ever has in his full-time job.
* Why he chose the sponsorship model over paid subscriptions.
Big Ideas:
* There is a big boom in investment syndicates now. An investment model like this has become much more accessible to those with an audience. We will see many more creators having their own investment funds.
* Quality content wins. Sponsors pay Packy thousands of dollars to get a detailed analysis in his newsletter.
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SaaS Growth: How Cardd Bootstrapped To $30k MRR With Zero Marketing
Interesting story of how the simple webpage creator Cardd was started.
The idea started as free HTML5 templates but the founder discovered that single page templates were much more popular than multi-page sites. Instead of competing against the big website builders, Cardd chose to focus on very simple sites that proved to be very popular with tech communities.
It demonstrates how most good business ideas evolve over time.
via indieletters.com
The idea started as free HTML5 templates but the founder discovered that single page templates were much more popular than multi-page sites. Instead of competing against the big website builders, Cardd chose to focus on very simple sites that proved to be very popular with tech communities.
It demonstrates how most good business ideas evolve over time.
via indieletters.com