Do you consider yourself a creator?
Yes. I think that is the most, all encompassing definition that I can use for myself because I am a social engineer. I am a writer, I co-founded a startup last year, so there are a lot of facets of my personality and only creator can say everything that, I mean,
So, what exactly do you create
currently? I write about critical economy. I write about startups in greater economy. I read about communities, but right now my total focus is on my newsletter and all my blog called community. Awesome.
So I want to start with the newsletter just because I'm not sure if you're aware. Twitter just started rolling out the subscribe button to review newsletters on Twitter profiles today. And I'm wondering first off, what are you hosting on? And second, are you thinking of moving to
review? I started my original new sizer on MailChimp because that's the only name I knew for newsletters. And I had like maybe 200 subscribers for six months or something like that. I hate. MailChimp as a provider, the interface, the place where I needed to write the scheduling, I needed it. A lot of people when they're starting a newsletter, it's not just a newsletter. Like it's a website, it's a sign up form. It's a lot of things.
So I had MailChimp, I was also paying for workflow and I decided, okay, I will jump to the startup called. And it removed a lot of my expenses, like workflow at all. I canceled it.
So you went to let her drop. Did you stay
there? No. So let's her job. It's an amazing product in of itself, but it had lots of bugs. I'm guessing
you went to sub stack. I
tried. So I decided to migrate my newsletter and at that point I had 66 articles and then you just let her issues. Which means I had to manually transfer all of that. I had to manually transfer subscribers. I again, needed to go through the hell of creating a landing page and finding substitutes or something like that. I had two paid members and they said that because the members are not acquired through sub-sect the best I can do is to compensate them for life, which means give them free.
They don't have a way to import no. Wow. They
don't. It was in may. They did not have a way to import paying subscribers, but I decided to stick with ghost self hosted on digital ocean and use email octopus for then just let her, but what is covered along the way is because my list was significantly lower. I was no migration service of the newsletter. Yeah. And no one is providing that to small craters. Everyone cares about you when you have only like 5,000 subscribers and more,
how do you go about building your audience now, did something shifted in the way you promoted to get more?
I will say that I am more relaxed now, which is a super strange thing to say, considering that I wants to like increase number of my memberships and get this project much more visibility and increase my. Of course as a creator. But I remember in the beginning I was in the spam mode. Like I was on indie hackers, like okaying for all the ways to put my links somewhere. Hey, I'm writing a newsletter, all of this stuff. And that was giving me growth.
Yeah. But I was always very alert or an anxiety about my growth. Like I don't get enough subscribers. I should have 1000 by the end of November to consider myself a good newsletter writer and stuff like that. But after I did my product and flown. Which broke in the significant amount of my current subscribers. I decided to just work on my current subscribers and just use Twitter as my main promotion channel and occasionally using racket.
But maybe again, find one more channel just for fun, where I will be just sharing for myself, not as newsletter writer. That's my approach now. Very laid back, very content focused rather than growth. Okay.
Yeah. And it seems like you've recentered the way you talk about everything around yourself instead of around the newsletter to have given you that
space. Yeah. I would say that one of my regrets is having like community weekly as a brand, rather than on the thoughts around us. I'm really
interested in what you mentioned about how you don't like. Branded it's separate because I'm probably in the next week going to take this current Twitter account in branded entirely for the podcast and make my own new, personal account to separate those
things. I don't know why. I'm very curious.
Okay. So if you, reason first off this account has a bunch of Twitter bans on it. So it really can't grow organic. That's probably the biggest one too, because I want to give control of the account to somebody else. And I want to expand the show into small network in the next year. And so I want that to be. And three, so that way I don't have to be involved with it and I don't feel guilty about it.
Interesting reasons. I don't know about the bands. I never had the bat. Yeah.
I use some automation early on and I think those have permanently reduced my account. Potential
interesting. I did not know that. I think those are good and legitimate, especially for podcasts. It makes sense because podcasting is this very strange medium where you are now the medium, but at the same time you are discovered through your transcripts or. Which is very confusing, at least for me. And if I say, what type of creators really desperately need the community, I'd say it's the podcasters because they really don't have a way to get feedback or be in the loop of their listeners.
So for podcasts, I talk, I see that because podcasts specifically needs that brand for them. But for newsletter, I would not do that home. The research that I did for myself and what kind of brand is newsletter, I want to be, I think it's beneficial to have a person attached to it rather than this random community, weekly like column that is suggesting your tools and interesting things that you should read. I think it's more interesting to get that from a person rather than from, to me.
Break down for me, your monetization.
Okay. So I think every creator in their life, at least once read that article saying that you need only 1000 true fans to live on the internet. And that article is true, but I realized that you don't need to have thousands subscribers to start monetizing. Uh, revelation, I think to start monetizing, especially if you want to monetize through sponsorships or affiliate links, it doesn't really matter the number of subscribers. So I started monetizing early on.
I got my first sponsorship when I had 300 subscribers, only 300
told me about that because I'm going out for my first sponsorship.
So for me, it was very hard to justify, to some extent to the brands, as much as we like to say that they are monetizing you for you. Like they like your content and stuff, they need numbers. Like they need to justify to their bosses, why they're sponsoring this 300 subscriber newsletter. And in the beginning I had quite good statistics. Like I had at least 20% click rates, like 50% open rate and. Very big for new center economy. So I just went on product hunt. I went on by tallest.
I subscribed to sponsor a gap and I just called him mailed. And maybe from 60 called the males, three people reached out to me, answered my email and one of them, supposedly that was the first.
What structure did you use? Cause what I'm thinking is I want to go after a year title sponsor. So that way I can get more than what I'm worth.
That makes sense. I think there are different types of sponsorships you can do like the classifieds, which is just a lane and main sponsorships, like sponsor of the issue, like test discovery style with a photo, with a huge text and with Elaine. And I think you can do a dedicated issue. So it depends on who you approach.
You had north star metric for success. How do you know you're on the right path?
I would say that right now, specifically it's monthly recurring revenue. I hope that this November, I will launch a community for the members of community with Wipro. So at that case, I will value the health of the community rather than the revenue part of it. So
tell me about that shift to.
Yeah. So one of my other regrets is that I did not launch it sooner just because yeah, the newsletter is good, but it's very unpredictable. And when earlier I mentioned that I had 52% or even more open rate, it gradually declined. So now my open rate is in its best days, 48%. Above
25 or 30 is very good.
But I think if I had a newsletter and the community, it will be easier to communicate with my audience. Maybe know what pressures they have. And I have added a forum where subscribers can submit their questions and they will answer them.
So what's your current goal is.
My current goal is to make my habits and working day much more structured because before I had only one issue to right away, right. A free issue for everyone. And maybe I would publish one or two blog posts a week. Now I have also hate members. So. To write for them as well. And I'm looking for a ways to incorporate that branch into my routine so I will not pronounce, but at the same time, I will be able to give quality value to pro members as well.
If you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? And when would it be?
I would send a tweet to myself last year. Around this time, I will say don't launch the podcast, just write the newsletter and the blog and relaxed because everything I did after launching that forecast was on some kind of pester wheel, but they have built for myself and I don't want to do that anymore. Um, Um,