From 0 to 1,300 subscribers in 24 hours
How I launched the Founder’s Cabin newsletter
At Baremetrics (analytics for Stripe) I’ve been looking for new ways to reach startups/founders/entrepreneurs. Not so much to market to them, but to just have a channel to regularly provide resources/tools/articles that would be helpful. Over the past 10 years of doing business, lots of people have been genuinely helpful to me, so I wanted to do the same.
I decided to run a little experiment with as little work as I could muster, and the outcome of that was Founder’s Cabin: a weekly curated newsletter for founders, entrepreneurs & startups that provides tips, insights and resources to help your run your business well.
Getting up and running
The first order of business was getting a logo. My buddy Matt Anderson did our cozy little cabin logo over the holidays, and while he was working on that, I was getting Curated set up.
Curated made it unbelievably simple to put together the type of newsletter I wanted to do. No messing with messy templates, no hacking MailChimp in to submission. It’s all built around the idea of, wait for it, curation. So over the course of a couple of weeks I saved potential links/content in to our Curated account and then built the first issue!
Once our logo was done, I tweaked the landing page and we were good to go! Curated handles that as well, so I didn’t even need to set up hosting. Ahhh, so nice.
Getting 1,300 subscribers
Once that landing page was done, it was time to let folks know about it! I gave myself 24 hours between announcing it and sending out the first issue. No pressure!
Truth be told, I’d have been happy with 50 people subscribing, so I wasn’t stressing too much. ☺
There were four places I pushed our new newsletter.
- Twitter — Specifically @Shpigford (my handle) and @Baremetrics. That was to about 3,500 people between those. We got quite a few retweets and shares from this.
- Facebook — Our Facebook page has a measly 170ish followers, but alas, it didn’t hurt anything to throw a link up (though I can’t image it helped anything).
- Baremetrics Blog Newsletter — We have a newsletter for our blog that currently has ~400 people on it. I sent them an email around 12 hours in.
- Product Hunt—This ended up being the big kicker for us. I posted it to Product Hunt a bit later than I’d have liked (close to noon), but it managed to make its way to the top five for the day.
So, those four sources resulted in 1,300 subscribers by the time I sent out the first issue!
First issue stats
I wasn’t really sure how the first issue would be received, but overall everyone seemed to love it! Feedback was great and the open rate was amazing (nearly 72%).
We only had 12 people unsubscribe after the first issue and we’ve added over 350 new subscribers since that first issue went out.
The future
This is an entirely new format for me, so still feeling things out and seeing what happens and where this goes. The overheard is pretty minimal and so far the payoff seems pretty good, so we’ll keep going until either of those things goes south.
If you’re a founder or entrepreneur or interested in startups, check out Founder’s Cabin!
Also, if you use Stripe and want tasty metrics (MRR, LTV, Churn, etc) with a single click, check out Baremetrics. You’ll almost certainly probably definitely love it.
Written by Josh Pigford, founder of Baremetrics, which provides analytics and metrics for Stripe users.
