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How these creators got their first 1000 newsletter subscribers

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Hi there,
Happy Tuesday! This week, we’re going to talk about growth — what works, and what doesn’t. 
📢 PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
Growing an email list takes time and effort, so before we get any older, it’s super important that you’ve already thought about who your reader is, the value you bring to them, and why you want to grow your list in the first place. Make sure you pin down your newsletter goal before you get cracking on growth strategies, and your efforts won’t be wasted. 
Still with me? Great!
There are a lot of resources out there on how creators reached their first 1,000 newsletter subscribers. I went down the rabbit hole this week and collected the most useful advice I could find. A lot of this will still be useful even if you’ve already hit the 1,000 mark (kudos!).
A gift from me to you 🎁
Before we dive in: There’s no magic bullet
Every piece I’ve collected here emphasizes the importance of patience and consistency. Even if you employ every tip on this page, you won’t go from 0-1000 in the blink of an eye.
This will be a gradual process — it will probably take months, maybe even a year or two — but that’s completely normal. Focus on acquiring engaged readers and keep your goal in mind. The rest will come in time.
On that note, there’s no use in spending tons of energy growing your list if you’re not demonstrating your awesomeness by actually sending your newsletter. The key is to consistently provide great value for your reader that will keep them coming back for more. Content creation and list growth goes hand in hand. 
I’ve extracted some key pieces of information from each article, but I’d recommend diving into any of these that take your fancy if you get a spare window of time. Let’s go.
Foster is an invite-only platform that lets writers improve their work by giving them access to a community of authors, editors and experts. This piece from Stew Fortier collates tips from several writers and addresses each stage of growth from 0-1,000 subscribers. The advice in here is inventive, and doesn’t just cover the same old chestnuts you’ve read everywhere else.
Ideas to steal:
Collaborate with a friend who already has an email list.
Ross Gordon from Gridology: “I had a lot of success co-writing with creator friends who have engaged audiences. Plus, it’s fun, too. When I co-wrote one week with my buddy Sid Jha, I got 25-30 new sign ups in a day.”
Share your newsletter on Product Hunt.
Brett G. Friedman from Marpipe: “My first 60-ish subscribers came from launching the newsletter on Product Hunt. All it took was a few simple images, a landing page, and a quick pitch on the concept.”
Tweet.
When Twitter works, it’s spectacular. This single tweet took Foster’s newsletter from 0 to over 600 subscribers, and we did not even ask people to subscribe to our email list in the tweet
Be consistent.
Sara Campbell from Tiny Revolutions: “After hanging out at ~140 subs for a year or so, I got to 250 by starting to write consistently every week, and by corresponding with other newsletter writers who ended up giving me shoutouts in their newsletters. And just asking people to share, making it more of a mission to get other people on board.“
Don’t stop doing what’s already working.
Dan Li from The DL: “The most impactful things that took me from 250 subscribers to 500 were writing regularly, posting relevant content more regularly on social (especially stuff where I could tag the startups or founders that I was writing about), and naturally letting subscribers share the newsletter with people they thought would like it.”
Be patient and keep writing great content.
If you write great stuff consistently and make some basic efforts to tastefully promote your work, compounding will eventually work in your favor. 1,000 subscribers may take a while, but getting to 2,000 will be a little bit easier. And so on.
www.foster.co
How I got my first 1,000 newsletter subscribers
Bria Felicien | The Black Sportswoman
In August 2020, Bria Felicien launched The Black Sportswoman, a publication where Black history meets women’s sports. The journey from Twitter account to fully-fledged newsletter is a fascinating and unconventional one, and Bria took the time to share her strategies in a LinkedIn post. She presents an unvarnished account of how she reached 1,000 subscribers — and isn’t afraid to mention lulls in growth or pauses in editorial output.
Ideas to steal:
If you don’t have a large social following, you can still grow successfully. Bria grew her Twitter account alongside her newsletter by posting items that fit with her brand, and as attention on her work as a journalist grew, so did the attention on her newsletter.
Once I launched the publication, I posted weekly features – including interviews with the legends, telling stories and history my audience (and I) hadn’t heard of before. This unique content and the value it offered in the women’s sports landscape drew attention and people began shouting out my work. 
Take time to refine the unique value your newsletter brings.
There are a lot of publications popping up, but I focus on Black women athletes across the diaspora… This has helped me develop a better pitch for why people should subscribe
Add a pop-up subscription form to your website. They just work.
This was by-far my most effective strategy.
Network with people in your field.
We had occasional boosts thanks to shoutouts from publications in the women’s sports niche… These are people I have relationships with… I’m not sure about other industries, but in the women’s sports landscape, it’s easy to make friends and uplift each other.
www.linkedin.com
Growing this newsletter to 10k Subscribers
Ali Abouelatta | First 1000
First 1000 is a newsletter that focuses on how companies reached their first 1000 customers — and in April this year, writer Ali Abouelatta applied that framwork to the newsletter itself. I love the granular approach Ali uses here, and I love how he calls out tactics that didn’t work as well as those that did. Of course, this is just one case study, but there’s a lot in here that’s worth getting your teeth into.
Ideas to steal:
Reach out to people in your contacts who you think might be interested in your idea, and ask if they want to sign up to your newsletter. Don’t just sign them up and hope they don’t get mad.
Cold-emailing isn’t a scalable growth strategy.
I used Snov and Linkedin to scrape some early founder emails, got about a thousand, and then started emailing them, 10-50/day, so my domain doesn’t get blocked. I got about 3% conversion which is not too bad, but the numbers didn’t work out.
Engage with people in your field on Twitter. It just takes one Tweet to reach the right eyes and be promoted by the right person to drive significant bumps in subscriber numbers.
read.first1000.co
Jonah Malin, author of the Barely Relevant newsletter, wrote a highly readable piece on how he built his email list. This entertaining article comes across as advice from a buddy, and highlights some great advice that tends to get brushed under the rug all too often.
Ideas to steal:
Take time to make your opt-in page shine.
I’ve gone on many creative benders designing, writing, editing, cutting, pasting, redesigning my email opt-in page until it flowed like honey. Visually sweet, with copy that’s sticky as hell in the mind.
My page currently converts around 50%, which, for my non marketing friends, is pretty damn good. The key is to be clear and concise. But also interesting.
Use LinkedIn to reach professional contacts and former classmates. Promote other people’s newsletters there, and tag them.
I’ve also promoted the newsletters of fellow creators I genuinely enjoy, and tagged them to grab relevant eyeballs by the fistfull.
Share your work in relevant places.
To build a slow-burning email funnel driving consistent traffic to your opt-in, create focused content where your audience lives. Promoting my email list at the bottom of this Better Marketing article makes sense. I send emails about marketing and you likely care about the subject matter… I even created a Quora space this week to share content from my latest emails and answer marketing related questions.
Reply. To. Emails.
Respond to people who email you directly. Have a discourse. Challenge them. Joke with them. Converse, please. They are giving you precious seconds of their life by reading your words AND reacting.
bettermarketing.pub
Philipp Temmel writes Creativerly, a weekly digest about creativity and productivity-boosting tools. Having hit the 1,000 mark in July 2021, Philipp shared his findings, insights, and experiences in a great blog post. This one is slightly more zoomed-out than the examples above, but it still brings some great ideas to the table.
Ideas to steal
Learn from people who have already achieved your goals.
Always be curious - always ask questions. Do you want to know how to reach your first 100 subscribers? Ask folks who already have 100 subscribers and learn from them how they reached this goal. If you want to know how to reach 500 subscribers, same procedure, find folks who already achieved that and ask them what they did to reach that goal.
Be active in online communities and groups — but be thoughtful about it.
The important thing here is the fact that you should never ever just straight plug your newsletter in communities. Try to create some value for others. Share your insights and experiences with them. Reply to tweets, take part in conversations in subreddits, or engage with other folks within Slack and Discord Communities.
creativerly.com
One last tip from Revue
Why not make it even easier for your Twitter followers to become newsletter subscribers?
If you haven’t already, enable the feature we recently released that lets people on Twitter subscribe directly from your Twitter profile. Learn how here.
Wrapping up
There’s a whole bunch of information and advice up there, and while I’d strongly encourage you to try out anything that catches your eye, I’d also emphasize that it’s often a combination of factors that drive growth.
My parting words on this? Stick with it. I know from experience that growth doesn’t happen overnight, but persistence does pay off. I’d also love to hear if you have any personal experience with any of the ideas discussed in this newsletter — let me know by dropping me a reply.
That’s all from me this week. As ever, you can reach me by replying to this newsletter issue. I love getting emails from you 🧡
Until next time,
Anna
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Anna from Twitter @revue

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