What's New: Top newsletter growth strategies

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Are you looking to grow your newsletter?

• First, ensure that your content is high-quality, then repurpose it to fit several platforms. Getting listed in newsletter directories and having your content reposted will help, also. Dive into more strategies below!
• Cold email is a unique channel where you can start seeing results within a week. This end-to-end cold email process for B2B can kick things off.
• Founder Minh-Phuc Tran quit his full-time job for the second time to launch his product, Queue.so. Here's what he's doing differently this time around, including his modified version of 12 Startups in 12 Months.

Want to share something with over 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

📰 Newsletter Growth Strategies

by Agam More

I recently passed the 200 subscriber count with my developer trends newsletter, Unzip, using methods like posting on Indie Hackers, DEV Community, LinkedIn, and even my personal Facebook page. But I feel like I can do better. I put so much effort into my content, and I hope to get more traction! Any advice?

Helpful outreach strategies

I totally feel you on how discouraging it can be to spend a ton of time on an article and feel that it doesn't get read by enough people, says Justin Chu.

I've gotten to 1K+ subscribers for my newsletter and blog, Small Tech Business. In order to gain new subscribers, you need to be recommended to people who are actively looking for newsletters to follow, and have your content shared with your targeted audience.

Here are some helpful strategies:

1. Get listed on newsletter directories: Here is a great list of directories to check out. This lets you reach people who are actively looking for newsletters to follow.
2. Get your content published in an existing publication: I've had my writing published on HackerNoon and The Startup. Be sure to use a canonical link to your own website's post. That way, you get that sweet SEO bump.
3. Don't be afraid to repurpose content: Turn your best content into tweets, then link back to your newsletter. Share relevant parts of your content in relevant communities, but don't just spam-drop your article link everywhere. Instead, use text posts to build relationships with readers, rather than chasing cheap traffic spikes.
4. Collaborate with other newsletters with similar audiences: This can be a win-win for both sides if you shoutout each other's newsletters to your respective audiences. Or, collaborate on a post together (similar to what podcasts do).

Eliminate any barriers

Michael Lee mentions that you should make it as easy as possible for people to access your content. One thing you might be able to try is making the subscribe form a little more obvious.

On each of your posts, I would suggest also including an inline signup form, either in the middle or the end. Make sure that your signup information is not chatbot-like. Comb through your UI for any hitches and smooth them out.

Another thing you could try is providing a lead magnet, which is an offer. Obviously, your posts themselves should be the reward, but providing a little something extra for signing up might be a good incentive for your readers.

Kill it with content

Try to get on as many social platforms as you can, Jay Dee advises. Curate and post as much high-quality, relevant content as you are able to. It's essentially the "be everywhere" strategy. Once you have great content for one platform, you technically have it for 10-20 platforms if you put in the extra effort (a few minutes) to customize and share it to them all. Once you build an audience on several of them, you can mix in your newsletter to draw in views or subscribers. The more, the merrier!

My team and I have actually been working on a SaaS web app, GrindZero, that can help you with that. We're currently in beta, if you would like to check it out!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

🎶 Spotify is testing a TikTok-like discovery feed.

🤫 Here's how Ikea tricks you into buying more things.

🤝 WarnerMedia and Discovery have completed their mega-streaming merger.

💻 YouTube is testing a stricter moderation system.

🍇 Fancy fruit is taking over as a shopping luxury.

📧 End-to-End Cold Email Process for B2B Companies

by Oneisprime

I've experimented with quite a few traction channels for my current startup. Today, let's focus on cold emailing. It's one of those channels where you can start seeing results within a week, unlike SEO or content marketing, which are suited for sustaining long-term growth.

Cold email pre-reqs

For bootstrapped founders, cold emailing is most likely the best way to grow, and can be mostly automated fairly easily. These prerequisites may be useful to keep in mind:

• Sell to a market that actually uses email daily. This might not be as useful if you're selling to restaurants, contractors, or other folks who may be mostly phone-oriented.
• Your average contract value per customer would ideally be greater than ~$500 MRR.
• You know the persona, industry, or customer type that you're selling to, and have a good idea of their pain points. For instance, if you're selling a DevOps tool, you understand the struggles of DevOps engineers and exactly how to help.

With that out of the way, let's get into the process.

Identify your customers and get their emails

You can use Apollo or any other prospecting tool that lets you identify work emails. No need to pay if you're okay with doing some manual work.

Use the filters to target the department, title, location, and number of employees within the company. Apollo will return a list of folks who match that criteria, along with their emails. Aim to get about 200 emails here. Try to keep it at three employees per company maximum so you get a good variety across more companies.

Set up a Google Sheet

I import my contacts from Apollo into a Google Sheet that has the following columns: First name, last name, email, company, role, personalized intro, and anything else that might be useful.

From the free Apollo plan, I usually just copy and paste from the table into Sheets. If you're on a paid plan, you can just do one-click CSV imports, which use up some credits.

It's also important to note that the "personalized intro" column is where I write one unique line per contact. This is usually me doing a quick LinkedIn search to see how long they've been in that position, if they've posted anything new, and even general Google hits on their names to see if they've published a blog or podcast. If they have published something, please read or listen to some parts of it and use that in your intro. Be genuine.

You're looking for anything that is related to what you're trying to sell that solves their problem. Trust me, it's better to send 50 emails with quality content than 500 generic ones.

Build email sequences

For this part, I'm using a tool called MixMax, but you can use any tool. Within your email sequencing tool, you'll import that Google Sheets file listing your contacts. After your contacts upload, create a five step email sequence with follow-ups spread out between three days on average.

Your first email should be ideally your best email, and should have the following structure:

1. Add the personalized line from your Google Sheets.
2. List whatever your tool does really well, showing how it can solve X problem.
3. Show how your customers (or beta users, if you're new) are using your tool to solve X and achieve Y.
4. End with a friendly note: We're helping company ABC do this today, and would love to share how we can help achieve something similar for your company!
5. Include a demo that shows how.

Including that demo link can drive up your reply rates, and it also adds something valuable straight from your first email.

If you've done a good job identifying the right folks, the message should resonate. Don't expect anyone to buy in from the first email. Just get them reply back to you in hopes of learning more!

The follow-ups

Next, create four more emails that are meant to be used as follow-ups. The second email should have the following structure:

1. "I'm curious to know if you've considered what the impact of X can do to help you solve Y."
2. "One of our earliest customers (name drop if you have permission) saw this result after using us to solve their problem."
3. "I'd love to share more if you're interested!"

Notice how I'm not using these follow-up emails as a way to just check in, or anything low-effort like that. Make sure that each follow-up adds additional value. Space the emails out so that, if someone hasn't replied, the next email will be sent three days later.

Send five emails in total. Your last one can be a breakup email telling the prospect that you won't follow up again, but you'd love to hear from them if they're in the market to explore further. Don't be petty. Keep it polite and move on!

Wrapping up

If someone opens your email more than three times (even if they don't reply), manually send them a follow-up with some customer proof. The point isn't to book a meeting here. It's just to get them to reply back sharing anything about their current situation or interests.

Try to spend an hour or two every day just monitoring the stats, finding new contacts, and adding them to your sequences. If you send 20 new emails a day, you'll get a steady pipeline within the first two weeks. Once you're comfortable, this becomes a very quick thing to set up because the rules are simple, you understand your customer type, and you know exactly what type of emails perform best.

Will you implement these tips into your cold email strategy? Share below!

Discuss this story.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

🤗 We can make Indie Hackers even better, together! Posted by Justin Chu.

🙅 Since becoming an indie hacker, I love turning down job offers. Posted by Paul Ruane.

🛠 Browser extensions are a great place to start your founder journey. Posted by Glen Chiacchieri.

💰 What's the best investment you've ever made? Posted by Darko.

👶 Children ended my indie hacking career. Posted by 40and0utoft1me.

⏱ Time-tracking is so important. Posted by Niels Mouthaan.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

🏃 Minh-Phuc Tran's Second Time Around

by Minh-Phuc Tran

Hey guys! Minh-Phuc Tran from Queue.so here. Yesterday, I officially wrapped up my engineering lead job and became a full-time indie hacker for the second time.

The last time I quit was two years ago. I joined a startup accelerator and tried to build a funded startup. I failed miserably, and had to go back to a 9-5 until yesterday.

Over the last two years, I learned about Indie Hackers, built a small Twitter audience of ~4K, tried to launch a few products (the biggest one being Queue.so), and learned a ton about preparing to bootstrap my SaaS full-time.

Here's what I've learned, and how I'm doing it differently this time to avoid going back to a 9-5 again (my absolute nightmare)!

How did I prepare financially?

The biggest mistake I made the first time I quit was leaving before I had any reasonable savings. After observing and researching the Indie Hackers community, I've concluded that three years of savings is the safest bet. Bootstrapping is hard, but three years is long enough in that, if I can't reach reasonable profitability after three years, I should probably try something else. To be abundantly specific, my goal is to hit $5K MRR in three years.

How much?

I'm a fan of Pieter Levels and Jon Yongfook since both traveled and made a comfortable living while starting their businesses.

I'm living at my parents' house and spending as little as possible, but I know I won't be able to do it for three whole years. Even though I'm happy living with my parents, I'm neither self-motivated nor creative. I'm the most motivated and creative being a nomad in Southeast Asia, which costs about $2K per month. I don't have a family yet, but I support my parents financially, so it adds up to $3K per month. I set my savings goal at $4K per month to be more conservative (accounting for inflation, etc).

$4K per month x 36 months = $144K.

I needed to save $144K in two years. I'm lucky enough to be a remote software engineer who typically earns $120K per year (cash only, after taxes) while living on only $30K per year in Vietnam. So, it was perfectly feasible to save $144K in two years. Again, I don't know if it would be possible if I were not a software engineer, or if I lived in a more expensive city. This is how I prepared for full-time indie hacking for the next three years.

Niche within a niche

I know that my biggest obstacle in achieving profitability is building too much, and launching too slowly. 12 Startups in 12 Months was the cure for my problem, since it is purely a solution to practice the habit of building less and shipping more.

During that two years, I realized that my own principle of bootstrapping SaaS as a solo founder is attempting to dominate a very niche market. This is what is happening with Queue.so. Even though the idea of Notion plus Twitter sounds ludicrous at first, now if anyone asks about that combo, Queue.so will be the leader in the space. There is no one else doing it!

I'm not scared that someone will copy it, because I spent way too much time on it for someone else to quickly build a comparable product. Because the product is so niche, I doubt that anyone would spend the equivalent effort to create an equally good product.

Six startups in 12 months

Here's my modified version of 12 Startups in 12 Months:

• Like with 12 Startups in 12 Months, I'll build, launch, market, and (try to) make money from a new product in one month. But, instead of immediately moving on to another project, if the project shows good traction, I'll hold onto it for another month. After two months, I'm not allowed to stay on the project; I have to move on to another project.
• To be able to reasonably dominate a market, I'm allowed to work on an existing product and consider it as working on a new product. The requirement is that there has to be a new launch that expands the product to a new set of target customers. For example, I'm allowed to work on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook support for Queue.so as a new project, since there will be a new launch and a new set of target customers to acquire.

I hope this post is helpful to folks who are trying to escape their 9-5's!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Agam More, Oneisprime, and Minh-Phuc Tran for contributing posts. —Channing