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Ask HN: If any of you have started email newsletters, I'd love your advice

6 points by thrwaway ↗ HN
I am starting an email newsletter to target a particular demographic (residents of my city outside the US), I am imagining something like something like thrillist or dailycandy on a scaled downlevel.

I have set up a signup page, with good design that is essentially collecting email addresses. It has around 57 sign ups so far by sending out emails to my friends and family, and asking them to forward it to friends/ some other methods. In the next month I will be advertising on two forums that residents of the city frequent, and I am thinking of actually launching the newsletter in late June or early July. Till then I am collecting emails, and creating content that would give me a buffer of sorts.

I am just wondering whether anyone has done something similar, and if so could you share some anecdotes regarding increasing membership, advertising, and whether how long a runway should I give this to figure out whether this may be sustainable in the longrun? I am planning on emailing content M-F with the weekends off.

1 comment

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taphangum
I started Blurb.FM last august. Got some early traction and press, link: http://venturebeatprofiles.com/news/view/blurb?article=28735... (behind a paywall now.) Here is an archive of the emails: http://twitter.com/blurbfm

I had to close it down because the workload became unsustainable pretty quickly (i was running another startup at the time).

My advice would be that you know your content generation strategy very well and make it work in such a way that you don't get burnt out.

I would also suggest that you offer an incentive on signing up. People don't normally like to sign up to newsletters that are just newsletters. I offered to plant a tree for every person that signed up (cost was only $1, i would earn double that from ad revenue in a year and that's when the trees would be planted.). It worked really well, i had an almost 30% conversion rate.

Also do as many things as you can to get people through the door and establish momentum. No other business needs more momentum to build than email newsletters. Word of mouth is king.

Hope that helps.