Hi Everyone - Big milestone, we hit 3000 subscribers this week!

Making some really positive changes and seeing the results.

This week:

This week we added 228 subscribers, up 16 from last week. We saw our ad cost drop slightly as Meta learned the new campaign.

We are starting to see open rate and CTR come back up a bit after SXSW finished. This validates the hypothesis that people were a bit burned out on events and entrepreneurship after that week. Warren also made some really solid changes to the Founder Fridays edition and I think this is driving more clicks and better engagement.

Our free guide is starting to pick up a lot more traction. Over 40 have been downloaded, while our Networking guide isn’t getting quite as much traction (probably because it is paid). We are considering giving this away as a reward for filling out our feedback survey.

We also made some additional website additions since last week. The biggest one is adding an annual calendar for people to see events for the whole year. This was a lot of dev time, but I think it is worth it.

Full transparency… I haven’t finished this yet. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about how we want our first emails to our audience to go.

These are the things that we are considering sending to them (No specific order):

I think we can send almost all of this out over the course of a few days.

There has been some exciting progress on the ad front. We have seen decreasing costs of our ads that we are sending direct to our website. Last week it was about $1.80 per lead. This week it is now at around $1.16.

With sparkloop and boosts, we are getting closer to that $0.85 mark set by our lead form ads.

For right now, I’m just letting the ads breathe. I will do another ad update in a week or two when we see the ads losing performance.

Speaking of Sparkloop, since I set it up on March 17th, we have been seeing decent traffic, but no confirmations to date. I’m not exactly sure how this works, but I will be waiting carefully.

During this period, we had 81 people who signed up via ads through the website. If we were able to get back all the expected earnings (very unlikely), we would be getting back ~$0.85 per lead. This would be really good, reducing our acquisition cost to around $0.30.

I’ll update what these actually are when they start coming in.

This week we are focusing on: